ABSTRACT
My first proper encounter with mainland Europe, aside from family holidays as a child, was when I went round it by rail as a student in 1988. Somehow, Britain didn’t really count to us as ‘Europe’ proper, and it was only when we had crossed the channel and boarded the first of those many trains at Calais that we felt really ‘abroad’. You don’t know what it feels like to live on an island until you leave it. My memories of that trip are of an unprecedented sense of huge expanses of land – we could have gone all the way to China without having to cross water again. We also encountered the novelty of the land border – waiting in a dusty Spanish town to cross into France, being woken in the middle of the night by an irate East German guard halfway to the strange island that was West Berlin, and then coming back on a night train that had started its journey in Moscow.
