level 31

on departures, arrivals, and the in-betweens

A view from the new underground station exit at Paddington

Time operates differently on trains. Not the sweaty, overcrowded commute from Zone 4 necessarily, but the longer trips that take you across county lines, through sweeping countryside vistas and alongside anonymous industrial parks.

I always look forward to those train journeys: a two or three-hour cocoon of undisturbed solitude. The Wifi is too patchy for any meaningful work or doomscrolling; my mind too active (or over-caffeinated) to sleep. It’s a rare pocket of time reserved for small, innocuous pastimes like finishing half-listened-to podcasts, catching up on overflooding WhatsApp group chats, or facing up to mobile-friendly admin that I’ve been ignoring all week.

There’s something equally compelling about being tethered to the rails but hurtling forward at high speed. Once you’re on board, you have no choice but to travel in one direction — momentum without agency. Maybe that’s why trains are such good places to write. The usual procrastinations dissolve. You can’t escape at will, so you might as well make something of it.

I used to have this romantic notion of what writing a newsletter would be like: inspiration strikes, I open my laptop, and the words flow out of my fingertips and onto the page in one fell swoop. Two hours later, a polished, thoughtful piece of prose emerges that is ready to be shared with the world.

The reality is less cinematic. It’s half-baked google docs left to collect digital dust for months on end, typo-riddled passages scribbled on phone notes, and disconnected ideas left wandering through my brain looking for a station to pull into.

Last summer, on a long train ride to Devon, I thought I’d cracked it. I had the whole arc of an essay in my mind, moved to write by the blurring view outside my window. But then, almost as if by divine intervention, an oak tree fell on the tracks, stopped the train, and halted my creative momentum. The irony of being literally and figuratively derailed didn’t escape me. That essay draft sat untouched for over a year.

Now, on the 08:32 Great Western Railway service to Cheltenham Spa, I reopen the doc with a slightly different perspective as a freshly minted 31-year-old. Same shit wishful thinking, different train. (No sign of falling trees yet.)

I’m what you might call a Birthday Person. I hold them sacred as rites of passage — both my own and those of the people around me — savouring the pit stops in between rotations around the sun.

This year, on a cold November Monday evening, my birthday looked like a quieter gathering with a small group of my closest friends. We sipped and scribbled at a Drink & Draw event, my additional digit taking a welcomed back seat to the hubbub of overdue catch-ups and nervous giggling as our artistic ambitions quickly outpaced our abilities. There was that erratic energy that Mondays always bring, everyone still holding a little of the workday’s buzz as they trundled in from the rain. It was warm, noisy, wonderful.

Now that I’m officially in my thirties, I’m no longer cushioned by the novelty of a new decade. Level 31, unlocked. The direction is forward, the speed constant. There’s no side-stepping the rails, just levelling up — full steam ahead to 32, 33 and (touch wood) onwards.

I like to think of every birthday as an upgrade to my operating system: new features, new bugs, new capabilities and responsibilities to navigate. Sometimes, like every iOS update no one asked for, the upgrade breaks something that didn’t need fixing and worked perfectly fine before. Sometimes it pushes too hard, too fast, and you’re left retracing your steps, learning what to let go of and what to keep from previous iterations.

Speaking of things no one asked for, looking up word origins is another writerly cliché I find hard to shake off, and one that my phone’s 3G can just about manage passing through Stroud. The word “train” descends from the Latin trahere, meaning to pull or draw. It’s a fitting etymology: the pull of time, the draw of the future, the inevitability of the forward motion.

Ageing is relentless, but it’s a fucking privilege. That’s the deal. Some do it gracefully, others begrudgingly, (most of us swing erratically between the two), but always in a forward direction.

Maybe I like birthdays so much because they’re a rare chance to place the pin in time and say: I am here, now. A fixed moment of arrival — and imminent departure — for another orbit.

So here I am, somewhere between two stops. There’s a strange comfort in knowing that forward is the only way to go — a passenger on the rails that hurtle me from where I was to where I will be, whether I like it or not.

Onwards.