I used to love trains. When I was nine and coming home from my school for the holidays I was put into a carriage (the old carriages in the UK had six seats in them with doilies for head rests and sliding doors to the rest of the train) and I felt very grown up. I had the other passengers in fits when the guard came round and said ‘drinks being served’, and I piped up, “That is what I was waiting for.” Drinks to me meant a cup of tea, and one of the elderly gentlemen in the carriage bought me my tea. A different age, one cannot imagine that happening much today.
My most interesting train journey was from Mumbai to Poona and having men run up and down the aisle whilst the travellers didn’t move an inch bringing them drinks and papers and food. You always know a slave culture because those serving always run. It was however a blissful train ride and very comfortable.
Today in the UK the trains are smelly and crowded more often-than-not. They run on time and give you lots of chances to listen to everyone else’s conversations, to plug in your laptop and type away and they get you to where you are going. Pure function without any beauty and barely anything worth remembering.
Human creations inevitably degrade to the ugly as the first flush of discovery trades brilliance for profit.