Of sexuality, and trains

I WAS interested to read about the American feminist Frances Kissling, who, having joined a Catholic convent, left after six months because she apparently "felt unable to remain a representative of an organisation whose views on marriage and sexuality were at odds with her own".

I want to announce now that I am leaving the Neo Nazi party. I joined just three weeks ago, in an effort to gel myself out of the house and in the hope of meeting pleasant companions for social outings and perhaps the odd game of draughts. But to my absolute horror I find the party devotes itself almost exclusively to anti Semitic campaigns. It also espouses violence, which I abhor, goes on and on about a "master race" and reveres Adolf Hitler. Moreover, most of the members are extremely unattractive, though some of the boys' haircuts are quite sweet.

I have not got over the shock yet if only I had an inkling of what the Neo Nazi party stands for before I joined.

By the way, is it just me or is there anyone else out there with absolutely no views whatsoever on sexuality? Who is neither at home with his/her sexuality nor gone shopping nor away on holidays with it?

I myself feel neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with my sexuality. Generally speaking, I have nothing to do with it one way or another. I do not see it (never mind recognise it) as an "issue". I have no more interest in "coming to terms" with it than my sexuality has in coming to terms with me.

No doubt this is a sad state of affairs. The advantage is that I am spared the tedium of reading articles or viewing programmes dealing with or "looking at issues of" sexuality.

Anyway. Getting back to the peculiar business of self delusion and culpable blindness. I saw where the editor of the much troubled Observer newspaper, Andrew Jaspan, was complaining in another newspaper about his editorial staff and their supposed faction fighting "Seemingly it's the game in town among journalists to bitch about their papers and their editors."

Well observed, Andrew. Though perhaps as a long time journalist and experienced editor, it might have dawned earlier than now?

Some people have to have the obvious spelled out for them, others apparently need to have it hidden. I see that the £4 million TV advertising campaign in the UK for the stock market flotation of Rail track has come under attack for featuring everything normally associated with railways except trains.

Much derision has attached to this campaign. The fear apparently is that showing trains in the advertisements would lead to public confusion about what is being sold off next May. Railtrack makes money not by running trains (which have already been sold off), but by charging the train operators for access to the rail network, tunnels, bridge spans, culverts and stations.

Despite the opinion of the "leading railway journalist" quoted in the Times of London, I think the campaign makes perfect sense. The public is going to visualise trains anyway. You would want to have a very dull imagination to look at a picture of a rail track or station or culvert without imagining a trainer two coasting along in the oddly attractive way that well, that trains have.

Potential investors are also visionaries, professionals in the business of looking to the future, and a track with no trains is exactly the sort of thing to attract any entrepreneur worthy of the name. These people are just the type needed, eager to fill out the bare imagery of track with all sorts of stuff fancy rolling stock packed with passengers, bustling activity, hawkers well, hawking their wares, whistles blowing, the inevitable stragglers and latecomers, the slamming doors, the hiss of air brakes, the excited goodbyes, the clackety clack sound of wheel on track and the ineffable romance of the whole damn thing.

Plus the river of money pouring into Railtrack investor accounts.

It is only the dull and unimaginative, the people tied to dreary concepts of reality (like that obnoxious child who first decided the emperor was wearing no clothes), who will be tempted to snigger at a railway advertising campaign without trains.