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6 hours ago
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Yesterday I was on a train for six hours – three there, three back, through two time zones and three weather conditions, and all of it without my headphones. Around me, passengers built little homes for themselves out of laptops and crisps, a whole universe on a plastic fold-down table. The computer screen acted primarily as a barrier, an emotional-load-bearing wall. Objects and arms were removed from sleeves and erected in delicate piles – illusions of privacy were magicked in the quiet coach. Rooms were fashioned on laps behind seats, or ideas of rooms; walled, breaded concepts – here is a kitchenette formed from Pret a Manger baguettes and precarious coffees, here is the memory-foam neck pillow, a portable bedroom, and here onscreen at 250km an hour is a working office, fizzing with legitimacy and blue light. I looked around with love at this side of us, we silly animals, building homes out of sticks anywhere we sit for longer than 20 minutes.
On smaller screens, my travelling neighbour pecked at a two-hour game of Candy Crush, while across the aisle a young man (blue jumper, skin that appeared to be enamelled) was playing blackjack. I looked over occasionally – through his window I could see the newbuild flats with their enclosed balconies, each one filled with boxes, and duvets and pillows pressed face-like against the glass – but for a long time I couldn’t tell if the man was winning, his face remained terribly still.
I thought about the recent news that Denise Coates, the brain behind Bet365 and one of Britain’s richest women, had last year taken a huge pay cut, 45%, and yet still received £150m in salary and dividends. Theirs is a business built on other people’s failures, her £90m mansion a monument to addiction and defeat, her website running on this train’s flickering 5G when there is nowhere else to go. And then the man put down his phone, took a deep breath, rubbed his mouth hard, and I knew he’d lost, and then he picked it back up and started again.
Outside, the fields were touched with ice and the plastic bags in trees hardened into the shapes of birds. Lone shipping containers sat confused on gravel, a hill rose like a hip and sunk into mist. There was a low white fog that suggested some kind of hidden beauty, beyond the muddied vitamin warehouses and lorry parks and small haunted farmhouses surrounded by their silent dogs. When the train went into a tunnel I was suddenly confronted by my own resting face reflected in the black glass, jaw clenched, eyes hooded and I gasped, causing my Candy Crush neighbour to jump. At around 9am he went to the café car in his grey suit and returned with a small, plastic bottle of wine. I met his eye with not a flake, not a crumb of judgment, not one.
Last week the chief executive of Ryanair called for airports to impose a two-drink limit on visitors after one of their flights had to be diverted from Lanzarote to Porto due to an inebriated passenger. I’m curious to see how this might be enforced, not just for the practical reasons, but because these long journeys, whether on train or plane, invite an element of ritual – it feels necessary to toast, perhaps, the country you are leaving behind. And time becomes undone and place becomes unclear – for a long time you are nowhere, in between cities with a hundred strangers all hanging on tight and hoping for the best. Anyway, he had a small plastic bottle of wine and then he anti-bacced his hands and opened some Maltesers.
I was impressed! A classy breakfast, I thought, until I remembered the picture that recently went viral, of a group of Fulham fans on the train to a match and recalibrated my expectations. On that table was laid out a platter of oysters and plastic flutes of Veuve Clicquot. Last year, Spurs fans on their way to a Europa League match photographed a similar train table, but laden with crisps, a bucket of ice and Gordon’s gin and Pernod in optics. A couple of months earlier, Stevenage supporters had posted pictures of their adorable individual charcuterie trays, plus a supermarket trifle and cans of Strongbow. All these movable feasts, travelling north on slick tracks, each one moving too in its own way, a self-portrait in meat and crisps.
In the seat behind me on the way home, a woman slept, snoring wetly, and the sound seemed to lull everybody into a mutual trance, complicated by the digital clock suddenly going back in time as we reached England. People I’d stood nearby in queues long ago at the train station passed slowly on their way to the toilet and we smiled at each other as if old friends, as if whole lifetimes had gone by, which of course they had. And then quite out of nowhere, for a second and with a mighty sound of rushing wind, there was another train running alongside us, its carriage gently lit, its passengers mirroring us exactly with our sleeping women and sandwich houses, and I made the briefest eye contact with a stone-faced lady before it was gone, and there I was again in the black glass, eyes like Revels.
Email Eva at [email protected]
