Japanese God Jesus Robots Telling Teenage Fortunes

En route to Manchester on another of the Grinning Pullover's Pendolinos. Outside the early May morning of the Eden Valley is assembling itself: soft sunshine cuts across the fields; limestone walls a maze on the valley floor; back east the Ullswater Fells rise and turn slowly like a pod of whales blowing off in the distant ocean. Behind me, a girl's walkman rattles out tinny sounds from the 1980s that suddenly stop and hit a different beat. I realise that she's listening to Elvis Costello's Tokyo Storm Warning, a vituperative catalogue of global misery that's impossible to reconcile with the scene outside.