Twenty years of train journeys between Oxford and Paddington are packed into a cult travel book from 1984
Notes from Overground by Tiresias (the pen name of Roger Green) was published in 1984. It became a minor cult, and though it never sold very well, it still gets into the occasional blog today. We admirers occasionally meet and share favourite moments.
Whereas most railway travel books involve crossing deserts in clanking trains with locals selling unhygienic food through the windows at the stations, this is devoted exclusively to 20 years travelling on British Rail between Oxford and Paddington. It is funny, wistful, and occasionally alarming. If it has a theme, it is the lives wasted through commuting, which Green calls a "small, unspectacular tragedy".
The author was a civil servant, in a department secretive enough for him not to tell us what he did. On his way to and from work, however, he noted an extraordinary range of oddities or created an odd sense of reality: scenes glimpsed from the window, the conversation of fellow travellers, graffiti on passing walls, the vocabulary of rail travel (and we forget how this had begun before privatisation, along with those ads in which Jimmy Savile plugged cheap tickets.)
"Orwell foresaw it all. Loudspeakers blaring a humourless mixture of muzak and misinformation. Twenty-four hour digital clocks. Trainspeak coinages like Inter-City, Travellers Fare, Awayday, Railair, Sealink, Britainshrinkers …"
He describes the homebound scene at stations: "Daddies descend and are met. Each set of participants knows only of its own little scene … each welcomed father ought not to learn of the existence of dozens of others along the line, any more than a prisoner should hear of the execution of his fellows."
Some of us remember the graffiti on a wall just outside Paddington, which read "LONG AGO IS CLOSE AT HAND IN IMAGES OF ELSEWHERE". Green spent long conversations fretting about what it might mean, though it faded year by year, was repainted, and finally the wall was demolished. He reflects that during his classical and literary education, none of his teachers told him that the only purpose of all this learning was to solve the Times crossword on a train.
"When the train passes any kind of sporting activity, invariably nothing is happening. The bowler is always about to bowl, the referee about to start play… at our uncouth advent, the initiates freeze into a tableau vivant, waiting for us to pass before they resume celebration of the mysteries. The Grecian Urn syndrome."
He sees the arrest and handcuffing of a yobbo near Didcot. "Train moves off. Law-abiding commuters look variously annoyed, smug, curious, compassionate, indifferent ... we should not. Few of us sense the bracelets round our own wrists. But they are there, along with the uniformed escort. Man is born free, and is everywhere in trains."
Green did escape in the end, to Greece, where he bought a house next door to one that belonged to a famous Canadian singer. He wrote another book, Hydra and the Bananas of Leonard Cohen. Much of it is devoted to the fact that Cohen never turned up.
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