Trains and Planes

I took a train ride today. London to Birmingham. It was a Virgin Trains Pendolino. Pretty fast.
I started thinking that maybe I should take flying lessons. The last couple of days I have noticed some small planes overhead and it took me back to when I was a kid.

There were several ice cream vans that used to come around our road selling ice cream cornets and lollyices. There were vans that sold the soft whipped ice cream, the kind that came out of a machine as the man held a cornet underneath. The cornets always came out in a pretty shape , you know that helter-skelter look. They used to come to our road and they had a loudspeaker that broadcast jingles so that you would know they were there. They always had Italian names as-well, Giovannis Sampinis etc I could never work that out.

Half a pound of two penny rice half a pound of treacle. Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall .. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. Childrens nursery rhyme tunes really, thats what they played. But my favourite was Jims Fabrio van, which used to come every day during the summer and park on the corner of our road across from the school at about 3.30pm. He didn't have any music. I think all the kids knew he'd be there.

He didn't sell the soft whippy ice cream. He sold the hard blocks from containers and it had to be taken out with a scoop. He also sold bazooka chewing gum. It was wrapped in blue red and white waxy paper and inside there was a cartoon. Wow!I loved it.

It was Jim who first made me aware of planes.I had not really thought about aeroplanes and where they were coming from and going to. I had thought about cars and motorbikes. I remember being in bed at night and listening to the sounds of the traffic. Many varied songs of car engines and the deep-throated revs of the big Triumph and BSA motorbikes. We had a railway at the bottom of our road and there always seemed to be late night trains with the beautiful long hoots and whistles that the steam trains used to make as they snaked their way from the docks on the River Mersey to the steel plant in North Wales.

He pointed a plane out to me one day as I stood in the heat of the July sun. I remember the way he looked and sounded to this day. He was gaunt with a pointed chin and had a receding hairline. He obviously felt self conscious about his hairline because he had let what hair he had grow fairly long on one side and he had combed it over his bald spot. He always got on well with the kids even to the point of remembering names.

"You see that plane up there?" in a London accent. Looking skyward, shading my eyes from the glare, I saw a little shape making its way across the sky.

"Thats the 4 oclock chewing gum plane to Belfast that is! Comes all the way from South America with its cargo of gum bound for delivery all over Europe"

As I continued to look at the small dot traversing the sky my mind was racing with the thoughts of the journey it had been on and the places its cargo would be despatched to. The fact that I had probably not really been looking at the 4 oclock from South America to Belfast with a cargo of chewing gum was neither here nor there. My imagination had been set on fire.

That night in bed I listened out for the thrum of the aeroplanes engines. I could hear them, quietly at first and gradually getting louder as they approached. They seemed to change their pitch and it almost seemed as if sometimes they were going to stop.

I have always loved planes and the thought of flying since then. Theres always a little nervous patch in my tummy before takeoff but it's such a rush. Getting on a plane in the pouring rain and being overcome by heat two hours later as you step off is just amazing. Of course it also works the other way around and is an equally vivid contrast but maybe not with as glorious an ending.

So I will look into flying lessons soon and who knows, maybe I will be able to fly myself around some of the places Id like to go.