Small pleasures

In this episode we explore the small pleasures that can make a big difference to the day - and why some might come with some guilt attached…

At my age now I’d don’t really have many guilty pleasures left. Well, of course there’s, uh, that one, that’s always so popular with so many other people; but I’ve lived alone for so long now that, for me, anything like that has been long since off the menu, so to speak. Oh well.

What about a more everyday guilty-treat that’s more literally on the menu? Something like a cream cake, perhaps? Nope, no joy on that: leaves me feeling bloated and unwell. What about an ice-cream, then? No, even worse. Alcohol? True, I do quite like it, but it it doesn’t like me at all: one glass of wine is three days of splitting headache. Not even chocolate? Sadly, no joy there either: twenty minutes later it knocks me out for an hour and leaves me mostly out of action for the rest of the day. Life is so unfair sometimes…

Okay, I’ll admit to a mild passion for Japanese animation, such as those with beautiful artwork - Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Away, for example, or KyoAni’s glorious-yet-often-challenging Violet Evergarden. Or maybe the crazy mayhem of joyous absurdities such as Spy x Family. Yet those are more… well, quiet pleasures, really. I’d hardly call them guilty pleasures as such.

But yes, there is still one, for me… Maybe just one. And over this past weekend, for perhaps the first time in more than a year, I let myself indulge…

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It was in the earlyish morning that I’d heard that sound - that so-characteristic sound, so very rare these days. I knew it was already too late to chase after it, though, so I let it be: after all, I had plenty of work that I had to do that day.

But then I heard the sound again, barely an hour later - something that just doesn’t happen. Then, to my astonishment, another one. And not long after, yet another. Each time, I knew it was already too late, and the work… the work…

There it was, again. Coming this way, from the north this time, but from further away in the distance. Possibly just enough time, this time, if I move really, really fast. Yes! So bother the work, I’m going! I grabbed my hat and my camera, and ran!

Yes, me, a somewhat-overweight not-quite-completely-old man - I ran! A real run, for the first time in a year! I was already near-exhausted by the time I got to the end of the road…

Yet I did get to the main-road junction in time - because there it was, in the far distance, just now coming fully into view:

A guilty pleasure indeed…

If you can’t see it yet, well, here it is up-close:

Or, sideways-on, lumbering past at its not-exactly-huge full speed:

I love steam-trains…

There’s something about them, you see. Perhaps the nearest thing that we have to a living machine: hot, hard-working, breathing hard as well, the whistle calling out at every crossing, that so-characteristic smell of engine-oil and steam-coal. And they have to be treated like living-creatures too, warmed-up slowly, cooled-down carefully, each one of them ultimately unique, itself.

If that engine above is the one that I think it is, then it’s quite a bit more than a hundred years old now, and has already done more than one and a half million miles. True, it’s fairly slow - these days it’s not allowed to go faster than fifty miles an hour - and to get up and over the three-thousand-foot-plus climb at Mt Macedon, between here and Melbourne, it does need a bit of a push from the diesel banker-engine at the back:

And clearly others do love the steam-trains too: every carriage full of kids waving out of the open windows in evident excitement. A lot of joy there.

A lot of memories, too. For me those would go back to childhood holidays at Greatstone, where the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch light-railway ran just behind the houses: my mother said that I would run out to watch the train each time it came past. I would have been about five years old back then. And there were still a few steam-engines even working on the mainline a few years later than that: I remember standing on the Long Road bridge in Cambridge on my way to school in the late 1950s, to breathe in the steam-smoke as a clattering old freight-train rumbled by on the Bletchley line below. All just place-names now, of course, but they’d meant a lot to me back then.

Small pleasures of the past - and here, this weekend, small pleasures of the present, too.

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Pleasures, yes - yet why call it a guilty pleasure? What is there to be guilty about? Short-answer: quite a lot, actually. For starters, it’s incredibly wasteful, on every trip burning through several tons of increasingly-rare and irreplaceable steam-coal. Which is also a fossil-fuel, of course, pumping out vast amounts of yet more carbon-dioxide into the air - just when we’re trying to cut back on carbon-emissions as much as we can. It’s horrendously polluting in other ways too, not just the visible smoke but all those millimetre-sized globs of soot that get into everything - giving a first-hand experience of why everyone back in the steam era needed to wear a hat whenever they went out of the door. And that huge water-tank that it’s towing behind the tender, that you can see in the second photograph? - that’s not just a supply for the steam, but also to help put out any fires that it sparks off as it blasts its way through the forest. A bit of a giggle-wrecker, that…

Yet, again, the counterpoint. The connection to history - a connection as experienced. The huge machines feel so alive when they’re out there doing the job for which they were built; by contrast, they seem as unalive as skeletons and stuffed-animals if they’re only ever left stranded in a museum. And there’s also the sheer joy, too, so evident in the faces and actions of the children carried along in those carriages. That would be a real loss if we were to lose all of that.

Choices, trade-offs, options, possibilities. For example, we could perhaps kill off the problems with coal by converting the engine to run on oil or gas - but then the experience wouldn’t be the same. How do we protect and preserve these small pleasures, whilst still ensuring that they do remain as pleasures? I don’t know: but perhaps keeping any notions of guilt out of the picture will likely help a lot.

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