Thanks, Doug and Barry

I've been trying to do something with that brief narrow landscape for a
long time. I go through it in a wheeled glass and metal box many days of
the year.

At first there are illusions of the rural; but closer / more intensely
seen it's always unexpected and counter intuitive; and I've gone back and
found it unexpected and counter intuitive again --

I've long enjoyed that moment in Peacock's Headlong Hall where a garden is
said to be designed to surprise the visitor and someone asks what happens
if one visits twice. That's never answered.

I have come recently to the idea that some urban scenes DO surprise a
second time round but without any designer's intention. It's not seeing
more in a made thing; but just emotionally banging each time into oddity.

I can hardly remember the Peacock novel but I suspect that the aim was to
surprise and delight; and I don't get much innate delight in this context.
It's more the worried surprise of a cat of my acquaintance EVERY time the
computer boots and goes bong.

Trying to make a poem is one way to cope.

 and it's only making this poem - or maybe the poems leading up to it
which no one will see - that I have fully absorbed how different this
landscape is in its different stretches.

That's ridiculous because it's obvious, once I have said it; but I am
still trying to absorb how this works. It's not geological. That sense of
hills of flowering bushes becoming valleys as the train moves only comes
when lines branch; and the stretch between Croydon and Norwood is a tangle
of joining and crossing lines.

This may be the most visually interesting stretch; but perhaps it behoves
me to make a set of poems for the different stretches

Sometimes I take a _pretty route_ via Crystal Palace, not only a 19th
century folly of a station (complete with shuttered off platform and
stairs brightly lit all the time) but a slight rise which makes for
variations on the illusions of the rural. I've been studying how the
railway manages it to get up and down, branching off from the main north
south multiple lines and then, where necessary, crossing over above those
lines -- and it came to me last night that it's quite like the problem for
2 dimensional creatures in Dewdney's Planiverse, the rails abolishing the
free movement in three dimensions.

A comment which won't help those who don't know that book!

& I have thought of something Rory Stewart wrote about coming back to
London after walking across Afghanistan -- it was to do with the
completeness of cover by asphalt and concrete and the outside of this city
being like one room.

I haven't quite got it yet -- or rather it was a perception of such oddity
and penetration that I am still exploring it. I think my experience is
slightly different to Stewart's -- and my ability to walk great distance
possibly not so good -- and I see it -- the urban out there -- as a kind
of rhetorical product

I think.

Er.

It wasn't that easy to write but I am quite pleased with it and *very
happy that you got something out of it.

May the vacuum bless you both

L