Departure from Platform 9 & 3/4’s

Departure from Platform 9 & 3/4’s 

I was working all through our final night at home, getting our house in order before our good friend Pete arrived at 6am to take us to Castle Cary station. So most of my 1st day of travel was spent groggily dosing on the Eurostar from Kings Cross St Pancras to Amsterdam.

Cousin Tim greeted us on the Amsterdam platform, easing our entry into the western edge of our journey, through feelings of trepidation, minor grief, and unpreparedness. From his balcony in Alkmaar I contemplate the steady gentle flow of healthy upright people cycling through the roundabout below. I’m reflecting how in every place we go I’ll find things that are different, and often better, than those we’ve left.

In Europe I always feel how much more elegant and thoughtful the human systems are to those in England. And I feel a deep regret for Brexit and the severed links. But still, in the cosmopolitan crowd of tourists and workers on the bridges and cobbled canal-side walks of Amsterdam, English is the common language all share. Dutch speaking voices switch seamlessly between the two.  Sleeping off a coffee shop visit high up the narrow spiral stairs of Julio’s Old Bridge Hotel, this first leg feels like a very gentle transition for us into the journey ahead, where eventually our Englishness will make us the rarity.

It seems inevitable to me that one day this style of civilisation will also be a rarity. The smart green digitally-dependent systems of Western Europe, already far in advance of Britain, are all still dependent on supply chains and energy grids which will struggle to survive the impacts of ecological collapse, even in this lovely practical country of reclaimed lowlands, where this years extreme storms uprooted  the unprotected trees that matured in easier times.

I can’t pretend I don’t love this well-provided, cosmopolitan, socially liberal, screenified life of a Western European. I say that as someone with lifelong access to its benefits.  But I always sense the shadow just behind. Of low-paid labour, daily drudgery, mountains of toxic waste and exploited earth. I think I’ll be wrestling with that shadow as we travel further east and walk among people who, even if they saved their wages as me and Shannon have done, could never afford an easy passage in the reverse direction.So finally, as we pull out of Amsterdam station in the spacious wood-panelled German express that puts Blighty’s aging overcrowded, over-priced and under-staffed rail network to shame, I feel only warmth and kinship for the Netherlands. The country of my first true love some 40 years ago, and one I could happily now call home.  But looking up from writing, I see we are already entering the graffitied concrete apartment blocks of Düsseldorf, rushing towards Romanian Bucharest, beyond which this Western European will become…completely clueless. ~ Theo