Kings Cross to Edinburgh Train, 11.06

And storms and cancelled trains and how are you supposed to get anywhere in this country and the irony of it being rain and not snow making it harder to travel north is not lost on me, not when I’m travelling to promote a book inspired by climate change. At home, left behind, a little boy who woke up croaking after coughing all night. Medicine dispensed. Instructions left. Kisses dispensed and remember it’s the school trip on Thursday. And me running out the door just as it gets light. And I am the patron saint of Elsewhere again back to working on trains and in hotel rooms, something about the motion of it, the looseness of it, works well for a manuscript. Which is a lie, what works best is a quiet room and many many free hours. But tell myself this because there’s not an alternative.

Strange resignation at Kings Cross. Crowds staring at departures boards where cancelled trains glow row after row. We are used to this now. You’d think, if you were asked during it, that you’d notice a decline. But it’s not like that. It just is. The country works and then it doesn’t. Sure, you notice the politics, and you think your vote does something, and it does, or it does until it doesn’t; until the current administration wasn’t even elected, until you can’t remember, or at least not without trying, who the last elected Prime Minister was, or when the trains were affordable, or when public transport was joined up enough to work and how much is a pint of milk. And you remember how it felt to vote for the first time and to believe you lived in a democracy. You are almost nostalgic for the then of it. And you realise this is how it happens, that you become old and you live in a time different to the present, and this is how you stop seeing, which is the first step to not caring. Although neither seeing nor caring does anything much now. What does it mean to do when scrolling is a verb?

A scramble for seats. A relieved message to my publicist; I’m on my way! Not certain last night, not when my train showed as cancelled and the storm was still incoming, to travel north in this country is to play games with fate.

Settle into the second train of the day. Faced dawn from the first one, the fields outside saturated green, was fearful of landslides. The land here at the far south of the country more clay than anything else, as if it is trying to revert back to sea. One day it will. Think of Peter Riley’s Strandings. A strange book and one of the best I read last year. He goes in search of whale scavengers, mostly a lonely group, rounding up the parts of stranded whales. A risky endeavour since any whale that runs aground becomes property of the crown. They do this mostly under cover of the night. Some bring bones home, sawing them from carcasses; some blow whales up, blubber and meat flying everywhere; most of them are stranded in their own way and Riley becomes preoccupied with these whales to the point of madness. I interviewed him, he interviewed me, each was a terrifying experience and in the way of most terror, completely enlivening. Think of this this morning as the land tries to become sea, as Riley observed, whales are maladaptive, not suited for land but barely suited either to the sea, and perhaps this is why they strand themselves on beach, also neither. Wish for a morning of frost, for the rare jewelled beauty of it, but it is 15 degrees, and why, still being January and what a fool to even be asking why now, think of Carolyn Forche’s Lateness of the World, think of stealing this phrase for later when I have to sit on a stage and sound intelligent for Ava Anna Ada. The first time I’ve spoken about it in public, no time for nerves.

And now the second train is too warm and doubly as full as it should be but it is going to Edinburgh and so will I. And every time it’s like this, last October heading to Dumfries to interview Maggie O’Farrell and maybe no one in the audience would’ve guessed she’d only made it there with 30 minutes to spare, rail strikes and roadworks, and my train had cancelled and the driver sent an hour’s extra drive and quick change and no dinner and programmers running around, where is she, where is she, and we get good at quick changes in toilets in this game, and I’ll be running on coffee for two days straight and Malcolm Middleton in my headphones sings what a life, spent hanging around with you and think of Bukowski and paraphrase badly, if I’m not the happiest man alive, I’m certainly the luckiest.