Trains offer such insights into the human condition

Train travel, as I’ve said before, is an excellent way of getting round Britain: fast, comfortable and these days surprisingly reliable. 

It has to be said that I have low expectations, having reduced them drastically as a result of my experience travelling on the nationalised services offered by British Rail, and then taken them to absolute zero when faced with the privatised monstrosity created by the sainted Maggie Thatcher.

These days, with the tracks renationalised in all but name and private companies offering highly-regulated services on them, I can’t help feeling we’ve hit a reasonable compromise. A little pricey, certainly, and it still suffers from hiccoughs, but mostly it runs to schedule and in comfort.

But it isn’t the efficiency of railway travel that strikes me most, it’s the window it offers into the lives of others. 

Rolling classroom for education on our species

For instance, I recently enjoyed hearing a conversation between two schoolgirls.

‘You’re going out with Brian Wilson? Why? Why?’

See the subtext? ‘You have to be crazy to go out with that awful Brian, but I’m just a little jealous he didn’t ask me instead. 

Her friend came back at her hard. ‘Because he asked me.’

Wow, that answer must have hurt. I took a swift glance at the two. These were children, but I suppose the one on whom Brian’s election had settled seemed, one might say, a little rounder than the other who was, if it’s not ungenerous of me, a bit angular. 

‘Go on then,’ Miss Angular demanded, ‘show me his number.’

Encouraging isn’t it? The younger generation demanding evidence before making up its mind. Miss Angular wouldn’t have gone to war just because her best friend claimed there might be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Hope is not lost. 

‘It’s not on my phone,’ replied her friend and rival, ‘he only asked yesterday.’

Ah, I raised my hopes too high, too soon. That was an answer worthy of the Blair school of duplicity. 

‘I can’t believe it. Prove it. Prove it.’

Quite. Quite. Just remember Hans Blix. And after that challenge, Miss Angular went on the attack:

‘Why are you going out with a year 9?’

Again, the subtext is worth examining. On the face of it, we’re hearing a principled refusal of the subordinate role of the woman, necessarily cultivating the older man. But underneath, isn’t there just a touch of slightly ugly Puritanism? Denied the fruit I covet, I denounce others who enjoy it.

But the answer was powerful and irrefutable. ‘Because I look like a year 7.’

Alas. It all turns on looks in the end. She was going out with him because (a) he’d asked – the expression of a wish is enough to win consent – and (b) he’d asked because she’d successfully presented herself as 12 when in point of fact she was only 11. And that’s enough to turn a 14-year old’s head?

Society’s not out of the woods yet.


My only regret about overhearing this conversation was that it drowned out another, being held on a mobile phone by a character with a voice at least as plummy as the late Laurence Olivier’s. 

‘I’ll play King Lear, which is what I’m going to call the character because I can’t be bothered to work out what his real name is. But I’ll only do it if Gemma can get a full cast, with a serving girl and a Palomides.’

Quite. We may be an actor (pron. actaw) who is currently resting but we don’t do just any old part, even to please our dear friend and fellow lovely Gemma. 

Is that clear? And we mark our indifference by refusing to learn the name of the character assigned to us, instead using that of a far more prestigious role which we would otherwise be playing, no doubt in a Royal Shakespeare Company production, if we hadn’t decided to do Gemma a little favour. 

And the amenable fellow had other points to put on the record. 

‘If Gemma plays Eladine she’s doing it as a favour to me, and I’m only doing it as a favour to Chris,’ he went on. He clearly knew what was due to him, and what was due from him: it’s not just Gemma we have to please but Chris too.

That shocked me. How could so fine a personality feel under an obligation to someone with so proletarian a name as Chris? But then I speculated that it probably wasn’t a mere Christopher but at the very least a Christian. 

Sadly, the Thespian left the train at St Albans (naturally: such a desirable city, and not at all because the properties aren’t quite as eye-wateringly expensive as in London) so I couldn’t follow the rest of his negotiation, which I’ve no doubt he would have gone on generously sharing with the rest of the carriage.

Still he granted us one final thought as he left the train:

‘She has an elfish look so she could play the slave.’

Well, quite. Slaves are just so elfish aren’t they? It must be captivity that does it, the freedom from every having to make any choices, that gives them that little sparkle.

Ah, what would I do without the railways? Certainly, my education in the ways of my fellow beings would suffer sadly if I lost these insights.

Today's trains - part 2

After the harpist on the train to London today, I was expecting a far less interesting trip home. But to my delight I made a new encounter which, while less musical, was as enchanting as the earlier one.

Enlivening my commute home

Yes. Opposite me was a Pomeranian pup. And judging by the conversation the owner was having with her travelling companion, I think an Arab Pomeranian to boot. 

A curious concept, that, of an Arab Pomeranian, but surely an entirely fitting one in our globalised communities today.

Harping on about the railways

It's easy to criticise the railways in Britain, and many feel free to vent their bile with gusto, and not always without justification.

Despite all that, I remain a committed supporter of the railway system in this country, a loyal user and a relieved spectator of its remarkable improvement over the last ten or fifteen years. 

Even I, however, couldn't have anticipated its latest development in on-board entertainment. First Capital Connect, I felt, was breaking completely new ground in its pursuit of excellence in customer service.

Not a common sight on commuter trains

It would have been even better if I'd been able to persuade her actually to play, but hey, a step at a time, a step at a time. It's great to find a harpist in your carriage at all, let alone getting music out of her.

Mockery can unite us

What an edifying spectacle Europe presents for us these days!

David Cameron retains some residual popularity, in Britain, or at least England, though it stops dead at the White Cliffs of Dover.

Silvio Berlusconi is the butt of everyone’s humour, that being the only response possible, other than despair, at the idea that the fate of the Eurozone, so dependent on Italy, is in the hands of a man facing at least three separate trials on matters of fraud and moral turpitude.

No-one can stand Sarkozy, seen as a latter day Napoleon, minus the charm. To say nothing of the vision, courage, competence or ability.

Angela Merkel is running out of road. Even Barack Obama, celebrated to the point of notoriety for keeping his cool in all circumstances, seems to be losing patience with her.

As for George Papandreou, with his flip-flops between caving in to the pressure on Greece or resisting it, he has spent the last few days simply drifting inexorably towards the only solution on which his countrymen seem virtually unanimous: that he should go.

Now I’ve been a committed European for years, strongly in favour of turning the European Union into a single, federal state. 

Don’t the the present circumstances provide a powerful argument in favour of that position?

Surely, if only from the point of view of efficiency and cost effectiveness, it would make much more sense to have a single government for the whole of the Union? What on Earth is the point of having all those separate little chiefs to despise and drag through the mud? Why don’t we have just one?


Then we could channel our contempt at just one set of leaders and leave them to get on with getting up the noses of the Americans and Chinese on behalf of us all.

A convenient target for all our mockery?

Postscript – another train experience: This morning, sitting across the aisle from me, was a woman in her thirties dressed for power but with great taste and fine aesthetic sense.

As we pulled in to St Pancras station, she rose from her seat and from the luggage rack above her pulled an exquisitely tailored coat – one of those that swings through the air, like a cloak with sleeves. She wrapped it round herself in one graceful movement, hitting me on the side of my head and sweeping across my face in a way that would have sent my glasses flying to the ground had I been wearing them. Next came her handbag, large but finely designed, which she swung the other way – had I not ducked it would have taken me in the forehead. Finally, she floated gracefully down the carriage, as self-controlled and self-confident as ever, and completely oblivious to the injuries she had so nearly cause me.

At least, I hope she was oblivious. I can forgive the condescension which made her unaware of her impact, literally, on the people around her; I would find it more difficult to excuse her arrogance if in fact she knew what she’d done and chose to ignore it anyway. 

Physician,heal thyself

My commuting has been a bit disappointing for a while now. 

I mean, the trains have been fine – largely on time, efficient, comfortable. But somehow I’d come to see them as more than that, as sources of edifying encounters, providing me with many interesting insights that I could share here. And yet – for several weeks, there’s been nothing.

So it was a delight last night to find myself at a table with two young women who lived up to all my expectations. 

When I first joined them, they were exchanging anecdotes, mostly drawn from one of the fine gossip newspapers with which this nation abounds. Children had been born to semi-celebrities, some within marriage, some not; there had been weddings, there had been divorces. One item was sufficiently salacious to be read out:

‘A couple have been forced to abandon plans to marry before the birth of their first child, when their parents, meeting to make the arrangements, realised the awful truth that the young people were brother and sister.’

To be honest, even I found that one interesting. A lot of stories down the ages have dealt with the fatal attraction of siblings brought up in separation – there’s plenty of mileage in that one yet.

In the meantime, my travelling companions had switched to more personal matters.

‘Do you think Anne is pregnant, then?’ asked one of them.

‘I think she’d like to be,’ replied the other.

‘Well, if she is, Astrid will get pregnant immediately too, you know.’

That struck me as quite an interesting proposition. My knowledge of human biology may not be what it was, but I didn’t think that this was how the process worked. The statement worried me even more later, when I discovered the profession of my travelling companions.

There was a fundamental problem with these putative pregnancies.

‘I don’t want Anne or Astrid to get pregnant. I’d hate to give up our skiing trips and we’d have to if they couldn’t come with us.’

That sentiment I could understand. I was beginning to feel that a week in a chalet alone with either of these two might indeed be a little painful.

At that point the train pulled out of the station. As though that was a signal, a bag appeared on the table and out came a ring-pull can of wine.

‘It’s Froglet,’ one of them announced. At least I think she said ‘Froglet’ – it’s hard to believe that anything with pretensions to be regarded as wine could be called ‘Froglet’, but that was what I heard.

She took a sip and made a face. ‘It’s perfectly awful,’ she concluded.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ replied her friend, ‘I’ve always liked Froglet.’

They stopped complaining and both continued sipping throughout the rest of the trip, so I assume they managed to reconcile themselves to its poor quality.

Next came out a heat sealed plastic box of chicken legs. The first woman made several increasingly energetic but repeatedly unsuccessful attempts to open the packet.

‘It’s like they didn’t want us to open it at all,’ she said, ‘perhaps they think the smell’s so bad no one should eat it on a train.’

They both tittered merrily, but the thought didn’t prevent the second woman attacking the lid with her teeth. She got it open, immediately confirming the first one’s judgement: the contents smelled diabolical. Like their conversation, which they’d been conducting at a level that ensured all around could enjoy it, it was clear that most of the passengers in the carriage were now being allowed to share the aroma of their meal. Why, even the young woman opposite me, of Indian extraction and therefore almost by definition trained to behave impeccably, couldn’t prevent her nose wrinkling before recomposing her features into a mask of studied neutrality.

Odd that the women only started their meal once the train was moving. Is there some code of etiquette that bans eating on stationary trains? It wasn't until the first jolt that they got the food out, but they were well stuck in  before our carriage had properly left the platform.

Their conversation next turned to that other absorbing subject, money. There were complaints about the scale of pension contributions, and then of indemnity insurance – at which point a disagreeable suspicion began to form in my mind, quickly confirmed by the next subject.

‘Yes, I really want to get into repatriation medicine. You know – someone gets sick in Australia. They fly you out there business class, you’re there four days, and then you fly back. OK, you have to have some poor bugger with you on the return, but nothing ever happens: they never let them get on a plane until they’re fully recovered. And – they pay you for every hour from the moment they send you out. And they give you a £60 allowance for every meal.’

‘£60? It’s actually quite difficult to spend £60 if you’re not having wine.’

‘Exactly – I tell you it’s brilliant.’

I felt a chill in my soul. These were young doctors. Demonstrating, as if any demonstration were necessary, that medicine is a vocation, driven by altruism and concern for others.

Wine, woman and gossip: all the elements of a vocation.
With vile-smelling chicken legs and a dose of cupidity to add some spice

Now I’m on the brink of that stage of life when things start to fail and you have to get your money’s worth for all the contributions you've made to the healthcare system. You can imagine the delight with which I was contemplating the prospect of being some poor bugger in the caring hands of these two. Especially as I rather assumed their table manners were probably a good indication of what their bedside manner would be like.

The public address system announced, ‘we are now approaching our first stop, Luton.’

‘Luton?’ cried one of them, ‘oh doom.’

It made me feel quite proud to be getting off the train there. Because though I'm the first to criticise the many failings of Luton, last night it had one great thing going for it: it wasn't going to contain those two young ladies a moment longer than it took the train to leave the station. 

Transport of delight

It’s wonderful the impact a little misfortune can have on people who are sharing it.

I’m on a train to Berwick upon Tweed, on my way to rejoin Danielle and our family up there, including our granddaughter Aya.

Gone are the days of my youth, when I would turn up three or four minutes before the departure time and belt along the platform, dragging a door open while the guard was already blowing his whistle. These days I’m much too neurotic for that. So I was at the station by a quarter past four, for a five o’clock train. Time to buy myself some food to eat on the way, time to hang around in what is currently about the most ghastly of the London terminals, King’s Cross: it’s having a face lift done but it’s taking for ever. Thank God for the Olympics – that might spur them to get it finished by next year.

So I was in my seat in plenty of time. I was with a charming couple who are due to be married in two weeks – they've been planning the catering as we travel along and it's obviously going to be quite a party. Before we left, we exchanged a few comments and settled down to what was going to be a pleasant journey up the east coast.

A happy couple who made for good travel companions

The first indication that things weren’t going to be quite right was the announcement as we were pulling out of the station, that there would be no trolley service on the train. ‘Due,’ we were told, ‘to a shortage of trolleys in the London area.’ A shortage of trolleys? Go down to any canal and you’ll see them sticking out of the water.

Then things started to unravel seriously just beyond Peterborough, not quite an hour out. Signalling failure. Why does that keep happening? What’s so fragile about signals that they can’t keep them in better nick? Do the bulbs blow or something?

And then just before Doncaster, another hour on, it was a broken-down freight train in front of us. And that’s when the ice really broke in the carriage. It was partly because of the charming lady who checked our tickets and made the announcements, in one of my favourite accents – Newcastle. I can’t hear it without smiling.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she would say, ‘we apologise for the delay to your journey. This is due to a broken down freight train on the line ahead of us. We regret the obvious inconvenience.’

She didn’t just say it once, she must have said it half a dozen times, always explaining again about the freight train. It got us all chatting.

‘Does she think we’d forgotten about the freight train?'

‘What’s so special about obvious inconvenience? What about the hidden kind?’

‘What does she mean ‘your journey’? She’s on the train too isn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ the bridegroom-to-be pointed out, ‘and she may have a hot date at the other end. I hope the guy is keen enough to wait.’

Those bubbles we usually travel in have been well and truly dispensed with.

The girl opposite has been doing her make-up. ‘I thought I’d have the time to get ready for the party once I was there,’ she explained, ‘but I’m just going to have to get ready now.’

We’re an hour and a half late now. My neurosis about being on time for the train clearly isn’t shared by the train itself. Lots of phone calls have been made, lots of complaints. But none of it has really been bad-tempered. After all, we’re perfectly comfortable. It’s Friday night, we don’t have to be up early tomorrow. The couple at my table have been told the hotel will send a car for them even though they’re late. The old lady next to the party girl has complimented her on her make-up. The  girl herself has gone off to try on two dresses – sorry, frocks – to see which she likes better. The chap two seats away shares a grin with me every time a particularly inane statement comes across the public address system.

Above all, there’s nothing we can do about any of this anyway. Hey, we might as well enjoy it.

The American on the Truro train

On a Truro to London train, I met a retired trial lawyer from San Francisco. He lived there from 1963, a time and a place ‘where it was good to be a single.’ But in his late forties, with the latest woman he’d been seeing heading back East, he began to wonder whether he was getting to an age where ‘no-one gave a damn any more’ and he might turn into a sad figure hanging around bars hoping for action that would never happen.

It was approaching Christmas in 1985. A niece rang him. She knew an Englishwoman – more specifically a Cornishwoman – who was living in Detroit, where she was editing a magazine. She was going to be spending Christmas in San Francisco, and it seemed to the niece that the uncle should meet her.

The uncle allowed himself to be persuaded and phoned the Englishwoman at her home. The call was taken by her then seven-year old son, who ‘for the only time in his life took a message correctly. He’s never done it since and he’s 32 now.’

As arranged, the lawyer called at the flat where the Englishwoman was staying. She sent someone else to answer the door, in case she couldn’t stand him. The man who opened the door said ‘who are you?’ gruffly.

‘I’m the uncle,’ came the reply.

They went out and liked each other. They met again on Boxing Day, at which point in his words they ‘hit it off’. I’m not quite sure what he was implying but he did add that there was nowhere open for them to eat, so perhaps he meant that they were forced indoors and indulged in more than polite conversation.

He suggested they should meet again. She had a pretty packed schedule, but said she would try to get him an invitation to a dinner she was going to. He turned up and found that of the eight people there, he already knew two, one of them a former client.

It soon became clear to the others what was going on between the two of them, particularly when she announced that she didn’t want to go back to Detroit as planned on the 31st, and not just because she didn’t like Detroit. There was, however, a problem.

‘I can’t cancel,’ she wailed, ‘I have a plane ticket.’

‘Of course you can,’ explained a doctor who was present, ‘you have terrible earache.’

She stayed on another week. He was introduced to the delights of organising babysitting so that he could meet his new girlfriend.

Eventually she had to go, however. So he went down to the local TWA office. A strike was under way; for the first and only time of his life, he crossed a picket line. ‘What you’re doing,’ he said, ‘is temporal, but this is important.’

He laid $1000 in cash on the counter and said ‘give me as many round trip tickets to Detroit as this will buy.’

The answer was ten. This meant that for the next several months they visited each other every other weekend. That phase ended only when, in the early summer of 1986, they married.



San Francisco

Today he’s in his seventies. They share their time between a place near San Francisco and another on the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall. ‘If you’d told me when I was young that I would end up living in Cornwall I wouldn’t have believed you. At the time, I didn’t know where Cornwall was, let alone the Lizard peninsula or the hamlet of 50 people where we actually live. The most active business in our village is a hole in a wall, the village post box.’

Urban life in the The Lizard, Cornwall

At least it explains why we met on a train up from the lovely Cornish city of Truro.

When you're crossing the country, you may meet some interesting people