I am going to post the account of my weekend in chunks, probably over the next few days. There is this entry, about my journey and getting to places, another about St. Pancras station, one about seeing Regina Spektor live in Hammersmith on Friday night, one about getting lost in Chelsea, one about the Abstract America exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery and possibly one about the universe’s attempt at thwarting my journey home and my epic victory against the evil forces of public transport.

I was in London last weekend too, but for a Mesh gig in Islington and I went to the National Gallery and British Museum. This was all such familiar territory that it didn’t quite warrant even one journal entry of its own. The venue, museums and food were all standard favourites and the only new thing was staying in a rather dilapidated but warm and cosy £30 a night hotel near Finsbury Park. I could write about this hotel but it would be unfair, it is very cheap but also very clean and warm. It is only the snob within me that wants to write about it, the guy who owns it is also a very nice, friendly and welcoming chap.

So, I didn’t set off for London until quite late on the Friday. I’d booked the day off work and my train was not until 12:30pm because this was the earliest of the cheapest tickets when I booked. Trains, buses and tubes trains are my default mode after having lived in North London for a few years and also commuted to London from elsewhere. I also do not drive so I have always used public transport for every distance over a couple of miles that I need to travel.

I gathered my ‘travel light’ bag and threw in the absolute essentials for an overnight and little else. Clean underwear, hair brush, deodorant stick, eue de cologne, one day’s medication snipped off a blister pack, nail clippers, ibuprofen, scarf and umbrella – both required, book, ipod, camera and all the tickets, reservations and printed maps I need. The idea is that I can carry this all around with me the following day without discomfort.

I walked to the railway station unable to stop myself grinning like a drugged retard, I was off to see Regina Spektor play at the Hammersmith Apollo that night and see the Abstract America exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery the following day – this is too much excitement for me!

I arrived at Nottingham station quite early, and ate a sandwich and oat bar I’d bought whilst I waited for the train to arrive, watching all the people coming and going and transitioning between places. I was trying to work out which people milling around were locals starting or ending their journeys from or to elsewhere, who were foreigners in the land of Nottingham and which of them were caught in the liminal state of switching trains just passing through without really being there, using Nottingham as a sort of nexus for an entirely different journey.

Train stations, bus stations and airports – airports more than anything else – are not real places, they are gaps between real places. When I hear of people living in airport terminals or on a tube/metro/train network it fills me with a deep, existential dread, as if these souls are just looping around in a constant liminal state, between place, time and reality, like a lost call in a telephone exchange.

Setting foot onto the train is leaving this state, it is where the journey begins, even for the fifteen minutes of waiting while the train fills up with people and waits for its scheduled departure it is the journey. If I step into a train carriage which is not going to move, which I have at museums and other times, such as a cafe in an old railway carriage I vaguely recall, it confuses me. It is like traveling to nowhere.

Twitter: “Sitting on an East Midlands train is like visiting the 1980s.”

Some of the trains on the East Midlands line are getting rather old, and the carriages have not been refitted. I was one of the first onto the train (as demonstrated by the above photo – it was a packed train when it left). Sitting there it felt like I had stepped into the 1980s by accident, I was in this environment from the past with no clues or signals that twenty-five years had passed since this carriage was fitted. It is one of the original Intercity 125 sets, and the only change has been recovering the seats with material that could have easily been used by British Rail in the 1980s. When people filled the seats and got out their laptops, netbooks, smartphones and idiotphones – I can’t think what else to call the mobile phones that have not been deemed ’smart’ by people in marketing departments – it suddenly felt like I was back in the present.

I listened to Regina Spektor on my iPod and read some more of Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac, a book which is taking me ages to read – I can only read it in small chunks because I want to think about half an hour’s reading for an hour before going back and reading more.

There was some minor annoyance of having a hyperactive university student sat opposite me, unable to sit still or shut his pointless disconnected mouth. He stank of many unpleasant things all at once, both literally and metaphorically. He never said a single thing that did not use the words “I”, “me” or “myself”. He seemed to put all of his effort into micromanaging a social life and network of people that act mostly as self-assurance for the self-obsessed ego that was slopping toxic psychic waste all over the place.

Twitter: “Urgh! I hate boys. They smell of farts, noise and lynx.”

Approximately one-hundred and five minutes later I was deposited at London St. Pancras station. Armed with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS15 camera I went for my first proper photography binge in a very long time.