Waiting is agony. Especially when it’s on a timetable and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.
The irony? You spend just as long trying to catch up - and still miss the connection.
Just like this post. ‘Substack Smash Sunday’, planned for yesterday. Like the best laid plans, its landing a day late.
Last week I travelled by train to Aberdeen - and back! I seemed to spend the entire week waiting for trains and dashing through stations trying to make connections because the trains decided they weren’t going to stick to the timetables!
There’s even a designated spot at the station, called a ‘waiting room’, as if being made to wait were a privilege they’d laid on specially. Indeed, all public transport is designed around you rushing then waiting. Last month’s trip to LA was the airport version!
The more I thought about it, the more I realised the system has us well trained. All those years on the platform, and we’ve learned to be very good at waiting - impatiently, but very good.
Some of you may even have been waiting last night for the 1 a.m. England vs. Mexico World Cup kickoff, delayed by an hour - of course! Then for the agony of the final result, then - if the pubs near you got a late licence - waiting for last orders at five, still celebrating, or if you’re in bed, for the final revellers to stagger past the house, cheering and singing!
That would have been an ordeal of expectation, second only to staying awake on Christmas Eve as a kid. And that’s where it starts! As children we know the torture of waiting for birthdays and Christmas, for the summer holidays. Somewhere along the line we get schooled into believing the good times are always just around the corner. The ‘are we there yet?’ stuff.
And we grow up only to find we’re still not there! We’re now waiting for the weekend, the next holiday, the phone to ring. Waiting for life to get started.
Waiting, it seems, is a condition of modern life. A very British one, too: we stay calm over something that’s really an imposition but somehow sounds like it’s doing us a favour. Waiting is the cousin of queuing, and we’re patient at that as well - irritated, but patient. Perhaps that’s what phones are for. Something to stare at while we wait.
While that may be the matter-of-fact human experience of temporal displacement, when you’re neither here nor there, artificially frozen between worlds, there is also a sensory version!
The feeling that your mind has already arrived somewhere your body hasn’t. It’s a feeling often described during an LSD trip!
The rush of going somewhere and getting nowhere, imagining you’re already there but you’re behind. Time letting go of itself, left in limbo between departure and destination, improvising through long stretches where you can only stare out the window, feet not touching the ground, travelling faster than walking speed and not in control of it.
That’s the Smash album!
Songs as brief points of clarity in an otherwise liminal drift - written between two time zones and two cultures, literally flying between the two, so the lyrics and the music carry the same disjointed-yet-connected feeling of being just out of reach of something. Waiting for something else to happen to make everything explain itself.
Too-ing and fro-ing not only physically, but in your head, undecided yet already on the way, and the one thing we have no control over is the passing of time!
Which brings me to this week’s song. It’s called “Waiting For A Train”.
No wonder trains and waiting have been on my mind all week. The lyric spells out the frustration; the music distils the tension - staying on the same chord through the verses, harmonically going nowhere. And, fittingly, it’s the song that closes the album. You have to wait through the whole thing to reach it.
Here’s a preview.
It mirrors the album opener, “Slip Away”, which announces ‘I don’t need a train or a plane or a wave goodbye’ before setting you off on the journey. But this final song catches you out. The train isn’t really the point at all. We’ve all caught the wrong train, missed the train, waited for the next one, or wondered if we’re even on the right one. It stops being a song about British Rail and starts sounding suspiciously like life.
By the end you realise you’ve been on a journey - the rhythm hypnotising you while you stared out of the window all along.
Smash was never really about the destination. And the last song isn’t the end of the line.
Just a chance for me to say ‘All change!’
Because there’s more soon after.
But for now, it’s all aboard the Smash train!
I hope you think it was worth the wait.
Here’s the song and a video of me in a blur of catching trains and imagining another day, while my mind slips away, in the station that becomes another waiting room.