Tonight I am not where you thought I was. Tonight isn't night, it's morning; it's dawn to be precise and I'm on a train to Naples. Unable to get a seat, I'd been sleeping on the floor of the corridor train. Someone had thoughtfully given me one of the supplements from his newspaper to sleep on and it contained an article about Bob Dylan. The newspaper-donor wakes me up to show me Vesuvius through the window. The sky is red and the volcano looks like grey tracing paper rising from cardboard foothills.
We reach a station and some boys get on, they're about thirteen and they have a huge flask of coffee and a column of polystyrene cups. As the train wakes up, these juvenile entrepreneurs walk through it, selling strong, sugarless coffee to the stiff, tired passengers. The coffee is probably horrible but just then it tastes like the best in the world.
An hour later we reach Naples and the other world, the dawn world, recedes to make way for dirty blue skies and noise and cars and people. The thing is, that daytime reality is not what I remember.
