Travelling at night alone

I travel a lot. I have to, as a motorsport journalist and beyond that simply because I can. Or maybe need to.

It’s not something I’m especially keen to romanticise — the budget of a freelancer does not see me doing it in luxury and although I’m good at it, I don’t necessarily think it’s particularly good for me. Not to mention the environmental impact of the 25 flights I’ve taken this year already is distinctly not great — and I have six still to go.

To do longhaul on a budget — to be honest, to do any form of travel on a budget, you need to be fairly physically robust. At least, the way I do it you do — so it’s a massive advantage to me that I’m physically abled, tall, strong and able to take quite a lot of dehydration, heat exposure, cold, extreme sleep deprivation, etc.

You also need maybe something slightly dysfunctional in your character, or whatever it is that makes me enjoy three quiet night hours, alone on transport, in the never-temperate cabin of a coach or plane or train.

It’s not just the mental resilience required for this sort of nonsense, which is considerable —bundling off a fourteen hour coach journey into the nearest 24 hour cafe to carry on writing takes a certain mental athleticism. There is something liminal and secure and entirely isolated to travelling at night alone.

Travelling alone in daylight is also a thing — which is mostly noisy and busy and tiring. Maybe it’s just that I do that so much that’s given me the appreciation for the quieter night time hours but there is something deeply silent and magical about the moment at 3am when all the world is dozing around you.

A little of it is the apocalyptic fantasy — that all your problems suddenly disappear because the world is disrupted but nowhere near that aggressive, it’s just that no one else is awake. People tend to sleep on night planes and buses — and I do, a bit but there’s an intense pleasure to being awake, surrounded by the peacefulness of slumber.

Which is absolutely me romanticising it because in reality, the long hours of realising how badly your leg is in pain from the cramped seat, that you can’t move enough to relieve the pressure on a spine that’s had all your luggage on it for several sweaty miles before you got on here… None of that is actually pleasant.

But the almost suffocating drowsy heat of a cabin, surrounded by people you’re very unlikely to see ever again, is a peculiar sort of isolation. It doesn’t feel despairing — you’re in transit, a thing is occurring and you’ve played your part in ensuring that by getting on it.

Because I’m old, the almost nausea-wave tiredness of true exhaustion, head swimming in the drowning pool of sleep, makes me think of the Manics — I’m running on loneliness — but with that as no bad thing.

For the anxiously overworked, those moments of full privacy — from intrusive thoughts about work, from the pressure of deadlines, from the nagging feeling you should be doing something - are very rare. To have time to seriously think, for anyone, is even moreso.

At 4am even my international twitter is soundly asleep. I can’t find anything interesting I should be reading, sometimes I’ve not even got data to load it . It’s not the smartphone making it this way but when I travel for work it is sacrosanct time, during which I can’t really be doing anything more. I’m already on a work clock (although hardly anyone gets paid for travel hours) so I can’t berate myself about that and usually there’s no way of doing anything even if I was inclined.

The soothing nature of watching lights and dark shapes pass by a window pleases the base mammalian brain with just enough quiet stimulation. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored on a long journey — although certainly occasionally in airports and stations where the liminality is far more claustrophobic.

Deep thought isn’t something I get much time for, at least of the navel-gazing, brain-sifting type that amounts to mental laundry. It’s no secret rich people book spa days for exactly this sort of thing and that the rest of us combine some sort of anaesthetic fix in the pub with repetitive actions or a hobby like running or knitting or turning every day actions into ritual.

Or, to be honest, that most of us don’t get enough time for it, live in a constant state of needing to tidy our own heads and indeed knowing full well how many crusty mugs lurk in the depression crevices of our minds.

I’ve made most of my drastic life choices on long night time journeys recently. I say “drastic,” I actually mean the most reasonable and balanced ones rather than those driven by panic.

I desperately crave space to think most of the time and know I enjoy travelling but it wasn’t until, on a coach through the darkened hills of western Bosnia, I realised I used the latter for the former that I understood why I weirdly enjoy the harrowing tiredness of a journey that takes over 24 hours, stuck in the same clothes in various tin cans.

So when I say I don’t recommend it — maybe I kind of only do if you slightly know it yourself. If the pattern of motorway lights through a coach window or the LED brocade of cities far beneath your flight has ever soothed you, if you don’t get much time without some responsibility or other tugging at your skirt, if you know you’ve not changed your headsheets for months and it would be so nice to quietly fold them for awhile, unhurried.