Lost for words
Monday, July 14, 2008 I absolutely love the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras. I was here in March but today - a bright, sunny morning in July - it looks and feels even better.
I arrived at 7.30 and even then the place was alive with people - businessmen, tourists, students - bustling to catch a train to Brussels, Paris or beyond. How different from the old St Pancras with its dreary locomotives setting off for Derby, Nottingham and Sheffield.
For my generation, though, travelling on Eurostar will never be as romantic as the old boat train from Victoria with its rickety, post-war carriages that rocked from side to side and left you feeling ever so slightly travel sick. I remember crawling through south east England en route to the ferry where we would disembark in some cold, unwelcoming shed (usually in the early hours of the morning). Minutes turned into hours as we waited to board some rusting old vessel that would take us across the Channel.
Eventually, in the dead of night, we'd be on our way. Dawn would break and we'd find ourselves herded from ship to shore, and then on to another train, this time in a distinctly foreign country where no-one (least of all the ticket inspectors and immigration officials) spoke a word of English. Now that's what I call travel.
Now, it's almost too easy. Take this morning. I turned up at St Pancras (I didn't even have to travel across London - I just had to walk a few hundred yards from Kings Cross), collected my pre-paid tickets from a machine, waltzed through passport control, and minutes later I was sitting in Coach 11, seat 51, with a cup of coffee in one hand and an egg and salmon brioche in the other - and off we went. Two-and-a-half hours later I was in the centre of Brussels, checking into my hotel.
In many ways this is great. I'm certainly not complaining. But something has been lost, and sitting here, in my hotel, I can't quite put it into words.
Reader Comments (13)
Thank you Simon, you already have. In most eloquent and evocative words which took me right back to my youth as a terrified Tour Guide in those same rusty boats and rocking trains. With a bewildering array of foreign languages and customs to contend I must, under orders, never show fear to my critical collections of British tourists. Each tour began in England with high adrenaline combating enormous fatigue from my days and nights of historical, geographical and linguistic home study before it.
Things are so much easier now. So what have we lost? We have nearly lost the difference.
This glorious and unique continent of Europe just should not be herded together as one political unit with one currency, one official language, one set of laws and one military style police force with unlimited powers to enforce those laws. Because who will benefit from the creation of such a state and the destruction of ancient civilisations to achieve it? Only a handful of power rich despots.
I really love Brussels especially around the beautiful Grand’ place. I really fear the mile upon mile of modern sky-scrapers office blocks built for the vast staff employed by the European Commission et al.
What are you doing there this time? Something worthwhile, I have no doubt. If you can, please rub the reclining statue of Everard d’Seicle for me. It is to the left of the Town Hall on the Grand’place. If you rub it, it will bring you good luck for the rest of your life! [Yes it will…ask anybody.] Not only was he a great freedom fighter against the oppression of the French Counts of Flanders, he also wrote a wonderful book extolling the virtues of smoking. According to him, smoking was the best discovery of the 14th &15th centuries and cured all ills.
No folks, don’t ask me about it, go to that excellent writer Karen Bunn on the F2C website. [Sorry Karen!] On second thoughts, leave her in peace. She is researching and preparing a definitive essay on these Benefits and a record of the tyranny waged against smokers by dictatorships throughout the ages.
Good luck, Simon, as yet again you take on the European beast.
How tres splendide for the Trans-Manche Express to arrive at EU Trough Central just a couple of hours out of St. Pancreas. But Simon's right. Something has been lost and probably forever. We are British dammit. Things aren't supposed to be like this; all bright sterility, frappacinos and automated efficiency. Rail travel should be a bit languid, a bit noir, a bit Traveller's Fayre. Then we can moan about it. This is a bonding-experience and an important pillar of our national identity.
When the rail-network sold out to Satan PLC, reclassifying passengers as customers, renaming Guards as Customer Care Managers and removing the bloody smoking-coaches, they abandoned their loyal and tolerant support-base. Folks like me who used to choose rail for the experience and not necessarily the convenience.
Ah, Adlestrop. The Aboriginals had their Dreamtime, the English had Mother Railway. The decaying Victorian grandeur of under-maintained stations, the comforting cigarettey ambience of steam-heated BR carriages, the fine old Crewe and Doncaster-built locomotives with their great diesel-engines barking a mournful and particularly English music out across the rooftops.
The visceral elements of travel involve partings, endings, transformations. We ride together but alone in our respective stories and our thoughts should be free to wander uninterrupted by the nulaborised scourge of interminable PA announcements reminding us how slippery wet platforms can be, commanding us not to even think about smoking anywhere, ever, and thanking us for choosing First Groat Western today. Thusly are we stuffed into straightjacketed purgatory modelled on a washing-powder conceit: First Groat apologise for the necessary interruption to our busy executive lives but hope customers enjoy the new travelling environs designed to look and feel like rule-bound offices, so will customers kindly respond like good little citizens of the corporate collective rather than as the troublesome muddle of disparate individuals we really are. Our dreams and stories count for little now. Our transformations, our journeys so routine and commonplace that the best we can hope for is to block out the dead-time by retreating into laptops and me-pods until the bingbongs inform us that we are nearing our unremarkable journey’s end.
Hitting forty’s such a shitter, innit.
You just can't imagine 'Brief Encounter' set in 2008, can you (quite apart from the fact that its values and mores would probably be unintelligible to today's twentysomethings)?
I haven't been on a train in fifteen years.
Unreliable, uncomfortable, unsmoky and unpleasant.
In fact, I hadn't been on a bus for ten years until last week. The drivers were rude, unhelpful and uncooperative when I asked them to put me off at a certain stop. (Being unfamiliar with the city I was in, it seemed a reasonable request).
Public transport sucks.
I travel a lot with my job. It is without pride that I tell you I am something of an expert in air travel, in airlines, and in airports. Mostly they suck as well. Mostly because they herd you in, herd you around, and herd you back out again. They maximise the "retail opportunity", and this is one of the few times you are treated well.
This, from a man who, as a child, enjoyed a wonderful adventure on a three day (steam train) journey from Salisbury (now Harare) to Johannesburg (always known as Egoli in Zulu. It means "place of gold"), hanging out the window and getting a face full of soot, marveling at the African wildlife, and bartering for goods being sold at the water stops, pure magic. This was possibly the very last time I enjoyed a journey. Nowadays I just enjoy arriving or departing. The bit in the middle is something to be tolerated.Flying is something I do up to 80 times a year and I can promise you that any glamour flying had was strangled on September 12th 2001. It is not a pleasant experience anymore.
The only thing that might get me on Simon's train is the speed of the journey.
Mind you, it would take me at least eight hours to get to St Pancras so it is unlikely in the extreme.....
What happened on 12th September 2001 Colin?
'What happened on 12th September 2001 Colin?'
The aftermath of September the Eleventh?
Woops! My sense of time and my sense full stop took a definate dip just then, To say I feel a little silly asking that question is an understatement!
My fault Tim, I should have been clearer.
Unfortunately I had to go to Houston a few days after the attack and everywhere I went a National Guardsman tried to shove the barrel of his M16 up my nose. If they heard me speak, several would crowd around me fighting each other for the chance to shove a barrel up my nose. I was frequently searched and when I flew on to Lafayette, a woman rushed through the x-ray machine just as I stepped through it. The machine screeched, She said "Oh my God", and I got searched again.They waved her on. She was an American, after all, and I "talked funny". I had nothing metallic on me. Two minutes later the woman saw me and said "It was me that set the machine off!", and showed me a pair of six inch kitchen scissors which were in her coat pocket. "Sorry", she said, and walked straight through her gate onto an aircraft. The scissors went straight back into her pocket.
It went downhill from there. 7 years later and the rules get more stupid with each passing month.The trouble, I find, is there is no real uniformity. One airport will take your lighter, for instance, and when you are heading home to the same airport, your lighter is suddenly okay.
I find most of the new rules petty and unnecessary.
Timbone, don't feel foolish, I was about to ask the same question myself - you just beat me to it.
What a lot of memories have come rushing in. What a lot we have lost now that travel is just a boring tedious unsociable chore. Gone is the comfortable smokey chit-chat. Gone are the happy "You may Smoke" signs after safe aeroplane lift-off had been achieved. Gone is the excitement and achievement of crossing yet another very foreign frontier in Europe.
What a lot of new illnesses have been suddenly thrust upon us from Deep Vein Thrombosis on planes to the killer viruses in smokeless, oxygen less, hospitals and ditto in the unhealthy airports.
What a lot of grey uniform unhappiness has been created for us by the insidious drip by drip creation of "No Smoking". Yes, all of this unhappiness can be traced back to smoking bans. We let it happen. We didn't realise. But had we done so, what good could we have done?
Now we are coming to the ultimate repression - No Smoking anywhere. It is no coincidence that side by side with this comes the ultimate creation of the Orwellian fascist state for the whole of Europe.
Is it all already too late? Is there really nothing we can do about it apart from throw up our hands in horror? We really are at the crossroads and this is war at its most dangerous.
See what is going on now in the Brussels parliament:-
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=M6QmH-7fu68&feature=related
Simon is in Brussels. What is he doing there? God be with you Simon. And with all of us.
I travel between Ireland and England regularly due to work and wish that there was a tunnel that I could use rather than having to fly. I totally agree with Colin about the ridiculous security measures that are adopted at airports yet if you travel Eurostar the security is no less safe but far more efficient.
I recently had a row at Stansted after going through the detector as the guard wanted to search me even though the beeper did not go off. When I complained his supervisor told me that they carry out random searches so I questioned why I should put my mobile phone, keys, wallet, change etc into the basket. She told me that if I did not that the beeper would go off. She failed to see the irony!
I love flying, well I used to! I now don't mind the flying too much, but getting to that point is a nightmare and one that sees me resorting to tranquilisers as I manage to work myself up into a panic that once I am through security, after which there is no going back - I am, effectively, trapped - what happens if my flight is then delayed, possibly for hours, and I can't even have a smoke!
This actually happened, fortunately however it was when we flew out of Alicante. We did take off and we flew around for about an hour and then landed back at Alicante and were herded back into the Departure Lounge. At a guess I would say about half the flight were smokers, so we made our way to where we used to be able to smoke and all lit up. There were security guards with guns passing us and not even giving us a second glance.
The large group of us started talking and commenting on the fact that at least the Spanish were human, considerate, tolerant and understanding of our predicament, without having to even approach us about it. Can you imagine if that had been Heathrow or Birmingham or any other UK airport!
Unfortunately, for me the EuroTunnel doesn't work - I cannot abide closed in places due to claustrophobia and panic even on short road tunnels, especially if I can't see daylight at the other end!
I used to love going to Europe on the ferry, when we were allowed to drink and smoke in the bar at the rear of the ship. A couple of years ago that was banned and we had to go on deck to smoke. They even painted a line on deck separating smokers and non-smokers. I went over last month and noticed that the ferry had that line erased, so that smokers and non-smokers could mingle.
As we are swopping cosy stories, here’s one of my most memorable train journeys.
It was a slow corridor train – Newcastle upon Tyne to London. We were all strangers and settled into the carriage for the long journey with polite Excuse-Me’s . Then shufflings as sandwiches and magazines were produced. Then silence fell.
A handsome young man of about 30 sat in the corner. He began talking to the man opposite him and then to the lady beside him. They replied politely but briefly. He turned his attention to the rest of the carriage. The British are renowned for their reserve, but also for their politeness. Eventually, if reluctantly, he had a bit of general conversation going. He passed around a pack of cigarettes. Some smoked, some didn’t, nobody was bothered either way. He said he would like to buy us all a drink. Most said, “No thank you.” He said he was going to buy a round anyway and if they didn’t say what they would like, he would just have to guess. Only spirits and mixes were offered. So, bemused and wondering what exactly he was up to, we reluctantly stated our preferences but still insisted we didn’t need a drink.
He went to the bar and came back with doubles all round. Alcohol loosened tongues and the party atmosphere grew. He disappeared a couple more times and came back with further laden trays. We soon became past caring and never has a long journey passed so quickly and in such very happy noisy company.
On the outskirts of London he explained that he was a millionaire and it gave him pleasure to take long train journeys like this and bring happiness into strangers’ lives. He said he did it regularly. Nothing was asked of us. He didn’t try to sell us anything. There seemed to be no Con trick involved.
On arrival, as I went through the ticket barrier, I saw him again. He came up to me and I thought, “Oh here we go, here’s the punch line.”. He smiled sweetly and touched my arm. He said, “Lovely meeting you. Good luck in life.” Then he was gone.
Make what you can of it. It really happened, and I will never know.