'that most wretched and dreary of towns'

buck curran wanders round bergamo with robbie basho's 12 string (in honour of stefan basho-junghans) on this day in 2023. 

it's a 13th. a saturday the 13th in 1872 but still not a good day for kilvert nonetheless. 

'I missed the 12.25 train from hereford to hay and had to wait three hours in that most wretched and dreary of towns. I felt fit to hang myself...'

kilvert returns to clyro from langley on the 8.42 to swindon. his hat box gets lost and he telegraphs from the gloucester cloak room after it. he thus misses the train from hereford to hay and has to wait 3 hours for the next service. 

in a grump he walks into town and buys a book to console himself - summer on the lakes by american transcendentalist margaret fuller ossoli. (interestingly enough she is a relative, an ancestor, of buckminster fuller the architect). 

on the 20th of january  kilvert writes to the station masters at gloucester and paddington inquiring after the hat box. he is heartened by the possibility of compensation.  horsemouth will let you know if it reappears or if he gets compensated (if kilvert mentioned it again, if cromer (his editor) allowed it in). 

kilvert would have a similar wait for the bus service today. seems there are two services - one every four hours and the other... horsemouth can't be arsed to wait for the website to load. there's even a service on a sunday (funded by the welsh tourist board). these pass within 4 miles of horsemouth's mum's house (and are thus the only way of getting home from hereford apart from a cab on sunday). 

horsemouth has fed the chickens and unlocked the abbey. he's just going to nip out and bolt the chicken shed door (having opened the the chicken flap in the door).  his mum will be off soon to get more chicken food. 

horsemouth has carried on with his viriconium reading 

the luck in the head, the lamia and lord cromis, the dancer from the dance

lamia is not set in the city (viriconium/ uroconium etc.) but it is set in that most familiar of settings, a city so ruined it looks like countryside. 

soon enough it will be all gone again. 

is horsemouth a doomster? does he think that net zero and all such measures are just a fig leaf, destined to fail, that the rich have a death drive that is overpowering their rational calculation for survival?

kind of no. he just thinks it's an accident of history. there are some forces one way, there are some forces the other, and our current (failing) trajectory is the result of this.