11.08 To Manchester Victoria

Grey railings with sharp ends march along the top of the railway cutting. There's a draft on my left shoulder as we pull into Rochdale, though I can see no open windows. Too many people get on at Rochdale and I feel hemmed in and oppressed, pray no-one needs to sit beside me. The sky is watercolour grey, trees determinedly bare and two young men are talking about Chelsea. I assume it's the football team they mean, though I can't really pick out any other words amid the rattle of the train and the heaviness of the Rochdale-Asian accents. Suddenly I hear Arsenal. Yes, football. Two huge pylons at an electricity sub-station. A long narrow pile of used red bricks like an embankment. A pale yellow bus. This is Castleton where a man leans against the shelter on the platform, chewing hard, looking sideways at me or maybe just at my train, wearing a black knitted hat with a red stripe round the edge. Green metal steps up from the platform, with white handrails. Another pile of bricks and rubble. Looks like they've been demolishing the terraces of Castleton. The railway line crosses the M62 or possibly the M60. I glimpse lines of fast-moving traffic, giant trucks. Lichen-green fence panels. Allotments with greenhouses and polytunnels. A procession of mighty pylons taking electricity to Manchester or possibly bringing it from Manchester. I see the Rochdale Canal, and we are at Mills Hill. A washed out sign saying Princes Drinks. A development of dark red brick box houses with brown rooves. Inflite Engineering Services. Darcy Joinery. A green van with T. Dobson & Sons on the side, and we're at Moston, where red-tipped stems of an overgrown woody shrub behind the platform hint at spring. A beige tower block. A caravan with a blue tarpaulin stretched over one end. More grey railings - standard railway issue. The train maintenance depot. Are You Ready To Be Pool Party Proof? asks a poster on a billboard incomprehensibly. The tower blocks with coloured rooves, one orange, one brown, one blue, with matching trim beneath the windows. The tower block inexplicably called Emmeline, a large red American motel-style sign on top announces this. This building was stripped back to the bone then reclad in red-brown panels and given this incongruous name a few years ago. Waiting just outside Victoria Station, the Boddington's Brewery tower now in view.