Five trains.

Travel is a religious experience. They say.

The bed was so comfortable when my alarm went, and Joel so safe and warm, that I was loathe to get out. What madness compels this? For a moment, I sank back and thought how easy it would be to cancel my tickets, change my plans, stay put and have a nice childfree week at home with Joel.

Not doing the thing is always easier than doing the thing.

Joel made me coffee and I had a quick shower, packed last minute items. Charger, toothbrush, book. Another book. Then a third. It’s ok, two of them are small. (I ended up buying another two books on the trip, and one of them was by Robert Musil so you know it ain’t small. What can I say? I travel with books.).

The train rushed me towards London on the familiar commuter line. It was an overcast morning and the light was flat, air cool after a scorching week.

I miss Joel already, I thought.

I’m reading Transit by Rachel Cusk which, thematically at least, felt appropriate for a journey. I’m on the fence with Rachel Cusk. On the one hand: closely observed and well-written. On the other: laboured, pretentious and over-engineered. Like a Michelin meal touched by too many fingers.¹

“The next station is London Marylebone. All change please.”

In Marylebone, a billboard of a leaping killer whale.

Orcas are apex predators with a diverse diet.

That’s cool, I thought: informative.

Then:

Looking for apex connectivity?

It was an ad for a mobile phone package.

By a strange quirk of the underground lines, it was quicker to walk several blocks to Baker Street than muddle through connections from Marylebone.

On the pavement outside the station, it’s so hot that London smells like Bangkok: an air of lightly cooked sewage on the streets.

It’s a Monday morning and feels strange—wonderful—to be abroad in the sun with a pack, not bound for the office. Wonderful to see London ticking along as it always does. I said a silent hallelujah for not having to live here anymore.

It’s been a long time since I was a lone traveller. I’ve noticed travelling alone has become less comfortable, more anxious, as I’ve grown older. Counter-intuitively, I was less concerned as a 22-year old ingénue than I am now. Aging into this world has made me increasingly aware of the deep well of hatred some men reserve for women. I am increasingly uneasy to be out in it. Travelling alone, disconnected from the relationships that construct an easily-parsable identity (“this is my man, these my children”) I wear a fake wedding ring as a protective device: it screens me, shields me, makes me less of a riddle and enigma to casual observer. Eyes pass onwards, incurious.

Just outside an optometrist near Baker Street, there’s a rotating screen trying to capture eyes of passers-by. It flashes up famous optical illusions: what do you see: an old lady or a young lady?

Often, I want to ask passers-by the same question.

What do you see?

In my mind’s eye, still a peripatetic twenty-something but in reality, a woman pushing early middle age, with a backpack, carrying a pillow, perhaps down on her luck (if you don’t notice the backpack is Patagootch).

I paused to take a picture of the optical illusion but it was gone, replaced by new scrawling messages that invited me to come in for a free eye test. I waited a minute or so for it to reappear but it didn’t.

Eventually, I decided this would be a really stupid way to miss my train to Brussels and moved on.

—

On the train, I was starving and took myself off to the café car.

I looked intently at the meal deal poster trying to work out what’s included. The blonde woman behind the counter addressed me while I was still looking.

Unsolicited, she told me I can have any of the baguettes, which she can heat up for me, or the veg curry or the salmon spinach quiche, plus any snack and any of the soft drinks or juices. She said it all very quickly and competently.

Head spinning with the complex options, I started to ask for a baguette but she cut me off.

“You can take it.”

“Oh… ok.” This is advancing quickly and also I live in England. I’m not used to this unapologetic forthrightness. What is this? No cringing? No saying sorry for telling me to get my own baguette? She physically can’t get it for me—there’s a Perspex barrier—but I am certain she would have apologised had she been English.

I grabbed a can of Coke too and asked if I can please have a cup of ice with it.

“It’s already very cold. You want ice as well?”

Now, stay with me a second.

I’ve never—and I mean, never, not once in all my thirty-nine years on this planet—had my need for ice questioned.

Is she being rude, I wondered with mild panic.

But her eyes are clear. I don’t detect rudeness. She is in earnest, just wanting to point out that the drink may end up being colder than I expect.

She isn’t being rude. She is just Dutch.

I reassured her I’ll be able to handle the iced beverage.² Then, considering the three chocolate bars, I asked if this was the whole snack choice.

“No, I said any snack.” She indicated the row of crisps and nuts behind her.

Again, I scanned for passive-aggression. Again, none detected. This is just … how she talks.

I warmed to it. “Oh, ok, so those sausage bite things are included?” The bag of mini-saucissons is, I know from experience, a real treat.

“Yes.” She clearly thinks I’m a bit dim, which perhaps I am. “I said any snack.”   

I’m standing there, in what is fast becoming a fairly involved social interaction, when there’s a kerfuffle behind me. An American woman is asking the conductor if she can switch to a forward-facing seat.

“We’re all getting dizzy.”

I was eager to help and stepped in.

“Do you have a window? I’ve got a forward facing seat but no window so I’d happily trade.”

She demurred when it became clear I only had one seat to offer (she needs them for the whole family) and the conductor sorted her out with seats elsewhere.

Before the conductor left, the Dutch woman behind the counter held a quick exchange in French with him. I caught the word “fenêtre” but no one said anything to me so I just waited for my heated baguette.

As I was paying, the conductor reappeared.

He said to me in English:

“Were you wanting a seat with a window?”

Oh my god, hallelujah. “Yes please!”

And he led me to a perfect forward-facing empty two-seater with a big window.

I thanked the Dutch woman fervently on the way back through the café car to collect my stuff, the mystery of what she was saying to him about a fenêtre resolved.

See? I knew she wasn’t being rude. She was just Dutch, bless her.

—

I’ve only ever taken the Eurostar to Paris so this is a novel journey. The train was bound for Amsterdam but I had to get off in Brussels to catch a connecting train. I tried to pay attention, to form impressions of my own.

This low country is mostly unknown to me, outside of obvious historical reference points (war, more war) and the Dutch and Flemish art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries I so adore.

People call it a theatre: it’s so often been the theatre for war.

Theatre seems right. It’s a flat plain of corn, studded with cypresses, like a stage. Rows of upland Europe rise around it like an amphitheater.

There’s an enormous DHL transport centre and Belgian place names with far too many vowels. As we approach Brussels, tall leaning high-eaved rows of houses crowd the tracks. Then, lines of freight cars flash past, covered with elaborate colourful graffiti out of which I can discern the words: Amor and J’existe.

—

In Brussels-Midi, it turns out that my ticket doesn’t let me board just any old train to Köln but solely and exclusively the 16:23 one. I have an hour to kill.

An unexpected bonus: an hour to go see what I can of Brussels.

I know nothing about Brussels (apart from, you know, European Commission). Amazing how helpless you become in an unfamiliar milieu. I had to be shown first how to scan my ticket to get into the Brussels Metro, then (realising I was on the platform going the wrong way) how to exit and find the right platform, down a secret set of stairs.

Then, how to scan a barcoded ticket to get into the toilet. A barcode toilet! A barcode barricade! I’ve never entered a toilet with a barcode before. Isn’t it amazing how many different ways there are in the world to do even the simplest things, like access a public shitter?

Truly, the spectrum of human possibility knows no bounds.

If my observations of Brussels itself are brief, that’s because I had about thirty-five minutes to turn a smart loop from the Bourse to the Grand-Place and back via Manneken-Pis. I narrate my life internally (who doesn’t?) so capturing it is just the trick.

A Belgian Beer World Experience billboard draped across the Bourse (the old stock exchange) cheapened it only slightly. Everywhere there were indications we were hitting peak Belgique: TinTin, Magritte, Horta. Affligem beer. Gaufres, conveyed about the streets topped with piles of cream.

It occurred to me that I heard mostly French and realised this must be where Belgians holiday. I bet the restaurants are great. A narrow lane, barely shoulder-width, snakes in between the buildings.

Eenmans Straate. Rue d’une personne. One-man lane, it’s called, before the lanes broaden into the Grand-Place.

I love a lofty spire (I live in Oxford after all) and Brussels has them in spades: airy as feathers and with little mouse-sized peephole windows in the colonnades. The towers of the Grand-Place are straight out of an Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole fever dream.

Brussels may be a city of history and culture—the coal-stained brickwork hiding under concrete in the Metro is ancient and full of personality—but the Belgians have no style whatsoever.

A young woman passed me wearing shiny red wellies (it was sunny and not raining), with shorts in a jaunty black and white check pattern and a navy and white striped tank. It looked so much worse than it sounds.

The graffiti is wonderful though. Is this a Banksy, these rubbish collectors fox-hunting a plastic bag?

Then, there it is again! J’existe.

I couldn’t figure out why there were statues of men all over a certain building (the patriarchy?) so I decided to film it. An old lady and her grandson stood discreetly by and waited until I finished filming to tell me I had dropped my sunglasses off my head.

The screams of a toddler, outraged to be strapped back in her push chair, chased me down to Manneken-Pis.

It was tiny. The fountain, I mean.

Heading for the Metro, I passed a “Men for Progress” poster that says in French:

“What if you didn’t insist when she already said no?”

Then, as I crossed back in front of the Bourse to regain the Metro, there it was again.

In enormous letters: J’EXISTE.

I have an eerie feeling I am the only person in Brussels who can see it.

Sinking back into the bowels of the Bourse, I felt grateful and glad to have seen Brussels and quietly delighted with the Belgians for taking the right things seriously but not themselves: for loving chips and beer and a tiny fountain of a little boy having a wazz.

—

A woman sat down opposite me in the first class car of the Köln train and said ‘bonjour’.

I was taken aback. I’ve lived in Britain for so long. I don’t know how to respond. She’s addressing me in public! A stranger! She must be mentally unstable. Or perhaps she wants something?

I pretended I didn’t hear her.

She repeated herself, looking at me pointedly, thoroughly disappointed with me for allowing us to get off on the wrong foot.

Sheepishly, I extracted an AirPod and muttered “hello”. Shamed for my poor manners.

She decided to pay me no further heed. When I was sure she was ignoring me, I went to work trying to extract shreds of the earlier saucisson from my molars.

Traffic on the motorway leaving Brussels was thick but we flew over it. So small is Brussels we were in deep agricultural countryside in moments. Then, in another smaller city. Then out of that one too. Quick as a blink, less time that it took me to write that sentence or you to read it.

In the prosperous Belgian countryside, tidy houses abutted cornfields in the sun.

Opposite me were two women in hijabs with a little boy and girl. The kids were busy with McDonalds cartons and the women administering their lunch.

One of the women dropped her phone. It landed in the aisle between us and I glanced up at the thud. I wondered for a second if I should pick it up.

Then she leaned forward to grab it. Before I could stop myself, before I could wrap a hand over my mouth and smother the word, it slipped out.

“Sorry.”

She looked at me, confused. Her friend looked at me, also confused. The woman I didn’t say hello to looked at me like I sicked down my front.

What was I apologising for? I didn’t make her drop it. I had no obligation to pick it up. I had nothing at all to do with any part of the situation.

What on earth was I apologising for?

None of us knew.

Reddening, I turned attention back to that stubborn scrap of saucisson.

—

At Liège, surprisingly dramatic scenery. The enormous bluffs on the far bank of the Meuse looked like stations for antique armaments and, let’s face it, they probably were.

The scenery was wilder as soon as we crossed the border into Germany. This is the Victor Horta woods and Google Maps tell me there’s an ancient milestone for Köln, at least two centuries old from the Napoleonic era, crested with an eagle, just off the rail line.

An enormous apple tree bent ponderously under an unripe load. At one point, buried in trees, I spotted an old chunk of stone bulwark, some twenty feet high.

It never fails. The ground speaks to me with echoes of what has gone before, always.

The lady opposite and I are bezzie mates now, by the way. Watching each other’s bags when we go to the loo with a nod and a conspiratorial outthrust lower lip. I listen to her phone conversations in what sounds like Portuguese. She’s not from around here either. Maybe that’s why she was so concerned to appear well-mannered and French.

When she leaves, she says ‘au revoir’ to the ladies across and ‘bye bye’ to me.

After she gets off, the woman who dropped her phone murmurs to the other in French:

“Did she just say ‘au revoir’ to us?”

—

As we pulled into Köln, I caught a passing reference on the loudspeaker to connecting trains to Wuppertal. I felt a momentary urge to go and seek out my friend there but it passed quickly.

Köln station was chaos: the squawking of steel, scream of metal on metal along the lines. I don’t know what it is about Germany but man, does it set my teeth on edge. Can’t shake a perma-hunted feel that at any moment someone will ask exactly how many sixteenths Jewish I am³.

Plus it seems my train is delayed but there’s no being sure.

Now, in contrast to Munich, I’m sorry to report that Köln boasts the ugliest and least helpful rail officials in the German federal republic. The first one I asked about my train, a dour prick with a Hitler ‘stache and a paunch, responded irritably in German ‘yes, this is platform 6’, which wasn’t my fucking question.

His eyes were shifty and I realised his issue was a big old chip on his shoulder that he can’t speak English. Then I felt bad for forcing him into the open: in this country where basically everyone speaks English,⁴ not speaking English must be a real sore point. And this is his country, after all. Who am I to bark English at him.

Chastened, I went looking for the information desk.

As I queued, I couldn’t miss immense Köln cathedral filling the station’s atrium windows. It looked like Orthanc, or a tower of Minas Morgul, drawn by John Howe.

I batted back two American teenage backpackers (“no boys, I was here first”—early middle age has its virtues) and asked the man behind the desk about the train to Stuttgart.

He instructed me to go back to platform 6.

Sigh.

Back on the inescapable platform 6, there was the cathedral again, buttressed right up against the station, as if the two might have coexisted harmoniously since the Middle Ages.

Incidentally, it was also on platform 6 that I decided Germans are more stylish than Belgians, purely on the basis of this tattoo:

Apex connectivity.

—

Sliding gratefully out of Köln, there’s a moving map showing how far the train has come today, from Streisund up on the Baltic coast through Bremen, Osnabruck and Dortmund. Speaking of apex connectivity.

None of those places mean anything to me, apart from Dortmund (football?) and Bremen (a harbour? And a folk tale about some musicians scaring away burglars, which I might have done well to remember last week?)

In the evening light, I examined German garden rooms. Everyone has one, it seems, a little cube in a square patch of garden, often kitted out with its own patio, mini-BBQ and hammock. There are trailers piled with pumpkins, polytunnels and tractors. The countryside is so flat here, it makes me itch for a hill or wrinkle—but it’s obviously good for the produce.

I noticed the guy across the aisle was reading a book with pictures of cereal in it.

Weirdo, I thought to myself.

A conductor came by. To check my ticket I thought, but no, it’s to take my food order for dinner. The perks of first class and that extra fifty quid I paid for legroom. Would I like to order dinner? Yes please, what is there?

He found a menu in the seat ahead and I flipped through until I went too far and got to the breakfasts.

Pictures of cereals.

Bonn seemed a lovely town, with beautiful old town houses and an Asian food market, outside of which children played with a ball in a quiet street. My veg chili arrived, an infusion of salty beans and tomatoes that tasted like salt, beans and tomatoes.

The landscape became lumpier, with hills like furred animals. Then, we were sliding along the Rhine, under bluffs at Remagen.

A tanker—big enough to carry my whole street and all the houses on it—chugged past.

I understood in that moment that, when people talk of a mighty river, they mean the Rhine. The Rhine looks mighty. With its locked arms of cliffs, the surface calls to mind a boiling pot of water that seethes with unseen rips. The green and red buoys plot a central shipping channel past submerged wrecks and sunken jetties.

I wouldn’t try to swim across it, not for a million pounds. It’s marked with death, plain as anything.

The train threads along the river, under Schlosses at every promontory, every mile. The traditional timber-beamed houses seem to have been lifted from a Disney movie (or vice versa: Walt sure was a big fan of intra-war Germany… ).

Tilled fields on 60 degree slopes called to mind Southeast Asia but this is the land of Luther and religious wars. We passed a Gasthof zum Landsknecht, bearing the image of a cartoon fighter, gripping a halberd. I imagined Landsknecht fighters roaming these bluffs, incongruous, alongside a modern holiday park with caravans and a pizzeria and a carousel full of children. Then, a quiet riverside churchyard, speckled with graves, in the town of Bingen, of Hildegard fame.

What an odd history this country has, at once grandiose and depraved.

Curving sinuously down the Rhine at sunset, I’m reminded why I love trains. If there is a better way to travel, please tell me. I looked and looked at the pretty Gasthofs and Schlosses and burgher’s homes until the light gave out and my eyes failed.

Then, thirsty, I walked several blocks (read: carriages) to the café car.

The woman behind the bar ignored me. She giggled and flirted and served instead a tall, handsome, absolutely stacked guy who pitched up after me wanting a beer.

I was not in the mood for it after twelve hours on trains. I gave her a hard look that said:

Don’t fuck with me, Gretchen.

I think she got the message.

—

In Stuttgart, it’s 10:43.

We are pulling in at platform 10 and my connecting train, the overnight one to Vienna, the only one I can possibly get without having to find a hotel and waste a pointless day of my week in Stuttgart, leaves at 10:46.

I have exactly three minutes to run from the very end of platform 10, with my backpack and pillow, to the very end of platform 5.

By the time I’ve run past ten carriages of the Stuttgart train I just disembarked, my heart is pounding uncomfortably and neck sweaty. I’m still wearing my fleece and it’s a Central European hot summer evening in Stuttgart.

I trundled alongside the Vienna train, running a fierce gamble, expecting at any second the train will pull out. Should I play it safe and jump on early, spend half an hour weaving through crowds storing luggage to get to the right seat? Or do I run as fast as I can straight to my carriage and pray the train doesn’t pull out?

Ever the risk-taker, I made it to my carriage, heart thrumming, with half a minute to spare, where it swiftly transpired there was no café on this *overnight* train to Vienna.

Really? This is the train on which there is no food or water? The nine-hour *overnight* one?

There was, it turned out, a little self-serve trolley and bottles of water in a vending machine.

But vending machines and I have an uneasy relationship at the best of times.

This one didn’t like it when I typed in the product code. It didn’t want me to tap my phone to pay first, didn’t like that either. Then it chirped at me urgently in a chastising tone, flashing a red X.

Several long minutes later, with rising panic (I was super thirsty after my sprint), I worked out that I needed to hover—but not tap or click—my phone near the sensor then quickly punch in a code and then—only then!—tap to pay.

Who invents this shit?

The bottle dropped—and got stuck. The neck of the bottle wedged perfectly vertically upright in between two black plastic flaps when I tried to get it out. It wouldn’t move.

I looked around because surely I must have an audience for this. It’s too perfect.

There is some malevolent God, I know it. He loves tormenting me.

Those messages in Brussels! They were a clue.

J’existe!

Grunting softly, on both knees, and trying not to make too much noise lest the Teuton inhabitants of this train assume I’m trying to jimmy an illegitimate bottle out for free, I managed to knock the bottle slightly askew. Then, with a few more finger nudges and grunts, I got it to fall sideways, as God intended (or maybe not, depending on his whim and malice… ).

When I got back to my seat, it’s sparkling water.

I loathe sparkling water. It may technically provide hydration but only of the least satisfying sort. It fell in my parched mouth like rain in the Sahara, vaporising instantly on contact.

I called Joel. The line was terrible. I told him I am fucking shattered and we are coming into Munich now.

He went quiet.

“What did you just say?”

“I said we’re coming into Munich now.”

“Oh. I swear for a second I heard you say ‘we’re coming in a eunuch now’.”

After assuring him that was not what I had said and bidding him goodnight, I wrapped a top around my eyes, threw my pillow under the tray table and curled up on the floor, with my head under my seat.

Through the night, I was shaken awake not once but thrice by various officials of both the German and Austrian rail lines to check my ticket. No one told me in a stern voice to get off the floor because they obviously took pity on me.

Either that or they feared me. Wisely.

Waking, I felt like several shades of sun-baked shit. Breakfast was black coffee and a Snickers. My throat was raw and head full of snot. My ears were underwater.

I had the cold to end all colds, and a sleep-deprived immune system unable to fight off anything at all, thanks to my night on the floor.

But, outside the window, the sun beat down on Austrian fields still shrouded in early morning mist.

When I stepped off the tram at the Volkstheater in the heart of the Inner Ring, the air was cool and smelled like creamed potatoes with nutmeg.

I made it to Vienna, again.

READ NEXT ➡️

1. Deserves a more detailed review but a few brief thoughts on her trilogy summarised here.

2. Joel had an additional observation to offer, which is that, had he been told he didn’t need ice, he would have 100% accepted without question that he did not need ice. He would not have pressed the point. He would have slunk off, probably apologising to her for having even asked for it. And, what’s more, had he been there with me, he would have been mortified by my resolute insistence that, yes, I did in fact need ice. “But babe, she said it’s fine without.” The English, eh?

3. At least six, I believe.

4. The 2022 English Proficiency Index (EPI) put Germany tenth in the world for English proficiency. Guess who was first? Our old pals, the Dutch.