Intro: refrain from Hazy Jane 1

If you stop at Sanquhar station – as you might, once again, since it re-opened seven years ago – wander into town and there, amongst other histories and monuments, you will find the oldest post office in the world: dating back to 1712.

What deeds and tracts, bills and summons have tarried there, however temporarily? How many love letters, penned in quill and biro, have passed over its counter in those 300 years?

Maybe in the night, about the hours of 3 or 4 in the bone-cold stillness, the ghost of unrequited love sifts through parchment, vellum and more recent, recycled stock. What words will seep deepest into her heart and make her cry again?

The outpourings of the townspeople, past and present, will flutter by first: tear-stained screeds destined for the front, postcards following brief encounters in sunnier climates.

Then the visitors, Burns amongst them: surely lyrics, inked by candlelight, in the Inn or nearby by the Bard, will twist the knot the hardest. An air for Mary, a poem for Agnes.

But no, here come song sheets of a boy, barely a man, who longed for love, who the rail tracks are remembering as they carry freight and the odd passenger across the border under a northern sky.

No crazy magic in this song: hey slow Jane, live your lie, slow, slow Jane, fly on by. Take off your eye shade, start over again.

Now the boy is gone. Been gone a long time. His whispers remain. Sad, so sad, those that die so young, with refrains and tunes inside them still unwritten, unsung.

If you stop at Sanquhar station, as you might, now you know what line it’s on, take the time to write and seal up a letter, seal up a song, to one you care for, or to one for whom you long. And post it there, in the box of haunted love.

Outro: from Hazy Jane II

Stuart Delves