last train home

i took a late night train today, a first in the longest time. trains feel different at night, there’s a certain relieved sigh in the air. today, there was a girl who evidently had changed out from high heels to comfy flip flops, someone who gave up his seat though he looked very tired himself, and someone who wore a little floppy hat with many badges on it. nobody could really make out what the badges were about, and i caught glimpses of  people peering at the badges in a kindly curious sort of way.

there’s something forgiving in the air at night — a collective ‘ it’s been a long day, now for some rest’ , something i like.

look at the stars, see how they shine for you

i meant to write more than i have, but it is always nice to return to little spaces. happened to chance upon this yesterday.. think this is pretty.

” I looked at the sky a lot. I like looking up at the sky in the garden at night. In summer I sometimes come outside at night with my torch and my planisphere, which is two circles of plastic with a pin through the middle. And on the bottom is a map of the sky and on top is an aperture which is an opening shaped in a parabola and you turn it round to see a map of the sky that you can see on that day of the year from the latitude 51.5 degrees North, which is the latitude that Swidon is on, because the largest bit of the sky is always on the other side of the earth.

And when you look at the sky you know you are looking at stars which are hundreds and thousands of light years away from you. And some of the stars don’t exist any more because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible which means they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something “

from The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time , by Mark Haddon