Instead of revisiting a specific piece from the past, today is more about revisiting the past in this new piece. Having eased myself gently into retirement earlier this year, I decided to take a month long trip home to the UK.
Besides visiting loved ones (family and old friends, spread across the country), I decided to get a Eurail pass, and visit the northernmost, eastern-most, southernmost, and westernmost points of the British rail network. I wrote this as made my way to the final compass point of my trip, Holyhead, which is in North Wales.
Steel on Steel
Sheffield first—not on the timetable,
but in how my feet remembered
crossing a street
after forty-five years.
Once, it was Christmas with my mum—
department store windows burning soft,
queues of children
restless and cold,
waiting for Santa.
Back then, the only trams I knew
stood frozen in Crich—
polished relics of another world.
Now they hum through Sheffield’s streets,
and in other cities too—
what was old,
is new again.
The train hushes me forward,
steel on steel,
shuddering dust from memory.
By rail, the Peak District reveals
how its villages link—
beads on a string
I’d never seen unrolled.
Heather in bloom,
bees working the air,
bilberry-stained fingers,
the sugar-sweet drift
from a patient ice cream van
still keeping its post.
One night,
in a pub with my ex-wife,
the music left no room for sitting.
We danced for hours,
laughing at the years between—
friends again.
Grinning when the same chorus caught us.
And then—
the long view:
top deck of an open bus,
wind lifting the weight of decades,
land unspooling
like pages I’d forgotten were mine—
countryside, city,
faces gone,
faces kept—
all held
in the rhythm of the train,
and the quiet certainty
of having come home,
the train still moving.