W H Auden: The Night Mail, and the related film

This film is a favourite of mine so much so my VHS video recently wore out and it is on my Xmas list to have it replaced. I love the poem too by W H Auden.

Night Mail (poem)

This is the night mail crossing the Border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, 
The shop at the corner, the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in a bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, Her climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends,
Towards the steam tugs yelping down a glade of cranes
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In dark glens, beside pale-green lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from girl and boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or to visit relations,
And applications for situations,
And timid lovers' declarations,
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled on the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, the adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep,
Dreaming of terrifying monsters
Or of friendly tea beside the band in Cranston's or Crawford's
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
But shall wake soon and hope for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

If the above film doesn't work for any reason, it can be found on youtube at the following...

https://youtu.be/zmciuKsBOi0

It is taken from the film 'Night Mail' made in 1937. 

If the above film doesn't work for any reason, it can be found at the following...

https://youtu.be/S7SD6qt0EFI

Does everyone have a car in Aberdeen? I think not!

As someone from the central belt of Scotland who doesn’t know Aberdeen well I found the coverage of the Aberdeen Donside by-election virtually non-existent, and as usual STV did better than the BBC (until its results coverage that is which was very poor indeed). Hopefully it was much better locally to the granite city.

I found the campaign very odd. It seemed to consist of everyone sitting in TV studios talking about a roundabout, roads and being left out in the cold by the Scottish Government investment wise.

The transport question was particularly odd as not one participant talked about anything other than roads. Does everyone have a car in Aberdeen? I think not!

As someone looking in the priorities for transport in Aberdeen and Inverness would be as follows…

1. Aberdeen road bypass. 
2. Extending the dual carriageway sections of the A9 to make it continuous from Perth to Inverness. 
3. Improvement of train services to every half hour between Aberdeen and Inverness and reopening of stations to improve rates of usage. 1 train per hour to be express, second to be stopping. 
4. Doubling of single train line between Stirling and Aberdeen, and/or reopening of Angus link from Perth via Forfar to Aberdeen with resultant improvements to train services which are badly needed so there are half hourly services from both Glasgow and Edinburgh. 
5. Replacement of semaphore signals with coloured light signalling equipment north of Perth and Dundee at least as far as Inverness. 
6. Reopening of Deeside railway line at least as far as Banchory, with a view to reopening remaining line to Aboyne and then Ballater. 
7. Reopening of rail line to Peterhead.
8. Reopening of rail line to Fraserburgh. 

As far as I am aware 1 and 2 and at least part of 3 is all ready planned, but I would strongly agree that is odd that Aberdeen as Europe’s oil capital city has been left out of major transport projects until now.

Perhaps however this is partly due to the preoccupation of the local political parties with roads that seemed to come across from the recent media coverage (what there was of it anyway).

If the Scottish Government was permitted by its own people to gain control of all the economic levers available to it I believe the above would become of greater importance than they are now. Vote Yes in next years independence referendum!