You used to come to life here… You still do.

The tumblers cascade: words and numbers; a thousand castanets building to a crescendo before gradually falling silent, their song reminiscent of pebbles driven before a wave. The commotion echoes in the void; ricocheting off the brickwork; through the exposed iron.

The departures board at Paddington talks; somehow poignant and yet at the same time visceral, you whisper in my ear.

How could it convey information in a manner that seemed, somehow, sensual? Like so many postcards home.

We all contrive meaning, you said. I believe it’s called post rationalisation, I responded. I don’t like that phrase; it implies cynicism. I would rather think of it as the jigsaw of life; a means of furnishing context, you replied.

Today, a giant polka-dot LED array has usurped the old mechanical board. The change perplexes me; as much for the unintended consequences as anything else. The new silence compels devotion. Reverence must be paid. I sit patiently, observing the swarm gather around their electronic queen, watching them watching…

A silent caller deals no game of bingo. I smiled at your idiosyncratic turn of phrase.

The old board (bifold slats, stencilled individually with station names and platform numbers, set on rollers, framed within a larger grid) had a singularity of purpose. The new board performs the same function, and yet there is a level of complexity that seems wholly superfluous.

‘Buscarle tres pies al gato,’ you gently chided. We had an unspoken convention: action, pause, reaction, pause. You were not made for this time, I told you. Society malfunctions all too quickly now. You seemed to like the sentiment.  

The new board has become a modern parable: a display capable of an infinite combination of letters, numbers, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, prefixes, suffixes, pictograms, emojis, symbols, grids, patterns, shapes, musical notes, proverbs, poems, non-sequiturs, bon mots, gobbledegook or prose stands guilelessly before a captive audience; a symbol of unused potential…

We recalled the time we randomly hopped on a train for the sheer joy of going somewhere new; sipping chilled champagne from the plastic flutes we brought for the journey. You pointed out that we weren’t the only ones that day.

What has changed? Some would say nothing. Platforms remain monolithic. Trains rumble slowly in and out, their motion relative to an independent observer no different now than it was then. Trains and stations as utilitarian tropes.

When you explained special relativity to me using a moving train as your analogy, it brought the concept to life. You had a gift.

The mode of travel has not changed, but the journey has. The board has become symbolic of aspirations narrowed. Stations have stopped being destinations, they are points on a schematic; sterile adjuncts alongside the steel rails; no longer broadening horizons for city dwellers but imprisoning the mode of transport itself. Trains sneered at for perceived deficiencies by advocates for the car and the plane; for nothing more than representing a more enlightened age.

We ran to make our connection, weaving hand in hand through the throng, laughing; still flush from grabbing a last half an hour in the hotel, naked in our lust for each other.

Like the algorithm behind a dating website; the new board dispassionately matches data; pronouncing the points of a journey, ultimately culminating in an end-of-the-line terminus somewhere else in space and time; unknowingly bound to its Sisyphean task where the boulder has been fractured into a trillion individual photons.

I went to hold your hand, but you were angry with something I had unthinkingly said… In the ensuing silence, the motion of the train soothed us both…

The word ‘terminus’ is a misnomer. It implies that man was made for machine; placing the station at the heart of affairs; the end of the line, not for the passenger, but for the engine. For us, our time at the terminus is a fragment, a fractured shard in an otherwise larger picture. A terminus is a paradox; a place where dynamism and ennui must be evaluated as two sides of the same coin. Motionless bodies, like reeds in a bed, somehow unmoved by the waves of single-minded intensity flowing around them. It is a subtle harmony composed of interchangeable melodies where the musicians are compelled to play each part.

I listened to you creating biographies for the people passing  by; your imagination was intoxicating.

I watch the tension palpably build in a man wearing a slim-cut sports jacket with a flamboyant pocket square tumbling from the breast pocket as he anticipates the announcement of his scheduled departure. I observe resentment light the face of an impatient lady in jeans and a pink windcheater, disturbed from her internalised frustration by someone passing by a little too closely. I feel for a soul strapped into an over-large rucksack and struggling with an all-too-heavy holdall, who wears her weariness like an overcoat, her onward struggle a burden for everyone to see. I see a child’s delight in pointing out a locomotive to his flustered and disinterested mother. A terminus is neither the beginning nor the end. The perfect allegory for our very existence. The departures board bears witness to it all.

I come here and try to remember what it was like to wait for you to step off the train. It’s become more difficult now that the smell of engine oil and diesel has been supplanted by cookies and french-fries.

They wait. On the signal, a stampede redolent of the Savanah; a headlong dash by the jaded, the cynical, the practised and the bewildered alike. Brownian motion, separating the efficient and aggressive from the naïve and uncomprehending. The prize? An empty seat. Its conjoined sibling often relegated to hosting personal items; deployed in the hope that it will ward off strangers whose bottoms have need of repose. This seems to be what passes for empathy with our fellow passengers these days.

I used to sit here and stare into the void. Age, unfortunately, demands that I sit. That, I can do nothing about.

Paddington station’s departures board is more than an omniscient presence toying with mankind from Mount Olympus; the people more than pieces in a divine game. Amongst the selfishness of headphones and smartphones disengaging one individual from the next, moments of togetherness, tenderness, grief and ecstasy play out in a dance tuned into the station’s cycles and rhythms.

Our first-class tickets were awaiting collection; but instead we had to rush you to hospital…

Lovers re-united, passionately embracing; the sorrow of the time spent apart forgotten in that first tender kiss. The tremulous beginnings of an adventure juxtaposed by the mundanity of the surrounding everyday grind. Such a moment can represent a simple pause in life; a chance to anticipate better things, perhaps; or to remember… The truth is that a train station is a temple to emotional reality and we all have our own journeys to make.

We reached our terminus, tossed on a sea of conflicting emotions. I made you a promise, trying to keep calm as I did; your trembling hand squeezing mine. I wanted my smile to be of comfort…

I recall the cacophonous castanet clatter, full of life, like a sun-dappled waterfall. I think of heartbreak, yearning, ennui, excitement, joy… the simple unfussy pleasure of knowing that home is one step closer…

que signifie adieu, à moins de mourir? mais la mort serait-elle un adieu? What does farewell mean, unless one is dying? But is death itself a farewell?