Since the move, I now take the train to work three times a week.
The journey provides an hour and a half that I have reserved as a precious window for reading, thinking, and scribbling notebook entries - waking my mind up over 58 miles heading northeast, and winding it back down again on the way home - bookending my day with these quiet pleasures.
Mar/Apr 2023 - train books:
Insatiable - Daisy Buchanan
Asylum Road - Olivia Sudjic
This One Sky Day - Leone Ross
Our Wives Under the Sea - Julia Armfield
Strange Hotel - Eimear McBride
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies - Maddie Mortimer (ongoing)
Often, I take the first service of the morning, walking through the city to the station along streets peopled only by binmen and copy-and-paste couples leaving the gym next to the WeWork.
In these somnolent hours of Pepto Bismol sunrises and bound stacks of freshly printed newspapers waiting on doorsteps, I often have the carriage to myself.
On such mornings, I rub my eyes to life while the waking sun filters through the window and makes me dozy, feigning sleep until the increasingly familiar ticket inspector passes. I spend half the journey reading, the other half drifting into a kind of half sleep until the violent lolling of my own head jolts me fully awake.
Whenever I wake up, there is always the same old man dressed in a Barbour jacket, head bent over a Times crossword puzzle, in a seat nearby. He is always in exactly the same posture, as if I had dreamt him. I know that he gets on the train somewhere between Harling Road and Wymondham, but I have never been awake to see where. I only know that, like me, he always chooses the front carriage to save time at the other end.
On my return journey, I walk right to the end of the platform to the final carriage for the same reason, before I am swiftly expelled through the ticket barriers into the station. I automatically scan the crowd for M’s face after the few occasions he has surprised me by waiting there, almost always when it’s raining, just so I won’t be walking home in the rain alone.
Forward facing on the way out, then travelling backwards on the way home, as if putting the day on rewind.
My choice of seat is always a reflection of mood. If feeling purposeful and driven, a commitment to a table seat is the commitment to taking out my laptop or notebook and daring to put words on the page, as if to justify my occupation of that extra space.
Otherwise, and more often than not, I am curled up in the corner against the window, a coat blanket over my lap and the heater blasting up past my ankles. Friday afternoons have become a ritual of their own, with two celebratory book-finishing beers on the tray table in front of me, accompanied by the soundtrack of various pub-fresh passengers and the hiss of newly opened cans.
Train behaviour is a funny thing. As someone who is generally too self-conscious to make phone calls on the train (enjoying the fact that I am, more or less, uncontactable at this time), I often feel like an intruder to the private conversations that are shared openly around me, an awkward and accidental eavesdropper.
Snippets of personal conversations and intimate admissions are shared openly and audibly just metres away from me. Voice notes, voicemails and phone conversations that make me view the small mound of head in the seat in front of me entirely differently, or want to strike up a conversation with the person poking out from behind a table further down the aisle.
A young girl opposite me leaves the longest voicemail ever recorded, sharing news of her recent breakdown and subsequent enrolment in CBT, accompanied with a serial refrain of “I’m fine but”, to a sardine-like audience of the 17:23 service. My thoughts stay with her long after she leaves, seeing her as a whole person walking down the platform, another character entering and exiting the scene.
Still, the train tears on through miles and miles of countryside, drops of rain like hyphens against the window.
Past the Guinness-dark sod of flat fields lined by wind-beaten trees, the grid-like marshlands curtailed by the dark murky trenches of the dykes, the stark expanse suddenly disrupted by the sparkling boatyards and piercing steeples of Ely.
On trains, my relationship with time is different. It is either on pause completely, or I am willing it to pass quicker. But most often, I am pleading for it to slow, like when I am in the middle of a chapter that I can’t put down before I step on to the platform and back into real time - as if turning away from the table with your plate half full, leaving a hot meal unfinished.