The Hours Your Ticket Leaves Out

Before I tell you anything else about this book, I would like to give you a small task. The next time you set off anywhere, even two towns along, give the first leg of the journey a name that has nothing to do with where it ends. The hour of river light. The ride past the closed shops. The wait with the blue benches. That is all. You have given the journey a place in your memory before it is over.

It sounds too slight to matter. But most of us plan a trip as a row of pins on a map, and the hours between the pins get treated as packing material around the real thing. Then the trip is opened, the packing falls away, and we are left with a curious feeling: we crossed a country and remember an inbox. We reached the coast and remember the queue for the photograph.

Make Time for the Crossing is my attempt to give those hours back their weight.

The bench before boarding

The book follows the shape of a single journey, from choosing a route to coming home again. It begins before any ticket is bought, because a route is already a choice about what you will notice. I ask you to give a trip one clear centre and then draw its edges, deciding what it is allowed to leave out. "While I am there, I might as well" is the most dangerous sentence in travel planning. It can turn a week into a relay race.

From there we leave the house. There is a chapter on giving departure a morning, on the station that belongs to the people working in it long before it belongs to you, and on what a train window can teach once you stop treating the view as a slideshow. There is a chapter on choosing the local train when it suits you, the one that stops often enough for someone to step down with a bag of groceries. And there is one on letting a ferry keep its own timetable while the shore you left turns slowly into shapes.

A crossing begins wherever one way of being gives way to another.

Slow, but not precious

I should say plainly what this book is not. It is not an argument that slower is always better. A fast train may give someone with little time an extra evening with a person they love. A direct route may be the only practical one for a traveller's body or budget. I have written for readers with limited money, mobility, leave or energy, and I have tried to take those limits as seriously as the pleasures.

So alongside the windows and the water you will find the plain, necessary work: checking documents and current information with the people who actually run the services, planning a transfer in physical steps rather than trusting a minute count on a screen, deciding what must stay in your hand while you wait. Official travel, transport and health sources stand behind the practical guidance, and the details always belong to your own dates and circumstances.

The scenes in the book are imagined, and I say so each time. A traveller who misses a connection and notices someone buying an orange across the concourse. Two friends who disagree about how early to reach the platform. A family deciding whether a well reviewed gallery is worth the only open afternoon. I wanted readers to try a decision on for size without pretending that a stranger I invented had offered me testimony. Where I have a sourced fact, I give it. Where I do not, I ask you to look closely instead.

A wider route

The journey opens outward through North America, Asia, Europe, South America and Africa: a long daylight train through plains, mountains and canyons, a guide to why the most famous kind of train is not always the right one, intercity roads that show you the country between major arrivals, an arrival at a station in a North African city. None of these places is there as a backdrop. Each is somebody's home first, and the book keeps returning to that. The bus stop that is the whole point of the journey for the passenger who gets off there. The first street outside a station, with its pharmacy and its row of taxis, which has no interest in being memorable to you.

The crossing home

The last crossing in the book is the one back into ordinary life, which is where a journey sometimes becomes clearer than it was on the road. I cannot promise you a perfect itinerary, and I would not want to. What I hope to leave you with is a way of looking that survives the trip, one you can carry onto a commuter platform as easily as a ferry deck.

If you have ever arrived somewhere and felt that you missed the journey, or if you simply have a weekend and a train that goes two towns beyond the one you know, come and make time for the crossing with me. Pack a small bag. Name the first leg before it is over.