83. Travelling backwards
Why what I'm used to will always be a comfortable option for my inner child.
Dear Reader,
My habit of going around in circles is entirely involuntary, but on a shoot at a botanical garden last week I was reminded of my liking for travelling backwards.
We had found ourselves and our gear being ferried around on an electric buggy. And we were grateful: there was a lot of ground to cover – not just geographically, but photographically – and today we’d much rather be driven than walk.
At first we were three. Jim sat in the front passenger seat of the buggy, his client behind the wheel, and I was directly behind them. On this sunshine-and-showers day, I was clutching two raincoats and grasping the 50cm diameter sleeve that housed a cleverly-folded reflector disc. Jim’s second camera body was nestled – I hoped securely – in my lap.
With room for six on the buggy, and because models were going to be needed to pose for Jim’s lens, later two other members of the garden’s PR team joined us on board.
‘I’ll sit at the back!’ I announced, with excitement. ‘Really?’ came the response. ‘You want to ride backwards?’
Reader, I did.
As a very small child I’d been envious of my older-than-me twin cousins, whose mother drove a Volvo estate car with two rear-facing seats in the boot space. On a trip to a safari park we took two cars in convoy, and I jealously watched their faces looking out at us into our car behind. As a very small person, their journey backwards had felt to me the height of travel sophistication.
When I was equally little I loved the swings, and having a go on the swing boats at the funfair would always be a highlight of my summer. My brother and I would sit opposite each other, each holding our own pull rope to get us higher and higher.
The backwards trajectory would always be a thousand times more exciting than the forwards one: the way my tummy would be left behind on the too-fast, too-curved backswing always made me gasp and giggle. Thinking about it again now I’m regretting not having been more interested in physics at school: I wonder what Google can tell me what was going on there?
The ride experiences a linear velocity and an angular velocity due to traveling in an arc. The linear velocity in an arc requires the use of gravity, the length of the pendulum arm, and the degrees of the arc because of potential and kinetic energy being converted into each other.
Taken from IdeaExchange@UAkron
Okay, that’s enough. Thanks, Google.
Whenever we took the train as a family of four, tickets would be booked in advance, with seats reserved.
‘Here we are!’ one of my parents would say, arriving at one of those British Rail 1980s aluminium-trimmed Formica tables with two facing bench seats for two – upholstered in one of the eye-grating fabrics of the time – arranged opposite each other.
‘Over there, you two. This side is ours.’
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the smaller-statured members of a family don’t get to call many shots, and my brother and I would always travel backwards on the train. I’m not sure I ever even noticed at the time. We’d be reading our books, playing ‘I Spy’, squabbling over who’d get to sit next to the view – and ‘is it tiiiiime to swap yet? – and gazing out of the windows as we rattled along the rails.
I loved to daydream as I looked out of the window whenever it was my brother’s turn for the aisle seat, propping up my bear against the glass so that we could watch the world whizz past together. Sometimes I’d mutter the first few lines of this poem, which I’d learned from my beautifully-illustrated copy of ‘A Child’s Garden of Verses’:
From a Railway Carriage
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And there is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart run away in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone for ever!
Robert Louis Stevenson
from A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885)
I remember once the train stopping a few hundred yards before one of the main stations on our long trip north, presumably to wait for the preceding train to move off ahead of it. The wind was eddying in the lush green barley, the surface of the crop turning the brushes of its collective ears into a sea of ripples. I’d followed the path of the cereal current with my eyes as it moved unpredictably around the field, and was fascinated by it. As the train moved off, I wondered aloud whether it was the wind that was responsible for crop circles.
‘No, that’s aliens. Or people with planks and ropes. Definitely not the wind!’ 🙄
Years later, Dad’s birthday treat to celebrate a milestone number had been to take us all first class on the Bluebell Railway, a heritage steam railway in rural Sussex. In a nostalgic nod to those much earlier trips, I’d brought a couple of old friends along for the ride.
As had been usual in the old days, we had a quad of facing seats, and sat in opposite pairs. The idea had been for Mum and Dad to travel forwards on the outbound trip, and my brother and I would then have the benefit of facing forwards on the return journey. And because we were going out and back, nobody would need to get up and swap.
Reader, I did swap. I didn’t need the perceived-by-others luxury of facing forwards; on that day, backwards was the way for me and my inner child.
On our rare trips to the capital when I was a youngster we would sometimes hail a black cab, and I’d always dive for one of the rear-facing fold-down seats with their back to the driver’s part of the vehicle. I’d hang onto a ceiling strap that I could only just reach, but I remember always loving riding in a taxi through London backwards on one buttock, my overstretched locked-out elbow straining from my strap-hanging posture. I couldn’t ever see where I was going, but that wasn’t ever important at the time. At that age it would never be up to me to be in charge of such things.
Thankfully my parents had – and still have, in fact – a much better handle on direction and navigation than I do. I wonder what went wrong there? 😉
Later, if I’d been lucky enough to get a seat on my commute to and from work I’d travel sideways on the Tube by default. On the Piccadilly Line in central London’s rush hour I would more often need to stand, and I remember always orientating myself sideways while holding on for dear life in the aisle. It would have been so easy to turn my body to face forwards1, given that I was standing, but no, that would never feel right on the Tube.
Why? Well, I was used to only travelling crabwise on that mode of transport.
Reader, I’m used to travelling forwards, sideways, and yes, round in circles more often than I’d like. But on a train, my inner child will still be comfortable travelling backwards.
Love,
Rebecca
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Or backwards, but that was for the above-ground network.
Love travelling backwards.
I think you have time to appreciate the view as it spreads behind.
I do love the bears - I wonder what they thought of their journey because bears are tremendous at being 'in the moment'. As you no doubt know.
And re the wind in a field - we always call it shivery grass, no matter if the paddock is barley, wheat, oats, or plain old pasture. It's a spectacular sight isn't it? As if the grass is performing its own ballet.
I love that travelling backwards makes you happy and whether the avoidance of it was something that we just picked up as an adult. My inner child wanted to play Ispy in the car this week so we did.