It’s that time of the year. Before the time for the giving of gifts comes the time for the making of lists. What were the best twenty books of the year, the best ten tv shows, the best five art exhibitions, and the top three recordings of baroque music on period instruments. I try to avoid spending time reading through such lists, although as I write this sentence it occurs to me that perhaps I should pay more attention, allowing me to compile my own list of the Best Lists of the Year.
Part of the problem is the calendar. The advent of the year’s end seems to provoke within us the desire to review the current and then to make resolutions for the next. The prevalence of this desire should not blind us to its oddness. For most of human history the “year” that mattered was the crop-cycle for basic food supply. In Europe these cycles are annual, with a season for planting seeds, a season for tending the growing plants, a season for harvesting crops, and a season when it is too cold for arable farming, during which the preservation of stored food supplies is paramount. In other, warmer climates there are two or three crop-cycles each year, but these countries had little influence on the development of the Western model of annual thought.
The modern calendar of twelve months is also puzzling, particularly for any English speakers who reflect on their language, since it includes a jumble of names that celebrate Roman gods, festivals emperors, and ordinals. January is named for Janus, the god who presides over doors and entrances including the door to the new year; February for februum, a Sabine term for purification, after which a Roman festival that occurred midway through the second month was named; March for Mars, the god of war; April probably from the Latin word aperire meaning “to open”, for this is the month in which the leaves and buds begin to open (in the northern hemisphere), although some people think the word might be a corrupt Roman form of the name of the Greek goddess Aphrodite; May is likewise a little obscure but perhaps for the goddess Maia; June for Juno the goddess of marriage, hence a good month for weddings, although some have argued that May is named for the elders (maiores, or majors) and June for the youth (juniores, or juniors); July is named for Julius Caesar and August for his adopted son Augustus, the first two Emperors in Rome after the republic was overthrown; September is literally the seventh month, although now that we have twelve months in our calendar instead of ten it is in fact the ninth month; similarly October means eighth, November means ninth, and December means tenth. What a mess.
All that said, I find myself in the penultimate week of the year, according to the Western calendar, and having no crops in the field to worry about, I need to devise a clever plan to avoid drawing up “best of” lists for the year that draws to its close and, even more importantly, to distract myself from thinking about what I should resolve to apply myself to more devotedly during the coming fifty-two weeks, which around here we refer to as 2023.
Did I ever tell you about the slow train from Vienna to Brașov? Vienna, capital of Austria, awash with wonderful art, music, food, and wine, is a delightful tourist destination for a few days – if that is all you can spare – or for many more if you have the time. It is also an important gateway to Mitteleuropa. Catch the train from Wien Hauptbahnhof to Budapest-Keleti, and from there trains run to Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, amongst other destinations. This should not come as a surprise, since all these lands and many others were once part of the vast Habsburg Empire, governed from Vienna after the split with the family’s Spanish branch. Main roads and later main railway lines spread from the metropole out to the far reaches of the imperial territories, allowing soldiers and administrators to travel back and forth on business and pleasure. (Recommended reading is Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, set just before the Great War of 1914, which led to the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.)
We spent a couple of days in Vienna in early August, en route to Brașov, a Romanian city in the Transylvania region, where one of my friends was getting married. (Short digression. He is Mexican, she is Romanian, and they met when they were both living and working in London. He is a fin-tech entrepreneur, but when the British government refused to renew his visa he went home to Mexico City, where he is now the local CEO of major international financial services firm. Their story sums up the charm of London and the stupidity of British immigration policy rather well, I think.) I had suggested that, rather than flying from Vienna to Bucharest, and then taking a three-hour train ride to Brașov, it would be fun to take the overnight train from Vienna to Brașov instead.
Why? First, taking the train generates less atmospheric carbon than taking a plane. Part of changing to a greener lifestyle means making sensible travel choices and, not having the time to take the train for the whole trip from London to Brașov and back, I thought we could at least reduce our total flying time by using the train for this section of the journey. Second, I thought it would be an enjoyable adventure, involving perhaps a dining car, bunk beds in a sleeping cabin, and then waking up in the morning to the delights of the Transylvanian scenery, to be enjoyed over a cup of strong black coffee. Third, it seems a little unfair that Peter regularly writes texts on this website about the joys of his trans-American train trips, and I have nothing to offer by way of comparison. Thus, it came to pass that I booked two tickets on the overnight train from Vienna to Brașov , scheduled time of just over seventeen hours.
What could possibly go wrong? Short answer, everything. When the train pulled into the station it looked at least fifty-years old, designed at the height of low-budget Ceaușescu functionalism. It was electric rather than coal powered, but modern it was not. There were only four or five carriages and soon all the seats were filled, with many passengers left to sit or stand in the corridors. There were no sleeping cabins. There was no dining car; in fact, no food, no coffee, no water, nothing. After three hours, the train emptied out in Budapest, only to refill with new travellers, and off we set for Brașov. The rather basic toilet facilities were soon “out of order” for most of the rest of the journey. The train travelled at a modest pace, I would guess around forty or fifty kilometres per hour in the countryside, and half that or slower when we passed through settlements of any size. At 1.30am we stopped for forty minutes at a small station near the border between Hungary and Romania, and all passports and travel documents were checked. We then travelled for twenty minutes until we stopped at an equally small station the other side of the border, for a further forty minutes, so that all passports and travel documents could be checked again.
Slow, noisy, uncomfortable, over-crowded, and lacking food, water, and basic hygiene facilities: forget the pleasures of the Transylvanian dawn, the only subject on my mind for the seventeen plus hours on the train was, how quickly will seventeen hours pass. Answer, slowly. On the plus side, the wedding was great, and Romania was beautiful, welcoming, interesting, and lots of fun.
We need to travel more by train. One day, when all cars and planes run on green energy, maybe they should have a renaissance. In the meantime, train travel makes sense and therefore building fast, comfortable train services across the whole of Europe (and everywhere else) makes sense. Not only will it lead to reduced carbon emissions it will also create work for people laying the tracks, building the trains, and running the services, and it will shorten journey times, thereby stimulating more economic activity in areas that are currently not well-networked. It is exactly the sort of public policy that pays for itself over time, with less environmental damage, higher employment, increased trade and, consequently, stronger growth rates. Unfortunately, railway mania fizzled out in England in the late nineteenth century and has been replaced with widespread deference to the motor car. That pattern is being repeated in many other parts of the world, creating significant social, economic, and environmental dysfunction. Three years ago, I sold my car and now, having no regrets, I rather wish I had done so several years earlier. So, for those of my readers contemplating making a resolution anytime soon ….
Postscript
Earlier this year, my daughter commented that I was able to make Bob Dylan relevant to everything, and she was right. There’s a Slow Train Coming.