Travelling in style

I’m writing this on my laptop, sitting in a first class carriage watching the English countryside slide past. There are slower ways of seeing England, but there are few better. This is especially true is you like canals. The railways may have killed off the canals but, with the permanent way being laid so often next to the waterway, travellers today can now look at hundreds of miles of the canal network as it passes at high speed. Of course, this has it’s downside, travelling by train is fantastic (you drink while somebody else drives at insane speed, that kind of arrangement is only available elsewhere on shocking council estates when you are in the passenger seat of a stolen car), because ever now and then you look out and see a boat captained by somebody smoking a pipe, wearing a moleskin waistcoat and a beard that society would disapprove of, accompanied by a dog with a kerchief for a collar and you know, you just bloody know, that not only is he carefree but he has picked up a couple of dainty female passengers who are into free love and experimentation and are, at this moment, in the galley making him a bacon sandwich. This is in contrast to life on the road, where the only passengers in the cars of, for instance, sales reps, are murdered hitchhikers.

The better you travel, the more you are rewarded. Travel by air and what do you get – you get to breath the air that the guy in front of you, the one with lank hair and a cough, was breathing half an hour ago. You get to sit in a seat that’s too small in an airplane that’s too crowded and if you get drunk enough to actually blot out the pain, you’ll be considered too drunk to be a passenger.

Travel by car and you have the illusion of freedom but, in reality, you’re just swept along with everyone else. There’s a reason that pictures of a highway at night, with the taillights all surging in the same direction, looks like bloodflow or a river, because you’re in the current. Don’t believe me? Try swerving across four lanes of motorway and look at the reaction you’ll provoke.

Travel by tube and you are normally asked to leave cinemas whenever there’s a horror sequence set on the tube because no atrocity quite matches what you once had to go through that time when you were bursting for the loo, the train stopped in a tunnel and the lady in front of you had a PVC handbag. The resulting six month stretch in Parkhurst almost erased the embarrassment of the moment, but not quite.

Travel by boat is best of all. Slower than driving, a bit quicker than walking and all rivers, eventually, flow to the sea so the possibilities are limitless.

(Interjection – it’s suddenly got so dark outside the train that I thought somebody had closed the curtains in the sky. It is, in fact, simply the traditional laden northern sky). (Or a tunnel, I’m a bit pissed on red wine).

Which is why, I think, I’ve recently seen the VW camper van as my vehicle of choice. It’s not unlike a boat in its lines and when you put up that roof extension thingie, it’s like raising a sail. All in all, I rather like camper vans, I just love the idea of having everything you need, stove, bed, telly, to hand and, best of all, when you fall out with the neighbours, you can drive off.

A camper van is very, very different to a caravan. The caravan is used by two sorts of people, wife-swapping cannibals of Welsh descent who enjoy nothing more than confounding senior maths lecturers by causing traffic jams where there should be none; and pikies.

As for global warming and pollution – fuck it. I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s a price worth paying for me to be able to sit on the train (product of the industrial revolution, where it all started), listening to my iPod and sipping red wine. Mind you, I’d miss the snowboarding.