Travels in a Very Ordinary Country (ZTw Return, S2 Ep. 41)

 (excerpt from the notebooks of Simon Blush, 20^th century travel writer and often credited with the invention of “fake news”)

— I got off the train in St Guillaume, for no better reason than the fact that the train stopped and nobody moved, so I thought I would justify the driver’s decision to halt the train by picking up my rucksack and being the only person to alight on to what would immediately seem to be the essential déjà vu platform: I was sure – and I am sure today –  that never before had I been on this train platform and yet it was as if I had used this self-same train platform not once before, nay, but on many occasions, to the extent that I could almost have said, “This is the train station of my home town and this is the platform I use every day to go to work just as I used it on numerous occasions to go to school”.

An aside: I am of the understanding that schoolchildren rarely take the train to school today. Why is this? I may be wrong. In fact, I almost certainly am wrong because not only do I have zero children but also I practically never take the train at what could be considered “going to school times” or “coming home from school times”. So please take this paragraph as having limited scientific relevancy.

Did I say, “This is the train station of my home town and this is the platform I use every day to go to work just as I used it on numerous occasions to go to school”? You don’t know, and neither do I. Take my word for it.

Back to St Guillaume, the station and indeed the town. Despite the fact that not a soul other than myself actually got off the train, the station was fairly busy. There were people waiting for trains (and signs informing of their arrival and departure) and station employees doing typical things done by station employees the world over. There is a lot more to do at a station than just sell tickets to travellers, needless to say, so the number of people engaged in whatever activities their job description affords is inevitably higher than what we might at first glance imagine. I have done the calculation for you, suffice to say. You do trust me, don’t you? As if!

At St Guillaume most people seemed to be shall I say working class and not very well turned out. Now, this was a Monday, and as a result people were not wearing their Sunday best, had not spruced themselves up nicely for church or for a stroll on the prom, and were simply going about their menial workaday lives, and I would like to stress that I mean nothing derogatory or demeaning when I say that. I am but a humble observer, and if I see a 40-something, sweaty, overweight slob in grubby clothes suddenly pull out a sword and decapitate another man, execution style, and then kneel down by his side and start singing what sounded like a hymn, my duty is to write down what I saw, to bear witness to the horrific event.

Not that this happened, of course. I didn’t say it did. But it could have, and if it had, and I had been on the scene, on the platform, so to speak, I would have recorded the facts as best I could. You know it didn’t happen, and so do I. I like the fact we’re both on the same page. Of my notebook.

In these digital days of Instagram and Tik Tok and what have you, perhaps it’s hard to appreciate the job of the travel writer who doubles as a kind of social commentator in a very different way to the “influencer” or “YouTuber”. We are writing of a time way back in the middle of the 20^th century; there was TV and radio and printed news and maybe most of it wasn’t particularly exciting but it’s how we learned what was going on. Telephones, of course, we had in our homes and in those quaint red boxes that you can find in London even today. Telepathy wasn’t as frowned upon as it is today, I might add; my father was a remarkably gifted telepathist and was able to converse, if that’s the word, perhaps “communicate” would be more exact, with other talented telepathists. Alas, I inherited none of his telepathicity and had to rely on postage stamps and the telephone.

There was nothing going on in St Guillaume that day so I decided to walk to the nearby cliffside village of Fujikawa. It was a lovely sunny day, I had just finished a hearty meal consisting of a ham sandwich and a bag of crisps, and I adjusted my sou’wester accordingly, and set out, throwing caution to the wind, swords or no swords. It was going to be a grand day.

• Simon Blush, 1971, as revealed in his scratty little notebook unearthed by Heen Martínez in 2023, and published here for the first time, online, in the Zaragoza Twins WordPress blog in early January 2024.