Heroic Futility, and R.S.T.

 My Facebook activity is sporadic (life's too short, etc.) and pretty random, but I do have spurts of activity from time to time. One of these recently resulted in me joining something called the Dull Men's Club. The stimulus – hardly the appropriate word – was a piece describing one man's heroically futile journey, by plane, train and automobile, all the way from the West coast of Scotland to Stourbridge in the West Midlands with the sole purpose of taking a ride on the Stourbridge Shuttle, Britain's shortest – and probably dullest – branch line, four-fifths of a mile between Stourbridge Junction and Stourbridge Town, a three-minute journey each way. An account of this adventure appeared under the aegis of the Dull Men's Club, and turned up out of nowhere on my Facebook feed. When I wanted to find it again, it had of course disappeared, so I threw caution to the wind and joined the Dull Men's Club. Or rather, as I later discovered, I joined one of at least three Facebook groups that go by that name (and between them have a worryingly large following) – and of course it was not the one that had carried the post I was looking for. Since then I have found this report, which gives the gist of the story, but is doesn't have the particular flavour of Neil Hughes's original first-person account. 
  Meanwhile, I've found that the Dull Men's Club (UK Chapter) does come up with some good, magnificently dull stuff, which I do find strangely amusing. I should say in my defence that I also recently joined an R.S. Thomas group (guaranteed to crack a smile), Dutch Golden Century Painters, UK Butterflies, Pursuing the Pre-Raphaelites, Painters from the North (i.e. Scandinavia) and other reputable groups. Not to mention my long-standing membership of the estimable Edinburgh Salon. But who could resist the saga of the Stourbridge Shuttle? Not me.
 And talking of R.S. Thomas, here is the poem for today, a sonnet – 'Young and Old'

Cold sea, cold sky:
This is how age looks
At a thing. The people natter,
The wind blows. Nothing they do
Is of worth. The Great problems
Remain, stubborn, unsolved.
Man leaves his footprints
Momentarily on a vast shore.

And the tide comes,
That the children play with.
Ours are the first questions
They shelve. The wind is the blood
In their veins. Above them the aircraft
Domesticate the huge sky.