All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

I take a train into a city. As it rattles gleefully along the iron rails it whisks me past the tracts of open countryside, past isolated brown brick farms and villages fuddled by the sleep of history. As the train carries me closer to the city the countryside drips away to be replaced by bigger villages and then small towns and then larger towns until eventually the gleaming rails are choked by row upon row of identical houses, the grey asphalt furrows beside the tracks sown with seeds of brick and slate and mortar. Faceless blocks of flats punctuate the rash of houses, cold concrete obelisks that thrust upwards like hitch-hikers' thumbs, and over it all hangs the cloying miasma of this modern life.

I remain untouched by it all. The train is a giant needle, sterile and insulating, injecting people directly into the city's heart. It keeps us clean, delivering us past the city's dead, diseased flesh.

Every now and then I see a face in a window. Inside every house, inside every room in every block of flats, is being played the story of a person that no-one on this train will ever meet. I take the time to smile as it drifts past.