Here we are again, travelling by train in Europe and still feeling foolish about Brexit. We started with the Eurostar service from London to Paris, which seems unnecessarily expensive, but I guess this might be just another consequence of ‘regaining our sovereignty’: someone has to pay for all the customs and border personnel that weren’t there in the good old days.
Earlier this
year, we rode trains to Greece with American friends, whose strategy for coping
with the embarrassment of sharing nationality with Donald Trump comprised keeping
their voices down and hoping to be taken for Canadian. We Brits have no similar
ploy available to us: one look at our clothes and general demeanour is enough
for the official at a Spanish platform barrier to address us in English,
knowing not to waste their time otherwise. And from there, it’s a small step to
imagining them silently deriding our rude and disrespectful exit from the union
that could have made a serious difference to the dynamics of global power-play,
had we been onside. That said, they might just be a supporter of one of the far-right
parties ambitious for their own exit from the EU.
But this is
about my shame, not theirs. In Paris, we transferred to a TGV train bound for
Barcelona and, for six hours or so, sat in a luxurious bubble of anonymity in
comfortable, adjacent seats on the top deck, sipping wine as we watched the sun
go down over the Camargue.
Our stopover
was for one night, so we had booked accommodation adjoining the station and
walked seamlessly from the platform to the foyer of a space-age fantasy of an
hotel. Our room, on the seventh floor, had a panoramic view and was fitted out
with style, panache and careful regard to the needs and expectations of the
contemporary urban traveller. (I imagine the same would have been said of many
of the original railway hotels built at the end of the 19th century.)
Come the
morning, we moved on to Valencia, where we spent a couple of days walking
around the city – a scouting exercise that took in many of the ‘must-see’
sights, as well as the unremarkable bits in between. The Old City was where we
stayed, quite near one of the two remaining one-thousand-year-old defensive
gates and an Ecuadorian coffee shop, a reminder of Spain’s colonising past. Such
features are commonplace in old Iberian cities, but Valencia has a couple of
modern tricks up its sleeve.
In the 1960s
the flood-prone river Turia that ran through its centre was diverted elsewhere
and its course converted into a public park that is supremely well located to
provide a refuge for the apartment-bound population. In the 2000s the land at
the mouth of the former river was devoted to the construction of a collection
of striking contemporary buildings comprising the City of Arts and Sciences.
The space age experience at Barca was a mere appetiser for this main course.
Heading
north next day, on a provincial train, we were back on planet Earth. A teenager
across from us put his feet up on the seats and focussed his attention on his
phone but the ticket lady, a small but fearsome-looking person came by and,
without saying a word, casually swatted his knees. He caved without protest.
Later, an older woman, a foreigner, had the temerity to put one of her feet up
on a seat and, though she received a verbal warning, I did note that the ticket
lady had serious backup if: she was accompanied by a burly young man in uniform
equipped with an enormously long truncheon.
I heard the
BBC news this morning and there is much talk of Britain’s current leadership
pining to re-join the EU. I can imagine a collective response of “you must be
joking”, yet still, I hope.
