“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape.”

Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel (2002)

To travel is the thing. Not always to arrive, but to travel.

I sometimes wonder if we have lost the art of travel. Some of my writing has been about journeys. A single country road or a train journey is often a metaphor for a wider world.

A couple of years ago I wrote about the Orient Express train route. Not the posh tourist train, but the regular overnight train from Paris to Vienna. Nowadays it has been truncated to run only from Strasbourg to Vienna. That piece is nicely metaphorical. You can read it here.

In an article which is one of my personal favourites, called 'The Road to Abergwesyn', a thin ribbon of tarmac becomes a metaphor for all Europe. You can read an excerpt from that article here.

In another article (published in May 2008), the arrival of a train is a metaphor for the coming of spring. The article is called 'Spring, Storks and Trains: a Visit to Brcko'. I mention it here because it won a prize from the British Guild of Travel Writers. I was dead chuffed, and the Guild award made me see this modest piece of prose in a new light. It is only brief - about 800 words. You can download it here: