no longer alien

The journey back home was long, over 24 hours door to door. But apart from the frustration of a 2½hr delay at Heathrow, there was some value in the psychological space of a time passed in the journey after a long time away from home. At SF airport I spent my last dollars on ‘Time’ and a ‘National Geographic’ to read on the flight, a last immersion into America. (As they call it, not The States).

The second to last leg of my journey was by train, through the lovely countryside around from north Manchester, Huddersfield, Dewsbury to Leeds. Mill towns, stone walls, clumps of woodlands, farms and Victorian terrace housing. We followed a canal for a good bit of the way, and I remembered a week ago trying to explain to Rachel and Emine the taken-for-granted beautiful and technical qualities of the British canal system.

The second leg of the same journey, the train from Sacramento to Richmond across the Californian Central Valley was a sharp contrast to West Yorshire. In the evening sunshine, here looked very green, very old, very irregular, a bit scruffy. Even compared to the incredible scenery of the US National Parks in my National Geographic, these are my everyday places, my cultural landscapes, and coming back is to find them freshly beautiful. I folded my magazine and mentally jumped from rafting down the Colorado river gorge to unfolding a OS map and finding my way through centuries old footpaths on a Sunday afternoon.

I got chatting to three Chinese students on their way back from shopping in Manchester Chinatown. They were eating a type of lychees that I hadn’t seen before, and they shared some with me.