This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
At 5am Greenwich time the lights come back up, the crew come round again with coffee, creamy yoghurts and jammy pastries, and everybody starts readying themselves for arrival. We hit the tarmac and taxi in to London Heathrow Terminal 1 just before 6am on Friday. It's still dark beyond the windows as we wind our sleepy way through the empty, echoing corridors and cross glass-walled bridges over deserted baggage halls. Immigration is a doddle - a friendly officer with a strong London accent compliments my baja jacket and wishes me a pleasant journey home, then I'm out on the busying concourse.
Yet again and in a slightly nostalgic turn of events Barclays have blocked my card as it was used in a different country - to be fair this time I didn't even bother to inform them where I'd be as it doesn't seem to make the slightest difference. Nonetheless I need cash to get home.
I go outside for my first cigarette in fifteen hours, and ask three men, impeccably-dressed in long dark coats and tailored suits, if I can borrow a quid for the payphone. After some translation (they turn out to be Russian), one of them hands me his mobile and tells me to take as long as I need. With my card unblocked I thank them and turn to go, and the youngest of the three stops me and hands me a brand new Shell Formula-1 baseball cap and a Moscow fridge magnet, with a wide smile and good wishes for my journey.
Money procured I take the long ride up the Picadilly line to Kings Cross. Everything I see is familiar, but tinged with a mixture of exciting strangeness and long nostalgia. Every brick terrace, skyscraper and narrow London road we pass under the clear, dawning sky is a wonderful rediscovery, and the strings of London-flavoured conversation which wind around me, seasoned with a hundred world languages, are both refreshing and comforting.
I lug my backpack up through the tunnels from the tube to the glass and steel edifice of the new St Pancras International station. All this was under construction when I worked as a ticket inspector on this line over four years ago, now the stations are integrated under one huge canopy and rail traffic for the whole north of Britain flows through here, as well as the terminus for the Eurostar sub-Channel train. The voices around me are British, French, German and many I can't identify.
I go outside for another cigarette and the air is crisp and clean, a perfect clear, sunny British autumn morning, my breath hanging in the air in white clouds. Long-familiar London, always magical to me, is fresh and new after my time away.
I catch a fast East Midlands Trains service (called Midland Mainline when I worked this line), and on a whim disembark at Luton station, my old stomping-ground, to see who's still around. I spend half an hour chatting with old colleagues before hopping another train on to Bedford, past the hedgerow-bordered fields of my home county, the trees already changing to orange, yellow and red, the first real signs of autumn I've seen since I left.
I disembark at good old Bedford station at around 11am, and make a phone call. In ten minutes a silver car pulls up and I get to hug my dad for the first time in 15 months. He drives me home in a wash of emotions, through the town centre I've known all my life which seems suddenly impossibly small, and along by the beautiful River Ouse, lined with great, old flame-red trees.
At my parents' new house, a cosy detached two-storey outside the town centre, I get the tour and my dad heats up soup and makes me a cheese and onion sandwich while I sort through my kit. We take a short walk down to Castle Road so I can get the pork pie I've been craving for a year and a quarter. I tell my story of the last few days, and partway through unpacking I fall asleep on the sofa for four hours. When I wake, my mum is home from work. The rest of the evening is spent in reminiscence and catching up (and a wonderful venison stew cooked by my mum). I fall into bed feeling like I haven't slept in a week.
Now it's Sunday night, and I'm at my girlfriend Ellen's house in the little village of Rushden, about half an hour's drive from Bedford. Tomorrow, life starts again. I have to plan, make decisions, most importantly I have to get back in touch with people. Right now nobody knows I'm back except my close family and Ellen.
There's a soft bed with a warm girl in it upstairs, but I can't sleep - jetlag's messing with my sleep cycle. It's 1am, but my brain's still back in North America, where it's 7 in the evening. For now, I'm in a little pocket of quiet between two lives. And the journey's over. For now.
(Explanations will follow shortly).
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