Reflections on Staring Out of a Train Window (Not Those Sort of Reflections, Smartarse)

[I jotted this down longhand on a train I took at the weekend. It's the most writing I've done since exams, probably.]

It's quite pleasurable to take the overland train out of Charing Cross. You soon see housing overhanging the tracks. It' can't be much fun in the file-filled rooms that are clearly offices, with only smudgy single-glazed windows dividing you from the snaking journey of the squealing 1106 from Charing Cross. Another of the things I have to be thankful for in my job is that my office isn't right on top of one of the major national rail networks. (I think I've just added an extra year to my eventual length of service with that piece of bright-side looking. Dammit!)

You also get to see advertising for long-extinct beers - Sharp, Double Diamond, Bovrilbrau - out of the window, and I'm left with the maudlin consideration that no-one will ever taste these drinks again (except for Bovrilbrau, of course; I made that one up because I need a third item for my list, following the Iron Law of Comma-Separated Lists:

If it be a list ye write,
three things mus show or else thee'll fright,
reader, writer, editor all,
and the cursed list shall be your downfall.

Just you try and avoid it - it's devilishly difficult). There must be a society dedicated to the preservation of the recipes of once popular alcoholic beverages (Two Dogs! Hooch! The old low alcoholic content Heineken!), much in the same way that Cecil Sharp did in the early 1900s, going round collecting and transcribing folk music. There's also four strains of Pimms that are no longer existent - the campaign starts here! The campaign for someone else to do something about it!