as fast as a speeding bullet

Doesn't life move quickly these days? Sometimes it feels like we are so obsessed with getting things done that we have forgotten how to enjoy doing them. Sometimes, I think our modern living blinkers are masking the glorious technicolour world around us.

I'm on a train at the moment - doing a train journey I haven't done since I was a very young child. The route takes us through some beautiful countryside, beside the mouth of the mighty Bann, along the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, under Mussenden Temple and past Downhill beach to the point where the shores of Lough Foyle become the banks of the River Foyle. It is a particularly beautiful journey. Not that anyone seems to notice.

I'm surrounded by people on laptops studying spreadsheets and filling out reports; all around me people are on the phone to their office, to their husbands, to their friend Pat who moved away ten years ago to marry an english man and so doesn't know the tragic events in Stranocum this week or the trouble anticipated at the band parade in Rasharkin tonight.

I don't blame them. The pace of life orders that we see journeys, not as events, but as wasted time. Time that technology can harness and make useful. It makes me yearn for the time when people used to dress up for a flight in a plane, a time when whole families would get on the train and head for the sea. Days when the journey was part of the experience - not an inconvenient means to the end.

So, as we pass through God's beautiful creation, I smile wryly at all those around me who seem oblivious to it... And I spend the journey typing a blog about it on my Blackberry.

there's santa waving

“Look! I see Santa! He’s waving!”

A highly improbable assertion made by the small child sitting behind me on the plane to Edinburgh on Saturday. He was of course kicking the back of my seat, making inane conversation and being annoyingly childlike for the majority of the journey. Normally this would have spoiled the flight completely. But for once I am willing to forgive.

It was a journey filled with enlightenment all round. For instance I had already learned that, even on a short thirty minute flight, it is possible for the fairly tiny women in the seat in front of me to order and down a triple vodka with tomato juice and just a little gusto. A short time after the waving Santa incident I would be watching, with some awe, the woman beside me intricately applying make up during the descent and even the (extremely bumpy) landing without pause or mistake – how is that even possible?

But it was when I glanced out the window to see if I could spot Father Christmas flying his reindeer alongside that I made my favourite discovery of the flight. For immediately I saw what the kid was talking about.
Looking down, the darkness was interrupted by a definite image of a rather fat man with a beard and braces made up of the street lights from a small (clearly strangely shaped) town. The main entry route formed his crooked “waving” arm.

I started looking around at all the other little settlements – trying to find images in the illuminated patterns below. Have you ever sat flat on your back on some grass and gazed up into the sky looking for pictures in the clouds? Well I suppose it’s kinda the reverse of that. I looked down at ground from up in the clouds for an eternity. I concentrated, hard – I saw racing cars and angels, Christmas trees and bobbles; Elizabethan actors and Budweiser bottles; old fashioned steam engines blowing smoke rings… these are a few of my favourite things…