In praise of the train I always miss

I have never once made a connecting train, and I have stopped treating this as a flaw in my character. For years I read it as carelessness, the sort of thing an organised person would have grown out of. Now I think it is closer to a preference I had not yet admitted to myself. I do not want the tight connection. I want the two hours in the wrong station with a coffee going cold in front of me, because that, it turns out, is where the travelling actually happens.

Consider what the efficient route asks of you. It asks you to treat the journey as a cost, a thing to be minimised, a grey stretch between two bright points that are the real purpose. Door to door in the shortest possible time, no dead hours, no waiting. It is a way of getting somewhere that treats the somewhere as the only thing worth having. And I understand the appeal, I do, when there is a meeting at the end or a child to be collected. But most of my journeys have no such thing waiting, and for those I have come round entirely to the long way.

The long way gives you the hour before arrival, which is the best hour there is. You are nearly somewhere but not yet, and the not yet is the whole gift. The light is doing something over fields you will never see again. The carriage has emptied out to the few who are going all the way, and the few who are going all the way have a particular quiet about them, the quiet of people with nowhere left to be until they get there. I have had conversations in that hour that I have carried for years, with strangers I will never meet again, precisely because neither of us had anything to gain from the other and nothing to do but talk.

The night bus is the purest form of it. Nobody takes the night bus who is in a hurry, because the night bus is never in a hurry itself. It stops at towns whose names you will forget by morning, at a petrol station lit like an aquarium where a man is mopping a floor nobody has walked on. You half sleep and half watch, and the country goes by in a way it never does at speed, close and dark and specific. You arrive creased and cheaper and knowing something you cannot quite name.

There is a station cafe I think about often, in a town I reached by accident because I had, of course, missed the train. Four in the morning, one other customer, a woman reading a paperback with the cover folded back, the espresso machine ticking as it cooled. Nothing happened. We did not speak. I have been to famous places that left less of a mark than that room did, and I have thought a great deal about why.

I think it is this. The efficient journey is designed to give you nothing to remember, and it succeeds. The memory needs slack, an unplanned hour, a wrong turning, a delay long enough to make you look up from your phone and out at the actual world you are moving through. You cannot schedule the moment that stays with you. You can only leave enough room for it to arrive, and the room is exactly what the fast route sells you the right to skip.

So I miss my connections, and I mean to go on missing them. Somewhere down the line there is a cold coffee and a stranger and an hour with nothing in it, and I would not swap that hour for all the time it costs me.