Yes, I remember Liskeard,
The land of lost content,
For, on an October day,
The branch train
Terminated there
Wontedly.
Bad hommages (or postmodern collages?:P) aside:-it is, again, a day of porous time boundaries: 2005/2006??. Somewhere around then… THEN… and NOW(October 2017).
I felt as if I had(mainly) re-emerged from a year of illness, back to the land of Network Rail trains (after two successful sojourns on Merseyrail as a warm-up). The 3-day Rail Rover of then (doing the Cornish and Devon branchlines :)); the one day epic, 6 trains-there-and-back- St Ives to Looe(via Liskeard) of now.
Here/there we are: St. Ives Central(sponsored by Blue Chip). It -just -survived the Beeching cuts and now boasts temporary coffee and booking office(independently run) shacks; so it is not even unstaffed; and the train was not one spamcan but FOUR coaches{I am getting a bit traingeek pre-orgasmic:P}.
“This train will call at Carbis Bay, Lelant Saltings and Lelant. Please note, Lelant is a request stop only and the guard must be informed, at the start of your journey, that you wish to alight there.”
Being gay in Liskeard(the change point for the Looe branch, with its own separate, cute little station,nomenclatured “platform 3”), 
must be no mean feat. It would have been pleasanter to have come to these remoter Cornish spaces/places- the UNgay- with a gay/queer friend with a strong gay/queer sense of self/identity: they/HE would have “got” it: the displaced, malaise-ridden feeling{ the ersatz sebaldian narrator, Steve, felt he was about to revert to periphrastic prose, interweaving clauses set in a miasma of torpor and that Sebald word “malaise”}, the need to(joyfully!) gay up those (already somewhat queer in the sense of “quaint”) Cornish branchlines and the pretty but,ultimately, tedious,blue-and-white art saturation. (My friend had gone to Suffolk at, strangely, the same time: on a Benji Britten and Sebald pilgrimage: I was a bit envious, because I felt he had had the chance to have a queer encounter, with his/our heroes; but I was, simultaneously, pleased for him:)).
…..I am rambling : as, indeed, is this crazy woman in the photogenic trainspotter’s heaven of a buffet at Liskeard interchange: she has been here most of the day. She likes diesel engines, according to the café staff; in fact, they say she is here ALL day EVERY day. She could be ME :P….
between trains… junctions/changing points … liminal areas… These (usurped, used images) trail away or, perhaps, just hit the buffers, like my train(s) and my prose………
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towardsutopia 