Sharing the Homeward Journey
A letter from the train
There’s a snowy forest outside the train window. Now and then, I get a glimpse of the winter sun, hanging like an orange bauble over a frozen lake. I’m travelling home by one of my favourite train lines, the route that branches off from the main Malmö–Stockholm line at Norrköping and winds its way north through Södermanland and across Lake Mälaren. This was always the last leg of the last day on the Interrail pass, when we lived in Västerås, returning home from weeks of visiting friends and family. It’s a single-track line for most of the way and since I last took it, the shabby carriages have been replaced by new Swiss-built double-decker commuter trains. The mainline was a mess of delays this morning and these were the only trains running on time, so I’m counting myself lucky. I’ll stay on the train to its terminus in the old silver-mining town of Sala, stop for a call in the station café, then take a couple of buses the last part of the way home.
Last night, in a hotel in Norrköping, I completed the edits on the audiobook of At Work in the Ruins. The original plan was for the publisher to book a recording studio, but the nearest studio that does audiobooks is in Stockholm, so I offered to self-produce it, recording in the room under the stairs of the Red House that I fitted out with soundproofing foam last September, when I recorded the audiobook of Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s Hospicing Modernity. The only catch was that there is no heating in the Red House and last week the temperature dropped to -15C. So I was standing at the microphone in my winter coat and scarf and running a little electric heater every time I took a break.