SETTLING down on the train to London to discuss the North/South divide with David Miliband this week, my mind was soon wandering faster than a 125.

The laptop's screen saved itself into a solar system of asteroids randomly speeding out of control. The view out of the window onto this corner of planet Earth was instantly more rewarding.

It was an Alpine blue sky day, crystal clear and translucent. Even the straight, shiny limbs of the new home of Darlington FC had a fantastic out-of-place beauty in the sunlight. They looked as other-worldly as a Mars invader from HG Wells' War of the Worlds or, indeed, as a 27,500 seater stadium in the lower reaches, and lowly gates, of the Football League.

We swept over the Tees, high above the tea-brown water, as Middlesbrough FC slept pastorally below.

And then we relaxed into the Vale of York. This is unprepossessing country, flat and featureless as if it dare not distract from the drama in the distance of the Cleveland Hills. The White Horse of Kilburn - as much a symbol of the North-East as the Angel of the North but too often overlooked as it is not in Tyneside - shone in the sunlight like the halo that hovers over an angel's head.

Soon, the unprepossessing fields grabbed my attention. Such stunning variety. The slender fingers of willow pointing heavenwards, the classic spread of an oak sitting dumpy in the middle of a pasture. Hedgerows cut set-square straight by brutal machinery or exploding in a natural riot of flying, spindly branches.

Fields, some ploughed rough with an army of rooks marching across them, some drilled dead straight with military lines of winter wheat pushing their heads above the sodden, puddle-strewn soil before the first snows of winter fell to smother them.

In some, the low sun illuminated the gentle humps of ancient ploughlines; in others the grass had collapsed after the summer's growth, matting itself into dense clumps which are booby-traps for walkers, snaring the boot and soaking it with a thick dew that seeps through every stitching.

Pigs in mud beside their Nissen huts snorted as happily as pigs in something far less clean; white sheep, big, fluffy and pillowlike, wandered carelessly in the warmth of the November sun and a couple of hairy horses, dressed up to the nines in their coats, swished their tales.

York approached. Work had to be done. I tapped the laptop, scattered the solar system and stepped into my files.

I re-emerged in north London. Lines of anonymous semis rolled up and down the slight hills, mis-shapen trees jostling for limb room beside the extensions and the attic conversions. There was a continuous stop-start of traffic on the roads, one uninteresting high street of fading shops merging into another. Paint peeled off a mock timber-clad precinct and the pigeons popped in and out of the windows of a dead 1930s cinema.

It was still a blue sky day, but the blue sky had gone grubby.

At King's Cross, swathes of humanity drifted across the concourse, trailing bags behind them, iPods clamped to their ears to drown out the babble of mobile phone users.

As I stood at the top of the steps preparing for the scrum of the underground, a newspaper seller offered me the early evening edition. "Last words of London bombers", said the headline.

There is a North/South divide, but it isn't economic.

Published: 19/11/2005