Lost folk art at a station in the North West of England.

I once took a picture on a long-gone phone. I wish I’d kept it.

Maybe I have somewhere. It was one of my favourites.

In Chester Station, it was. Platform 3B. You had to squat to see.

On one of the tracks, somehow, someone had managed to scrawl

Or scratch, into the actual metal itself, some graffiti.

It always struck me as a stroke of genius, and entirely silly.

Because, to access that track you’d need to drop down six feet

Without being seen; you’d have to lie down alongside it, making sure

That nothing was coming, going, or ready to decapitate you.

You had to lie there, scrap metal in hand, for minutes on end.

And all for the knowledge that nobody would ever be able

To identify exactly who it was who’d written, on the train track,

At Platform 3B, in Chester Station, some time in the early 2000s,

The potent words:

Trains Are Gay