I'm On A Train

That's me, never unafraid to use a cliché. The purpose of this journey is a day trip up to Leeds to say a brief hello to my family and also to have a major session at the dentists to repair my steadily eroding teeth (long story). It is the perfect opportunity to reflect on the fact that I think I've spent a measurable proportion of my life doing this exact same journey, shuttling between Leeds and London on the East Coast Main Line. The great thing is the memories many of these trips inspire.

So let's think back. The first one I recall as an adult is one whose details appear to have faded from my mind. This was exactly 20 years ago this month, May 1987 when we took Americ, my French exchange partner on a day trip to the capital. Despite being 13 at the time I've only fleeting memories of the events of the trip, photographic evidence of us standing in front of Buckingham Palace notwithstanding. Bizarrely the most vivid memory is of being crowded into the downstairs seating area of a central London McDonalds somewhere, simply because I remember 'If I Was' by Midge Ure playing on the PA system at the time. I was a strange child clearly.

My first trip to the smoke as an adult was what was in retrospect a pivotal moment in my professional life. It was June 1995 and after receiving a cease and desist notice from the people at the Chart Information Network regarding my regular usenet postings of the Masterton Chart Commentary, I'd been contacted by a man who I knew by reputation - Steve Redmond, at the time the editor of Music Week. After a short phone conversation he invited me down to see him at his office, and so it was that dressed in a brand new suit (bought incidentally with the £100 I'd won on a scratchcard that weekend) I ventured out onto the streets of London for the very first time. I remember exiting the train, walking down into the Underground and plotting my journey to Blackfriars station in order to find the Daily Express building where they were based. The strangest thing is that I now find myself working just around the corner from that very building and if I so choose can pass by its front door every day. Inside on the 12th floor I was invited to contribute to an exciting new website that Music Week were about to launch - dotmusic.

The next trip was a few months later, September time I think. This time it was to go meet Bridget, my post-university penfriend whom I had spoken to regularly on the phone but never actually laid eyes on for real. She was about to go work in America for a year, so this was a chance to say goodbye for a bit. Most memorably we went for lunch to the Leicester Square pub which had become her adopted Saturday evening home and which she had spent endless letters waxing lyrical about to me. It is a nice personal anchor point to have, as despite only exchanging the odd email every couple of years or so, every time I walk past the Brewmaster I'm reminded of that trip with her.

After that it was 1999 before I had an excuse to hop on the GNER again. January saw me making plans to fly to Seattle to see yet another online friend, Cori in Seattle. This meant flying from Heathrow at the crack of dawn and the best way to achieve this was to stay with my sister Rachel overnight at her flat. The journey itself was my first ever taste of luxury as one of my colleagues had wangled me a complimentary first class ticket. For the first time ever I sat in a wide seat, read my complimentary newspaper and drank the endless cups of tea that they supplied us with. After that it was a case of hauling my suitcase on the tube down to Waterloo to meet Rachel at Eurostar arrivals (my visit coinciding with a trip of her own to Paris). Yet again life has taken me full circle, the vast expanse of Waterloo station now a familiar part of my daily routine as I travel to and from work. I also remember the train journey back home five days later, for the simple reason that I arrived at Kings Cross sweaty and dishevelled after the eight hour flight back from the US. The stewardess on the platform seemed quite surprised that this weary traveller in a t-shirt and jeans was clambering onto her pristine First Class coach. Such were the joy of freebies.

Early September was an excuse for a trip to see my mate Louis in his newly bought flat near Stratford and to escape work which was starting to become extremely irrelevant given that I was just playing out the last few weeks of my contract. I arrived at about 5pm on the Friday and made my way to his office on Goodge Street. After waiting for him to pack up and finish we set out on what at the time appeared to me to be an epic journey home, jumping on the Central Line to Stratford and then catching the bus down the Romford Road to his flat. The Saturday morning meant a journey right to the other side of town to Ealing to see our friend Alan and to spend the day looking around old record shops. Eight years later I'm living not a million miles away from Stratford, even if Louis has now long moved out of the capital.

One year later life was changing dramatically as I'd found myself gainful employment in London itself and was faced with the daunting task of finding somewhere to live in London. I'm not sure those October 2000 trips count for the purposes of these reminiscences as being a perpetually skint temp at the time I was reduced to taking the National Express to London and back. Still, I remember vividly the trip back to Bradford on the Thursday night (I had a radio show to present on the Friday), taking the overnight service. I caught the coach at Golders Green and listened to the radio all the way up the M1 as George Bush and Al Gore went head to head in a debate before the notorious presidential election. I closed my eyes and dreamed that by the time they went to the polls, I would be secure in my brand new home in the capital.

Hence my next trip on the train involved going the other way, travelling back up to Leeds for Christmas 2000. The strange significance of this was I think rather lost on me due to the inevitable stress of clambering onto a packed train at Christmas time. Things were made even more complicated by the fact that this was in the aftermath of the Hatfield rail crash and the entire network was paralysed by the need to check every inch of track for defects. As a result the journey back involved being given a lift to Doncaster to catch a train that was only half the length it should have been, resulting in all carefully planned seat reservations being thrown out the window. It was quite literally every man for himself.

My next trip was a few months after that and one which in many ways was a significant personal moment. I'd been asked by work to go on a road trip to visit various commercial radio stations in the north of England, primarily to see what kind of internet links they had and how they would be able to cope with what was (at the time) the revolutionary idea of receiving distributed audio content via the net. My colleague and I had taken the time to see stations in places as far fling as Scarborough, Huddersfield, York and finally Harrogate before I was despatched to the railway station to make my own way home. I took the train from Harrogate to Leeds and then stood on the platform for 20 minutes waiting for the connection back to London. As I did so I wandered past the platform where the trains to Bradford departed, remembering how back in the old days I would have been just a few minutes from home, jumping on the local service to Frizinghall station. Now here I was standing at Leeds station with "home" being a two and a half hour train ride away. Suddenly the reference points of my entire life had changed.

The next few journeys were uneventful, routine trips back home for a short visit or for Christmas. The next two of significance were the ones that involved the person who now shares my life. March 2002 was the date of Mila's first ever visit to this country and every single moment of that week sticks in my mind. The vision of bleached hair and red coat who emerged blinking into the arrivals lounge at Gatwick joined me a few days later on a train ride up to Leeds to see my family and to see a part of the country that wasn't London. Three years later she was with me again, only this time with her parents in tow as we gathered around the table and watched the countryside fly by, taking us up to Yorkshire so that we could get married in the countryside where I grew up.

Yes it is true, I've spent a measurable portion of my life in recent years making this country-spanning journey, and at the other end of the line each time has been an event which has shaped my life, changed my thinking or just given me a new favourite memory. Who said the romance of the railways was dead?