I am writing this while nursing a Pastis in front of the Gare St Lazare in Paris. I am awaiting my train to Le Havre and a book signing (une signature) there this afternoon. The café where I am currently situated is called Le Depart; a stylish rethink of a railway café. I find railway stations a source of ongoing interest. Yesterday in Lille I discovered that the magnificient ‘gare’ there was once the ancient Gare du Nord in Paris, and the entire edifice was moved northwards to that splendid city. Just as my pied-a-terre in Paris is located within walking distance of La Gare de l’Est and La Gare du Nord - two stations through which I have regularly passed many dozens of times over the past fifteen years. Rail travel still has a great romance for me. I remember a trip from Paris to Marseille during my student years, nine hours overnight, and awaking (stretched out over three seats) at dawn at Marseille St Charles and finding myself amidst a scene part-French, part-North African. Just as I still love the ‘slow train to China’ local that runs from Boston to Brunswick, Maine, and feels very much like something out a John Cheever short story of the 1950s, without the men in fedoras and the low fug of cigarette smoke. And I also remember that my first trip overland in Australia was the Indian Pacific from Sydney to Perth, and that we stopped in the middle of that terrifying epic desert called the Nullabor Plain. We were allowed off for an hour, and I walked a quarter of a mile away from the train in absurd heat ( 44 degrees centigrade), and felt as if I was in Genesis 1:1: the beginning of the world or the end of it. And that the beer I drank in a grubby outback bar by the railway tracks on my return seemed colder and more restorative than any beer I had ever drunk before. What is most wonderful about rail travel is that you really do feel the earth move under your feet. Trains are always romanesque: the stuff of narrative intrigue, of chance encounters, of forward momentum. And we all need forward momentum.
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 21:19:26 +0000
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