Soon the red bricks of Manchester will give way to the wide, flat coastline of Lancashire, and then the rolling green valleys of Cumbria; the oaks and chestnuts and beeches that line the tracks here in England will slowly become outnumbered by ever more evergreens as we move into Scotland; and after we pass through Haymarket and finally roll into Waverly, the black igneous cliffs of Castle Rock will suddenly rise up to our right, bearing the yellow-stone Castle itself proudly aloft.

I know the journey and its landscapes well.

I decide to try and figure out how well, to actually put a number on it. I mark out a tally count of the months that I lived in Edinburgh, and try to recall the frequency with which I used to travel south. At a conservative estimate I’m sure I’ve made this rail journey at least a hundred times. A more realistic figure is almost twice that.

Today, making this trip again, after a two-year hiatus which saw the world turned upside down, the journey feels strange: both intensely familiar and unsettlingly unfamiliar at the same time. 

I think, as I have on this train before, of a poem by Norman MacCaig. It hits differently today.

I’m waiting for the moment
when the train crosses the Border
and home creeps closer
at seventy miles an hour.

I admire MacCaig’s ability to notice the Border; I usually struggle to. In fact, it has often struck me how completely invisible the border between England and Scotland is from the train. Enter Scotland by road and you are greeted by a great Saltire of a road sign bearing its welcome in both English and Gaelic: fàilte gu alba. On the tracks, however, there is no such sign, and usually no announcement. We roll casually across the border without ever really noticing we have crossed from one country into the next.

Today it is different, though. The pandemic has changed things. Face coverings are no longer mandatory in England, but remain so in Scotland, and so as we pass from one jurisdiction to another an announcement is made. We have formally entered Scotland, and are now legally required to mask up.

Today, we notice the border
I dismiss the last four days
and their friendly strangers
into the past
that grows bigger every minute.

I think of the past and its friendly strangers often on this journey. This train, for me, is so full of memories of strange, chance encounters with interesting characters I might never have encountered elsewhere.

There was the time I sat alongside two ladies heading away for a birthday weekend who’d brought prosecco and chocolates for the train. They’d not only had the good sense to pack champagne flutes for themselves but had even thought to bring a spare for an amenable stranger like myself. We celebrated and chatted together like old friends for the three-and-a-half hours we knew each other.

There was the time the man sitting across the table stared back at me with a look of confusion and alarm after I reached into my bag under the table and pulled out a book. He hurriedly fumbled with his own bag and then produced, with a look of relief, the very same book. “Wow we’re both reading the same thing!” he said “For a second then I thought you’d stolen mine!” We laughed, and had a fun conversation comparing notes on Denis Johnson.

There was the time a less agreeable passenger beside me loudly announced to the rest of the carriage that I was reading “Russian bullshit” – a harsh but, I suppose, factually-correct assessment of Chekhov.

There was the time I discovered a note in my bag from another passenger saying that he’d been watching me sleeping and had fallen in love. He gave his name and contact details, and suggested we go out to dinner in Edinburgh. (We did not.)

There was the time someone sitting next to me noticed the komboskini I was wearing on my wrist, and started a conversation about orthodoxy, religion, culture, and philosophy.

I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations on this train. Today I don’t speak to anyone today, though. Our masks discourage small talk. Still, this forms a new memory. The past keeps growing all the same.

The train sounds urgent as I am,
it says home and home and home.
I light a cigarette
and sit smiling in the corner.

Pulling into Edinburgh feels like coming home. I’m surprised by the strength of feeling I have for this city. I didn’t grow up here, but I arrived when I was eighteen and was in my thirties by the time I moved out. I didn’t grow up here, but I did a lot of growing up here.

I step out of the station on to Waverly Bridge and am greeted by that old familiar sight of Princes Street Gardens stretching away to the galleries ahead and the castle above. The setting sun casts its warm rays over that reassuringly unchanged skyline. This beautiful city will always feel like home. 

Scotland, I rush towards you
into my future that,
every minute,
grows smaller and smaller.

London to Edinburgh, Norman MacCaig

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Adolescence (I remembered while I was writing my previous post) is configured around friendship in a way that adult life is not. In high school friendship is a cornerstone of existence. There we’re able to forge close bonds with a small group of friends who share similar interests, experiences, and ambitions, and then we’re granted the luxury of spending all day, every day, in their company. At that age we assume that life will always be this way – and then we grow up, and discover that it isn’t.

I distinctly remember sitting in a maths class some twenty years ago with two girls, two of my very best friends at that time, doodling in our exercise books. We’d decided to draw pictures of our imagined wedding days, and so each of us sketched herself as a bride, with the other two friends as her bridesmaids standing loyally on either side. I’m sure if anyone had ever seen those sketches they would have assumed that we were fantasising, as young girls supposedly do, about marriage, but we were not. We weren’t really interested in boys yet, and in any case not one of us had included a groom in the picture. Thinking back now I realise that they were simply illustrations of the strength of our friendship, and of our shared expectation that this would continue, unchanged, into that nebulous future world of adulthood that the wedding scene represented.

Now, two decades later, both of those girls are married with children. We were not bridesmaids for each other. We didn’t even attend the weddings. After leaving high school, we went our separate ways, moved to different parts of the country, and haven’t seen each other since.

There’s nothing remarkable about this story. I’ll bet almost everyone has at least one teenage friendship that went the same way. As we transition from childhood to adulthood our interests, values, and priorities change. We lose friends, and we make friends. We learn about ourselves, and we get better at recognising what we value in others. It is not high school friendships, but those forged in our twenties that tend to be the most enduring. Twenty-one, apparently, is the average age at which most people meet their best friend.

But then we hit our thirties and life gets more complicated. We move even further afield – not just to different cities, but different countries. We start to focus on careers, marriages, kids: all of those big, important pillars of life which take up most of our time and energy. And when life gets busy, as it always does at this stage, socialising with friends begins to feel like an indulgence. Many of us fear being overly self-indulgent, and so we don’t allow ourselves that time.

And yet study after study has shown that social relationships are hugely beneficial to mental and physical wellbeing, and a strong predictor of longevity. They are not an indulgence, but essential to a long, happy, and healthy life. Still, we were all conditioned to accept that it is necessary to sacrifice some, if not all, of our social time if we are to achieve the other milestones of adulthood.

Then the pandemic came along and turned all of our lives – and especially our social lives – upside down. Enter those trite slogans about “social distancing” being “the new normal.” It caused grief, and heartache, and distress, of course, but if there is a silver lining to be found (and boy do I love silver linings!) then in my case at least it helped me to reframe and reconsider the value of all of the personal relationships in my life – including, and perhaps above all, my friendships.

With the first lockdown I suddenly found, in the midst of the chaos of adult life, that I had time to spare again. There was no commute to work, no time spent in the office, and much less time lost to mundane errands. Spending all day secluded at home somehow freed up time an extraordinary amount of time not only for the family that I share a home with, but also for those family and friends that I don’t. And what’s more, since we now had to do all of our socialising at a distance anyway, long-distance friendships became indistinguishable from local ones. Perspectives changed, and suddenly faraway friends seemed to be just as close as anyone.

In those lockdown months when life moved online I unexpectedly reconnected with old friends in new ways. It was suddenly easier to make and stick to plans. It’s easy to find time for a cup of tea with a friend when you can both do it from home, and have nowhere else to be anyway. So we did that, much more often than we ever used to. I started to meet up with gaming friends online too, in the virtual worlds that we usually explored alone. And with other friends we just picked up the phone or messaged each other more often. Sometimes we chatted away until the small hours – a special kind of indulgence that previously felt like it belonged only to undergraduate life.

Then the real magic: these friendships, newly reinforced by our digital connections, began to spill out into the real world. We started to write to each other: real, physical, handwritten letters. I hadn’t written to anyone like that for years and years, but it felt good. It was exciting to receive post again, and comforting to see the familiar loops and curls of my friends’ handwriting on the envelopes. With those letters we sometimes exchanged gifts, too: books, drawings, flower seeds. One friend sent me packs of Amiibo cards for us to use while gaming together. Another sent me a hand-embroidered t-shirt. Yet another sent a walnut-wood phone stand that she herself had carved for me. Some of these friends I hadn’t seen in years or even decades, but all of a sudden we felt closer than ever.

So then, why didn’t we do this sooner? We had the means to re-connect, online and off, all along. The pandemic didn’t bring any new means of communication. If anything, it only reminded us of the inadequacy of digital media. We began to write because we missed the real, physical, human aspect that computers and smartphones could never replicate. No, all the pandemic really did was to encourage us to look at our time differently, and to reassess our priorities.

I’ve written before about the brevity of life, and the need to spend our time wisely on the things we value most. Well, let me slightly revise that. At the top of the list, for all of us, should not be the ‘thing’ we value most, but the people: the personal relationships that support, inspire, and delight us. And they should most certainly include our friends. Our lives are short, and so are theirs, and we should spend time together before either one of us is gone. If you need convincing of the urgency with which we should prioritise our personal relationships, take a look at the infographics here.

It’s no coincidence that I’m mulling over these thoughts today, the 25th of January, Burns Night. The traditions of Burns Night are said to have begun on the 29th of January 1802, when friends of the late Robert Burns gathered on the day they believed to be his birthday (they got the date wrong – but somehow this detail just makes the story all that more charmingly human) to remember his poetry, enjoy his favourite meal, and drink a toast to the friendship they had shared.

Friendship; poetry; good cheer. Are they not the most delightful reasons to celebrate? So cheers to them for valuing their friendship, and cheers to you, readers near and far. Let’s continue to make time for each other, to keep in touch, and to truly celebrate our friendships!

Here’s a bottle and an honest friend!
What wad ye wish for mair, man?
Wha kens, before his life may end,
What his share may be of care, man.

Then catch the moments as they fly,
And use them as ye ought, man:
Believe me, happiness is shy,
And comes not ay when sought, man.

Robert Burns, 1787

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