Station to Station

London is Sunday morning empty. Thinned of people, its places regain a sense of size. Paddington, owned by only a handful of bleary travellers groping for carriages, becomes a cathedral again. Isambard’s intent glimpsed. The station not as mere terminus, but as a temple to travel.

A sacred start is apposite. The journey to Penzance, the push to the end of the line, feels like a pilgrimage. Not just a leaving of London, a going beyond England. Any passage into the territory of a thousands saints cannot help but echo a kabbalistic climb. The Penwith hundred revealed as higher realms, holy ground. Crossing the Tamar a jump across the empty space of Da’at.

London to Penzance, station to station, is the best five-hour film never shot. The only possible rival to Chris Petit’s Radio On as the ultimate English trip movie. From the window you get the slow decay of exploded industries. Hills flooded with tumbling purple lupins. Warship glimpses. Red earth exposed as jubilant wounds in the green armour of valleys. You look ahead, see rails polished with sea spray.

Clear as gin sky. Murder sky. Miser grey sky. All extremes of English weather stitched together by thread of track.

I long ago learnt the only way to make sense of a city is by walking it. The journey through it the only way to trace the contour lines of history, to let its stories fold into you. Satori through movement. Maybe the only way to really grasp England is by train.