There are things you resign yourself to giving up as a parent: 24 hour Berlin techno parties, eating your own pudding, feeling rested ever again and sleeper travel . Of these, it was sleeper trains I was most heartbroken about giving up. I don't know when my romanticism of trains started.
Perhaps age ten, watching Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, sprawled in front of our council flat four-bar fire on a rainy Sunday afternoon when I found I ardently wanted to transport myself there despite the murder shenanigans. It was watching Dr. Zhivago, which gave me the idea I might enjoy crossing Russia by train.
Eventually I did, while researching my second novel, an epic one-month journey from Moscow to Irkutsk through Siberia where I became used to the soporific rhythms of the vintage rail stock, walking to the toilet to wash cucumbers and tomatoes bought from grandmas on rural train platforms eaten with endless Cup-a-Soups made at the samovar at the end of each carriage. Then, Caledonian Sleeper I took back to London from The Ullapool Book Festival when I realised I couldn’t wait to see the guy I was calling ‘a friend’. And, finally, the sleeper train from Hanoi to the mountains, my then-boyfriend and I holding hands between the space in bunks as we gently jostled by rice paddy fields to Sapa where he finally deployed the engagement ring he’d been carrying about for two weeks.
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