Train journeys and storms

(or hating Euston and wanting a Bloody Mary)

I have just left Milton Keynes station; delays at Euston again - must be Christmas. There’s something about when a place begins to accrue memories that it turns into home, whether you want it to or not. I wrote a particularly vitriolic paragraph about Euston that I cut from a recent essay. Like lots of places in central London, it has a lot of my stories. Nearly missing the sleeper to Glasgow Film Festival, three negronis (four? - there comes a point you stop counting, or looking at the clock), deep and my editor bundling me, and a suitcase probably heavier than me, into a cab in Soho, another time, getting off the sleeper and wandering round a pre-dawn London, the pelicans in St James Park, ducks not caring about traffic and holding it all up. I love cities at dawn, it feels like seeing their inner mechanisms, all the things that keep it working and alive. I love it the way I used to love watching the local clockmaker as a child, peering thorough the window at his workshop, hoping someone needed their watch repaired just so I’d have an excuse to go inside. Another dawn time, maybe after a night at Fabric, walking past Smithfields, all the sounds of all that butchering. Something beautiful about it all, the folly of it. Every Christmas Euston though, a different Christmas, two years past, coming back from Glasgow after doing press for Ava Anna Ada, just on the train and it pulls out of Queen Street when my publicist calls, any chance you could go back, they need you for a photoshoot. I stay on the train, get changed for a party in the toilets at Euston. I can’t say I like Euston, rationally I know it’s the worst station in London, but I have a kind of misplaced affection for its consistency in my life at least. Stockholm Syndrome perhaps. It’s malingering influence everyone hates but should it suddenly start to function, have nice toilets say, trains that run on time, somewhere to buy a decent Bloody Mary even, it would feel like a betrayal.

The route between Euston and Milton Keynes is particularly ugly. Even the Red Kite overhead can’t do much to soften it. Being of the sky as it is, it can’t be said to be exactly the route either. From the train, Milton Keynes station is tiled with the sort of tiles that haven’t been in common use since the eighties but were in much common use during the eighties, in the same way Charing Cross station and Glasgow Queen Street, until recently, could instantly be aged by their tiles, so can Milton Keynes. There’s something reassuring about a bad station; you know what you’re getting. In a similar way there’s something excellent about a dive bar, anything good comes as a surprise. A smooth running station, now that’s a cause for alarm. Arriving in Copenhagen recently, I felt thoroughly displaced by its smooth platforms, its easy to navigate ticket hall, the announcements in both Danish and English; all this combined to make it feel foreign in the way Rome did not, when barely half an hour after arriving I’m standing on the platform arguing with the Carabinieri. Copenhagen has the same effect expensive hotels or good dining rooms have on me, when in them, I want to be very very badly behaved. Whereas put me in a Travelodge and I’ll spend the whole time wondering why it doesn’t have two ls.

After Milton Keynes, the landscape remains nondescript but more open than it was before. The sky is low and grey, none of the drama of Sweden. Being back has been harder than I thought it would be. I never expected to say I missed moss. I never expected to find walking on pavements offensive. I miss the feel of the forest floor under my feet. I miss the sky. I miss the blue hour. I miss showering outside. I miss the extremes of temperature; how biting cold it was when I ventured my foot outside the covers in the morning. I miss how alive the shock of it all makes you feel. I have taken to prowling around the house, saying things like I’m just going to look at the moon, and standing on the hill looking out over the sea in the dark, in the same way my father said his mother did over the Indian Ocean, her with her fortune telling and watery blood. But the stars here are not bright enough, not with the sky not being dark enough. I had not realised how my eyes had adjusted to the darkness until last night, when I went looking for something late, not even thinking or needing to turn the light on. I glower at the rain hitting the train window, really it should be snow.

Then I remember I’m changing at Crewe. Another less than beautiful station but always an adventure of a station. The thrill of never knowing if you’ll make the connecting train, or if there will be a train to connect to is really something. Last time I was at Crewe, I’d left Wales early in the morning. I’d been supposed to travel the night before, but a storm had got up, the roads were flooded. I had not thought to think the storm might be travelling in the same direction I was. At the station, a large ginger cat befriended me. He’d clearly been out all night, settled himself on my knee. Purred. Didn’t seem to want to leave when the train arrived. The light was curious that morning. Pastel backlit clouds. That heavy feeling of a storm on the move. At Crewe, all the trains west were off. Trains north too. Trains south too. I needed a coffee, bought on in the Upper Crust, a mistake. The station was full of Scousers, maybe it was about 8.30am and at least half of them were drunk already. A fact I found so interesting a messaged a friend, who replied about something to do with match day and not being allowed to drink at the match. The logic didn’t seem to hold much. But a drunk scouse accent is a fun thing to encounter that early in the morning.

I have come to know the west coast line too well. I know if you’re going to get stranded the danger points are Crewe, Preston and Carlisle. Carlisle because if you’re trying to get to Scotland, you’re so very tantalisingly nearly there that God likes to throw a grenade on your plans. I have come to know terrible pubs in all three places. I have come to wonder if there are good pubs in any of these three places. I know the sleeper pulls into a siding somewhere on this coast, and when it does, it cuts the Wi-Fi out, so that when I checked the map in a desolate mood not helped by a siding at 2am, all I was was a blue dot on a background of blue squares.

When I open this map now, it’s doing the same thing. The electricity on the train is as patchy as the Wi-Fi is, so that sometimes my laptop is charging, and sometimes it is not. The fields are flooded, cows have taken to the scant higher ground there is, and are lying bunched together. Not a good sign. When the doors open at a station, wind gusts in. I recall a similar day in January, when I had not thought to check the weather, and if time is a straight line, it’s just a lie we tell ourselves to avoid the likelihood of ending a year in the same way it began; storms, train journeys, and me at the mercy of it all.