High Speed Train - 19th March 2010
20th April 2010
On the new high speed train from Kent to London that many of my colleagues are calling the British Library Express. It makes me wonder if this new train service will lead to a cricket nickname, but the ‘Southeastern Highspeed’ doesn’t sound as good as the ‘Rawalpindi Express’. I’ve never actually been inside the British Library, although people keep promising to take me there. Now I go past it all the time. My new portal into and out of London is St. Pancras, AKA ‘stp’. You can text things like ‘dep stp to ram’ and some train-robot texts you back the train times from St. Pancras to Ramsgate. I miss Charing Cross, with its umbrella shop, and the easy walk to Soho and Covent Garden. But I love this new journey: through Medway as fast as falling, and then – wham, bam – there goes Dickens’s Kent. Under the Thames at 140 MPH and then the landscape becomes broken: birds, wild flowers, rubbish, tower blocks... And then, suddenly, I am in London.
