I SAW a train down in the Rockies below, a long snaky train going "woo woo". And suddenly I hated being up in the plane having my lunch. I wanted to be down there where the moose and elks would come to the railway stations and look thoughtfully into the railway carriages, and there would be dark ambiguous shapes in the trees and we would all nod sagely and say we had seen a bear.

And for hours and hours there were pointy, jagged mountain peaks, and miles and miles of flatlands, and then Toronto. The girl who had just come on duty sighed heavily. It was full moon, she said sadly; an airport was no place to be at a full moon, it brought out all the crazies. I must say I ranked this along with believing the weather forecast and your stars in a magazine.

I was about to mouth some kind of polite non committal sympathy when another woman at the information desk joined in excitedly. She worked in a cinema complex, she said, and the audience was practically howling in their seats.

Toronto? One of the most quiet, proper, understated cities in the world. And it went mad at every full moon? Unlikely. In the hotel they said they hated to see a very pregnant woman coming in when there was going to be a full moon - almost invariably the moon attracted the baby early. A doctor I got chatting to in the lift said of course people behaved in a different way at a full moon and he wondered what kind of a land I had come from that this had not manifested itself. When I told him the name of the land I had come from, he laughed somewhat immoderately for 25 floors.

The waiter who brought the hamburger to the room said I was doing the right thing having room service. No point in inviting trouble and going out on the night of a full moon he said.

IT was the same room of the same hotel that I had stayed in two years ago. Eagerly I went to the window to see how the folks in the condominium right next door were getting on. They still had all their curtains open, their lifestyles pleasingly visible to those of us who are interested and caring enough to look in.

The young man in the expensive suit who seemed to look at a television screen all day was still there. It had to be a computer of some sort, but still there was an over leisurely look about him. He was relaxed in a big comfortable chair and seemed to look at the ceiling a lot and smoke. He could hardly have been stoned since 1994, not at the prices of those places. Come on, it must have been a computer, he was a money man of some kind.

The Chinese family of four who sat around a table working all night had reduced to a family of two. Maybe it was an empty nest, but they still worked on way into the night. Sometimes I peeped from behind my curtain and they were busy with lots of papers at the big table. They looked happy and content. But did they ever sleep?

But the woman I had been worried about, the one who kept rearranging her ornaments night and day, was gone. In her apartment there was a young couple much into holding hands and standing on the balcony looking out over the enormous moonlit Lake Ontario. They looked quite calm about the lull moon, and drank little toasts to each other. I wondered to myself was this their first home, but of course they could have just met at a happy hour.

It was the obsessional woman with the ornaments I worried about. Where had they gone, all those pots and candlesticks and little horses qt different sizes? Had they been packed and brought lovingly to the country, to a small home in Niagara on the lake? Were they still in crates waiting for her to get well in hospital? Had she died and had the ornaments been thrown out by an over speedy estate agent?

Eventually I went to sleep while the old moon managed to get through the thick curtains and remind me that it had a power to trouble minds no matter how much I disbelieved it.

TORONTO survived the full moon, and the next day was bright and sunny. You ways think there has been an accident when you see little groups gathered together on street corners, but it's only the smokers barred from buildings and even frowned at on the open street.

A jogger in very unwise, fuschia coloured lycra pants and a sweaty headband stopped to hurl abuse. "I'm not polluting YOUR air, why do you feel you can do this to me?" he cried.

"Get real, man" someone called to him, indicating the lorries and cars, all of which were giving off much greater fumes, it has to be said, than a few ciggies.

"And we're not polluting the appearance of the place," said a handsome, well dressed man who looked as dreamy as the jogger looked ludicrous. He may have had right on his side but it wasn't fair - that's a different war for a different arena.

AND in four weeks time, they tell me, this sunny city will be in deep winter. The snow and the rains will come and it will be like that for months.

I talked to a bookseller about it she said it was terrific in a way because it meant you could wear shapeless outer clothes, people approved of you drinking gigantic mugs of hot chocolate, and you wore big boots, so you didn't have to worry about your ankles not looking slim.

I thought this was a nice positive approach to months of desperate weather ahead and was full of praise. But there's always someone, isn't there? In this case an over groomed racehorse and pencilghin member of the public who said she thought winter put more demands on one to look well, and anyway you couldn't wear anoraks and boots indoors could you? She was buying, we noted viciously, a book called The Rules of Dating, and so behind her back we muttered that if her attitude was all that damn successful she shouldn't need to buy the book would she?