And when did you last go Interrailing with your father?
Prologue train: London St Pancras Intl to Paris Gare du Nord, 2h 24m
On the Eurostar from London to Paris on a morning in late September, as I listen to three small children on the next table enjoying three different AI-generated nurser y-rhyme cartoons on three different iPads, their parents seemingly having forgotten to pack even one set of headphones, I start to wonder what I was thinking. I am on my way to meet my dad, who lives in France, to begin a train trip across Europe that I have proposed and he, with almost imperceptible enthusiasm, has agreed to come with me on. “Train travel is a major travel trend right now because the planet is on fire!” I had told him, knowing how much he, a retiree in his seventies, likes to be on top of these things. He loves trains! I thought, equally confident that it was the kind of thing he, a man, was definitely into.
Maybe there were other reasons for asking him too, to do with his age, and my age, and a rising sense of panic. But, anyway, he had said yes, I’d arranged first-class Interrail passes and — after a series of exasperated FaceTime calls over several weeks, as we struggled to make sense of the byzantine Interrail Rail Planner app and website —we have a plan. We are off to Rome, where my parents met and married 50 years ago (just to dry up any misty eyes, they’ve been divorced for half that time), and we are taking the scenic route: travelling from France to Switzerland and then through the Alps to Italy. And, though I haven’t actually told him this part of the plan explicitly, we are going to talk.
It’s something that, in the general run of things, my father and I don’t do much. We see each other maybe two or three times a year, and we speak on the phone once a month at a push, so this will be the longest time we’ve spent in just each other’s company for —I do a quick calculation — our entire lives. Now that I’m older (43) and a parent myself (of two girls), and time has started to concertina in that strange way it does, I find this mildly horrifying. Are my children, whom I’m currently loving and cajoling and battling and soothing and coaxing into being, destined to become people I exchange sporadic small talk with every now and again? When and how will that uncoupling occur? Can I resist it? Reverse it? Is it undignified to even try? And there’s another question that lurks for me about my own dad: has he even noticed?
This isn’t my first attempt to King Canute the situation. During the mania of lockdown, with all those statistical reminders of mortality, I’d resolved t
