Actually doing it is a pleasure beyond words. Events are wonderful. The getting to and from events, though? The travelling from home to another place more than 40 minutes away by public transport? That, my friends, is a hellscape.
That, however, was then. It’s been at least five years since I last travelled round the British Isles like this and in that intervening half decade things have apparently gone completely to pot. There has not been a single journey that has not shredded my nerves and left me arriving at my destination in dire need of a drink, Valium and a lie down (in any order). Oh, and late, of course.
Now, none of this happens often enough for you to depend upon it. Trains are cancelled last minute and there is usually, despite us living in the technologically astonishing year of our interconnected Lord 2025, no way of imparting this news to would-be passengers in swift and efficient fashion, or of proffering alternative routes or refunding tickets.
So you build as much slack into your system as you can: getting earlier trains just in case, researching alternative routes, altering and re-altering arrangements with the people at the other end, or abandoning the whole project and driving instead (if you can drive, which I can’t). The waste of time and the accumulating stress for the hundreds of thousands of passengers a day, plus their professional and domestic dependents, is incalculable.
One immaculately turned out couple behind me on the way back from Keswick listened to the racing out loud while drinking cans of Grolsch and then screamed down the phone to friends about the result for long after the carriage’s own interest in the subject had faded.
And all this while employers also expect long journeys to be productive worktime. There’s train wi-fi, isn’t there? There’s tables or drop-down thingies on the backs of seats, aren’t there? Then work, dammit! Work!
Bookish: How Reading Shapes Our Lives by Lucy Mangan, is published by Square Peg (£18.99)
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