This song takes me to Durham. It’s a mid-December day and the snowflakes drift down past the windows of the train station and follow me down the winding path and under the viaduct. It’s nearly Christmas so everyone is bustling around trying to get things done. The big issue vendor stops me so I buy him a cocoa and a muffin, a sad and ineffectual gesture given the fact I’ll be spending the season in a warm and loving home but he seems glad of the sustenance all the same. I wander round to the cathedral and wonder at the way we imagine people as primitive a thousand years ago; I’d like to see a modern architect design that or modern craftsmen build something so magnificent. I walk back into town and mingle with the students, it makes me feel a little less alone. I buy presents and cards and I sit on the tall seats in the window of Cafe Nero and write cards while sipping a cup of tea. After that I queue in the GPO and mutter frustratedly at the Christmas rush. I leave there and wander slowly down the cobbled street and over the ancient bridge in the lee of the castle. I head back to the train station and dive into The White Guard by Bulgakov. It will become my favourite book of the year and even those first few pages leave me pregnant with anticipation. It was a good day, all in all, and this song played its part in some small way.
(noun) lengthy and tedious talk expressing little of substance; a superfluity of words.
