all aboard

Recently I've written about a reading project I have bubbling away in the background - see my 26 in 26 post back in January. The idea of it is that I'll read the 26 named titles across the year. It's going really well, so far, and I've read 11 from the list, and I've also interspersed a few random books amongst those. So it's been a good reading year. It's been so good that I've been planning another reading project that I'd like to have running in the background alongside the above mentioned 26 target, but this one will have no set titles or timescale.

This new project has been prompted by a train ticket I never bought, and an adventure I never had, back in the 1980s. Let me explain. When I was in my mid-twenties, in the mid-80s, there was a train ticket available that gave a young back-packer/traveller/adventurer one month of unlimited 2nd class train travel across the rail networks of 21 European countries. This ticket was called the Inter-rail pass, and in 1985 one would have set me back £119.

It's a sadness to me now that I never managed to buy one of those passes, and take off with just the ticket, a rucksack, and boundless curiosity. I do remember feeling frustrated even at the time that I was either short of the money needed for the ticket price, or unable to take a month away from my job in order to take the trip. I either had the money, but not the free time, or I had the free time, but not the money. There was also an added time-limit pressure, because I had to be under 26 years of age to qualify for the ticket, and that particular clock was ticking down. Eventually, of course, it ran out on me.

All these years later, the £119 price tag for such a trip seems ludicrously small, but back then it was a big chunk of change. They still have similar rail tickets for sale today, though I'd qualify for the senior citizen version these days, but the rules are far more stringent. The ticket's are valid for much shorter time periods, for example on one of them I could travel only on five separate days within a one month period, and that ticket would cost me £206.26. That's not a bad price, I suppose, but the limitations on travel are quite restrictive. No suddenly deciding to hop on a train to Venice, mid-afternoon, on a whim. But on the upside, after decades of political changes, and the birth of the European Union, I could now choose from 33 countries to visit.

All of this is to say, without saying 'Never', is that I probably won't be doing a Grand Tour of Europe anytime soon. Unless I do it through the medium of print, on the page, in a novel.

A quick scan of my recent reads tells me I have already travelled freely across the borders of several different countries, in recent months. I went to Scotland in Douglas Stuart's Young Mungo. Germany in Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada. Anthony Shapland took me to Wales in Room Above a Shop. And I spent time in France courtesy of Henri Alain-Fournier, and his Le Grand Meaulnes.

I don't intend to follow any particular route, and I'm not fussed if I return to one particular country on multiple occasions. And, as I've already said, I have set myself no deadlines, nor a time-limit. Also, this project is about reading my way around Europe (44 countries), and not the European Union (27 countries) - interesting that the ticket I mention above allows travel to countries numbering somewhere between those two numbers.

To my knowledge and, admittedly, patchy memory, I've never read a novel set in Finland, or Portugal, or Hungary, or Estonia. I'm looking forward to the trip.