DISCOVER Scotland by Sleeper
The humdrum nature of everyday life is a powerful shrinking ray – but here’s a walking weekend that works the beam in reverse.
THERE’S A FAMOUS exchange in the 1950 movie Sunset Boulevard which resonates far beyond the film. Joe: ‘You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.’ Norma: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Its poignancy speaks to something in all of us – something which suspects the stage on which we strut, or perhaps our part in the whole play, may be getting smaller. It’s a well-grounded suspicion, not just since not many of us grew up to be, in fact, astronauts or Olympians or major motion picture stars, but because experience tells us if we don’t grow, we tend to shrink. Our circles, our horizons, our resilience, our aspirations. You’ve got to keep your body and mind on notice that new ground will continue to need to be broken, new connections made, for them to know it’s not OK to enter the long fadeaway of age. Like muscles, when it comes to life’s opportunities, if we don’t use them we lose them. That’s not to say we can’t get them back, but doing so can seem an impossibly daunting prospect – since the smaller you shrink the bigger the obstacles appear. A 50% loss takes a 100% gain to recover.
But there’s a way for walkers to make that hyperbolic 100% gain, and reverse the trend, readily. A way to step out of the shrinking ray and take instead the Eat Me pill of a really big adventure, in just a weekend. The secret is simple enough: it costs just £55 to board the Sleeper train from London (or Crewe or Preston) bound for the highest, most isolated station in the UK, there to walk in some of its grandest country, to dine in its remotest restaurant with rooms, and to sleep amid utterly quiet, black-sky wildness, feeling again the occupant of a gigantic universe instead of a tiny hamster wheel. The trick is convincing yourself you’re the sort of person who does this sort of thing, and who can unlearn the nonsense about Britain being a small country and a weekend a small unit of time.
The Caledonian Sleeper runs from London to Scotland six nights a week, leaving Euston at 9.15pm and arriving at Edinburgh Waverley at 4.50am, where it splits into three, with sections heading for Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William. The seats are comfortable enough for a decent doze, there’s charging points, earplugs, eye mask and footrest provided, and lockable storage for your stuff (if you’re really wellheeled you can spring for a tiny room with an actual bed).
