Long Coach Journeys

Long coach journeys are both wonderful and vexing. They provide both the opportunity for a magnificent amount of reading, and the curse of immobility in a vehicle that could be caught in a traffic jam at any moment. Generally, the opportunity outweighs the curse, as my recent twinned seven hour coach journeys to Nottingham and back can attest. With one whole anthology and three newspapers read, an epic letter written, and much thinking done it was quite the experience. Sadly, none of it was work-related thinking as there's still no work, but it was still worthwhile. Constructive thought is always useful, and reading can soothe a savage torment.

Long journeys can make people so bizarrely stressed, those people who have yet to acquire the skill of Zen travel anyway. Even if you're late, even if the journey is delayed and you will certainly miss your connection, there is nothing you can do to change it. The world is your stage, and the best thing is just to sit back and enjoy the ride through the scenery of your world. No amount of looking at your watch, cursing the driver for accidents outside of his control, and bowing your head in frustration will let you catch your connection in time, half-demented man who was across the aisle. Raving is not the solution.

There is a limit to the opportunity of long coach journeys, of course, as anyone who's spent more than twenty four hours travelling to Budapest, Bratislava or Warsaw would confirm. Once a travelling sleepover enters into the equation, paired with an inability to sleep in strange places, any journey becomes an insomniac nightmare of waiting for each service station while becoming progressively more and more tired and incapable of even reading to assuage the boredom. Finally, you emerge from the coach at your destination, blinking into the light as if you've never seen it before, and wondering how the world works without wheels underneath you. On the positive side, however, the reality of having travelled a long distance is something not to be missed. Travelling is real by coach or train. Real. Never fly, if you can avoid it.

As I write this, the supremely daft Rutger Hauer film 'Blind Fury' is playing, and being rather entertaining. Never would I like to see it again, but for a one-time foray into silly action it's unsurpassed, if a little gory. Also coming in for a verdict is the anthology 'A Study In Sherlock', which was problematic. With the exception of 'The Seven-Per-Cent Solution', in my experience there never has been a Sherlock Holmes pastiche to live up to the writing in the original stories, and perhaps there never will be another. 'A Study In Sherlock' is an interesting idea, a collection of stories inspired by and orbitting the Holmes canon, spinning off into a multitude of directions, but ultimately the whole just seems to have writing style no better than a bestseller pulp so it fails. Also, some of the stories are barely even tangentially related to the canon so it feels like quite a ragtag collection. Maybe next time will be better. Maybe I missed the point.

O.