w.atching the w.orld unw.ind

Today's lyric:

"Oleanders, growing outside her door
Soon they're gonna be in bloom up in Annandale
I can't stand her, doing what she did before
Living like a gypsy queen in a fairy tale
Well I hear the whistle but I can't go
I'm gonna take her down to Mexico
She said "Oh no, Guadalajara won't do."

Steely Dan: "My old school"
From the album: "Countdown to ecstacy"

The fat old moon rose rapidly above the horizon, like a starting gun heralding the beginning of our journey south, and Home. Alternately tracking us from our rear port quarter and abeam, as we jinked our way back from the North, I wondered idly whether more people would eventually visit other planets than the Moon? After all, there's stuff all there of use. Will the grass be greener on the other side of the galaxy?

And today, there she was again, staring balefully out of a crystalline blue sky, 180 degrees away to the West, heralding another day, another train ride...

During the trip I finished what must be this year's 28th book - it's still posted up over there on the right. An insider's account of some of the worst abductions and murders in the UK during the past 20 years. Horrific, true stories of human depravity, degradation and predation which do not make for 'enjoyable' reading.

Even Number One Daughter - herself a student clinical psychologist - refuses to read it because of the graphic details behind the police investigations into cases such as Fred and Rosemary West, the Wardell and Nickell killings, the Michael Sams' abductions etc.

It does make you despair for humanity, when such atrocities can be calculatedly perpetrated on other people?

An unscheduled stop for repairs to overhead lines put us half an hour behind our ETA and an indoors time of 9.30 pm meant a quick, but welcome, supper of beans on toast -welcome after the usual processed fare of hotels etc.

So, proof that we did visit whyaye country (the Tyne bridge) - the locals were very friendly and we didn't have to go down too many subways that reeked of urine..