general musings

From a Summer Train

June 24, 2025 by ricky 1 Comment

Firstly: Thanks you for so many kind messages of love for my friend Jim Prime. I’ll spend longer talking about Jim at a future date but for now, we at DB are all so grateful for the love you have shown in texts, mails and posts. I’ll be playing a track in memory of Jim on this week’s show.

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As I write this week’s blog I’m on the loveliest of journeys, a summer train. I think I first fell for the joy of this particular outing as a young teenager travelling with a friend for the first time without parents or grandparents. I’d once had a long train journey with my grandfather which had turned awkward as I started to resent the hot, stuffy train and behaved rather like the teenager I was about to become. Inevitably he was kind and consoling and, as he was my best, best friend this proved to be a matter of some regret for many years after until I finally dealt with it in a song…always the best way.

The later journey with my schooldays friend saw us taking a train from London Victoria out to Sevenoaks in Kent for the start of a holiday. It was July and travelling out through the suburbs to the commuter belt and seeing the cars parked at the station for the office workers to start their journey to the city was a whole new experience to two young lads from Angus who’d never been out in the world.  We’d missed the rush hour so this mid morning train was as quiet as an empty church as it pulled up to each little stop and doors swung open to empty platforms. Somehow the heat seemed more intense when we were stationery and the summer seeped in through the open windows.

Later on I’d read Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop:

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
In 1998 I did a rather less than perfect solo show at a county festival somewhere west of London and took the train the next day into the centre of the city to meet my new music publishers. That day, coming on an unfamiliar route the whole splendour of the imperial capital overwhelmed me. Grand buildings, bridges and the sparkling river all put on their best show as we careered into the heart of the Big Smoke. I thought of my mother whose 70th birthday we were celebrating that year and how, when freed from duty and care she’d laugh and sing and on the best days we’d see the side of her we loved shining through. Like her, on that day, from that train London came alive.
The other day I heard another familiar poem read aloud. Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings carries the narrative perfectly of the loneliness and curiosity of the solo traveller on a warm summer journey. I’m always glad to be travelling alone but then events occur and we wonder how different life might be to have companionship.
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   
And someone running up to bowl—and none   
Thought of the others they would never meet   
Or how their lives would all contain this hour. 
So on this week’s AC we have compiled a summer two hour playlist to take you through some part of your holiday travels. It’s the best of what we have enjoyed in 2025 so far and you will hear Charley Crockett, Eric Church, I’m With Her and Rhona McFarlane as well as many more in a packed two hours. It all starts at five past eight on BBC Sounds or BBC Radio Scotland this Tuesday evening. Do join me if you can.

 

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