The joy of the journey

“There’s always a moment in the journey from Dublin to London – which I make every month or two, taking the land-and-sea route via Holyhead instead of flying – when I stop what I’m doing and think: you don’t get to enjoy this from 40,000ft.” Our writer Killian Fox says that it’s the little details of the things you see, the people you meet and the reveries you enter that make the longer journey all the more worthwhile. For Killian, “a journey is so much richer and stranger when you travel close to the ground”.
Likewise, Cornwall-based documentary filmmaker Christopher Morris regularly takes the Night Riviera sleeper between his home in Penzance and Paddington. It’s a service that’s been running since 1877 and, as Christopher says, “it is the earthbound tortoise to the flying hare alternative”. But that slow overnight trundle towards the capital is freighted with romance, and he cannot enter his cabin “without conjuring Poirot (Finney, not Branagh).”
For Glasgow-based writer Peter Ross, it is the drive to Dundee to collect his son from university that is “slick with memories and sweet nostalgia”. And for Phoebe Taplin, the magic comes on the relatively mundane bus trip from Leeds to Whitby. For Phoebe, “the long meditative miles of drystone wall and cow parsley, spacious landscapes and big skies are an end in themselves.”
Enjoy the slow ride!