Skip to main content

The city of recurring dreams


There is a place I often dream about. Not exactly a place, because it has many forms, but I know its the same dream. It is away from the capital city, sometimes far, sometimes close. There is always a train, and that's how I know it. The train goes through a quiet landscape. It's grassy plains or around the river of a bushy national park. It follows the coast or a river or neither. The train itself is never new, never shiny and modern, usually just a rail car of a couple of carriages. It may even be a tram in origin, if not in fact.

It's the end of a branch line.

The location is Australia. It's Rockhampton in the mid-eighties, Newcastle when the train ran to the city centre, it's Yeppoon with its old train line or tiny Keppel Sands which never had one. It's Kurnell which never was. Or it's a hidden suburb down a non-existent turnoff a bit further along our road.


Wherever it is, the city has a few characteristics. It's old, a bit run down and it is quiet. Sandstone buildings along the main street, one of which houses a small department store selling clothes and toys like the old Lima train sets and Star Wars figures. They still sell computers and electronics kits. There's a university or scientific institution that looks a lot like the campuses where I've worked, architecture dating back between the fifties and the seventies. 

These places, they come from memories and daydreams from many decades of my life. They do not exist here and now in Australia.

I realise too that they have another source, that being Japan. I think of industrial cities like Toyama, with its tramways and Chiho Railway to Unazuki Onsen, or Kushiro and the line to Nemuro. It's historic Matsue and riding around Lake Shinji to Izumoshi or Takasaki to Shimonita.


Places that others ask what the point is in visiting them, yet it is their unassuming lack of sights that is their attraction, that offers a blank canvas on which to portray your own stories and dreams.

In isolation, I dream of isolated places.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Asagaya and heading home

How can I be happy? I am about to return to a country where the toilets have at most two buttons and no seat warmers. But the tickets are booked and there are no cyclones, typhoons or other disasters standing in our way. It's almost time to go back to my first home. First B wants to do some "local shopping". So we catch the Chuo Line up a few stations to Asagaya, a residential area with a number of Shotengai, covered and uncovered arcades leading away from the station and narrow alleys lined with bars. It is an interesting area for a wander around. We are mainly looking, do some shopping for toothbrushes and sweets from Seiyu, a Wal-Mart owned supermarket/minor department store. We skipped breakfast and lunch is ramen and gyoza at a small restaurant near the entrance to the Pearl Centre shotengai. With the help of a staff member, I manage to purchase tickets at a branch of Lawson to the Ghibli Museum for a friend travelling to Japan in May. There are some...

IKEA Museum

We have a packed itinerary today. Flat packed and assembled with an Allen key. There are patches of snow on the ground that weren't there the previous evening. We are a bit sad to leave the Duxiana after the comfy beds and the breakfast of cold cuts, fruits and hot waffles. I tried the Swedish caviar on my boiled egg. It was... Interesting. I was very disappointed to realise that, after talking it up for months, I had forgotten the Disgusting Foods Museum in Malmö yesterday. Too late now. We catch another Oresundstag train, for a bit over an hour. Past yesterday's Lund, past increasingly white fields and towns to Älmhult, home of IKEA. The conductor warns us that the train will split in two so we have to move carriages forward. Unfortunately, there we no spare sets of chairs for all of us. The IKEA Museum showcases the history of the furniture company, along with temporary exhibitions. One of these was "Hacking IKEA," about using IKEA ob...

To Melbourne on the XPT sleeper

Excited by the prospect of reliving the experience of seeing my very first movie and hearing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra perform it I bought tickets to The Empire Strikes Back in Concert in Melbourne back in February. Then I did nothing about actually getting there. Much as I love Melbourne, due to family commitments I didn't want to spend more than the Sunday away. Flights there and back made sense, but  my flight down to Melbourne in late October reiterated the fact that I usually don't enjoy descending into the city. And the concert was in December, a season of summer storms. I really didn't feel like driving the whole route alone and in a hurry, so that left one choice. The train. My very first trip up to Sydney from Melbourne was aboard the luxury Southern Aurora. Or it was supposed to be luxury. I wouldn't know because I spent the whole ride up very sick with the flu lying in the top bunk, unable to stay awake for my whole of night vigil. Now only...