I’m on a book tour at the moment and I am already broken. Not by the events – good God, if you had told young me that any of my adult life would consist of talking for hours to other bookworms about the books they love and about one I had written, I would have expired from delight at the mere thought.
Actually doing it is a pleasure beyond words. Events are wonderful. The getting to and from events, though? The travelling from home to another place more than 40 minutes away by public transport? That, my friends, is a hellscape.
I used to love a train journey. So much. It was an enforced chance to stop, to think, maybe even lean your head against a window and have a little daydream as bucolic pastoral scenes passed by – at speed, but somehow no less comforting for that. (I think perhaps that as someone born and bred in the city, the countryside-but-fast is probably my mental sweet spot).
That, however, was then. It’s been at least five years since I last travelled round the British Isles like this and in that intervening half decade things have apparently gone completely to pot. There has not been a single journey that has not shredded my nerves and left me arriving at my destination in dire need of a drink, Valium and a lie down (in any order). Oh, and late, of course.
Even five years ago, you see, children, you could reasonably expect – not guarantee, not fail to build in a bit of extra time just in case – that a train would set off from Point A at its appointed hour and then (get this!) arrive at Point B at almost exactly the time stated on its schedule, and upon which the rest of your day and the expedient execution of your duties therein were predicated. Thus, life could unfold pretty seamlessly after alighting. Oh happy, halcyon days were these!
Now, none of this happens often enough for you to depend upon it. Trains are cancelled last minute and there is usually, despite us living in the technologically astonishing year of our interconnected Lord 2025, no way of imparting this news to would-be passengers in swift and efficient fashion, or of proffering alternative routes or refunding tickets.
If trains do leave, there are points failures, door failures, passengers taken ill, ruptured cables, vandalised tracks, flooding, “late running previous trains” or broken down trains ahead to contend with.
So you build as much slack into your system as you can: getting earlier trains just in case, researching alternative routes, altering and re-altering arrangements with the people at the other end, or abandoning the whole project and driving instead (if you can drive, which I can’t). The waste of time and the accumulating stress for the hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, plus their professional and domestic dependents, is incalculable.
That said, I find my sympathy for a large swathe of said passengers distinctly absent, on the grounds that they are monsters. Because in the last five years, it seems that at least 25 per cent of any given population have become pigs. Pigs who noisily, wetly, slaveringly trough stinking food all journey long and leave a great mountain of litter in their wake. Who don’t tell their children to be quiet or to stop running and clambering over everything. Who shout into phones that they have on speaker, or listen to music that they have on speaker, or watch television on speaker.
One immaculately turned out couple behind me on the way back from Keswick listened to the racing out loud while drinking cans of Grolsch and then screamed down the phone to friends about the result for long after the carriage’s own interest in the subject had faded.
Then there were the teens who became abusive to the train manager who asked them to move the bike one of them had slung across the doors. It was dangerous, she said. Who did she think she was, they asked, scattering expletives more freely than I am allowed here. There were special places for bikes, she said. More expletives, they said.
And all this while employers also expect long journeys to be productive worktime. There’s train wi-fi, isn’t there? There’s tables or drop-down thingies on the backs of seats, aren’t there? Then work, dammit! Work!
Travelling by train is now a masochistic, borderline depraved act. I don’t want to say this country’s going to hell in a handcart, but only because it’s clearly going in an intercity commuter train.
Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan, is published by Square Peg (£18.99)
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