In blog-time, it’s been months since I went to Paris. That’s because there’s been so much other stuff I needed to post first. In real life, I haven’t actually left London yet. I’m sitting on the Eurostar at St Pancras and there’s still seven minutes until we depart.
I’ve never been a mad lover of Paris. I went quite a few times as a teenager – either in the height of summer when Paris is hellish, to break the three day drive home from camping in Austria or Italy or on school trips intended to improve our French language skills and enhance our cultural appreciation. Needless to say, whatever we got out of those trips, language and culture were not it.
I’ve liked it a bit more as an adult, on my own schedule. It’s easier to really take in the Eiffel Tower if you can sit and stare at it from the Trocadero wall for as long as you want and really let it soak in that there’s a steampunk iron monstrosity of a zeppelin mooring tower just dominating the City of Love and no one thinks that’s weird
But this isn’t about Paris. This is about the Eurostar. I’ve taken the ski train down to Méribel and it took hours but I wanted to go on the real train, the original, the direct London to Paris one. Long-distance train travel is inherently romantic, even though it actually isn’t. It’s a little bit of a leftover from the Golden Age of European leisure tours, Thomas Cook’s heyday, the Grand Tours. Yes, London to Paris is only half an hour more “long distance” than the South Western Railway train I took from Winchester to London but it goes to another country!
There’s nothing romantic at all about arriving at St Pancras red-face and sweating, carrying the travel blogger’s favourite carry-on backpack on your back and a collapsible Ikea backpack (overfull with food for two meals and a handful of last-minute bits you grabbed at Primark) hanging around your neck. There’s nothing romantic about dumping all your possessions in a tray and then spending a full five minutes emptying assorted pockets and removing watches and bracelets and then discovering there’s no repacking area so you just shove it all back into pockets and bags. There’s certainly nothing romantic about discovering that five seconds later is the point when you need the passport you just haphazardly put away somewhere.
And it’s not romantic to sit down on the floor to wait for your train to be announced because passengers waiting for the preceding Paris and Amsterdam trains are taking up every single seat in the terminal.
But you know what? It does feel quite good to be on the train, even if literally everyone else seems to be the epitome of French glamour. I’m wearing a too-big yellow hoodie and have my hair in plaited pigtails. You have noticed that’s my default hairstyle. My brand. I have quite a lot of hair, of quite unruly texture. Unless it’s confined in two plaits, it ties itself around hoods, straps, glasses, it pokes me in the eye. It’s a bit like having a badly-behaved toddler on my head. I always feel cleaner and more in control when it’s safely twisted away. But I admit, it’s not up there with French chic.
I enjoy the sensation of speed and this is good. It’s faster than my Winchester train, slightly quieter, a lot smoother. The seats are bigger and more padded and they feel so reclined. In fact, it leans back so far that I’ve spent most of the journey leaning forwards, elbows on the little stowable table. There’s a little more romance – writing, in real ink and thin paper, on the train to Paris.
About a month ago in real life, I went to Canterbury. It’s an hour and a half on the train from Waterloo. The Eurostar reaches Folkestone from further north in London in half an hour, which is pretty impressive. It’s barely more than half an hour across northern France once we’ve crossed the Channel and then we’re pulling into Gare du Nord.
If I thought the romance was lacking at St Pancras, you should see Gare du Nord. It’s the least romantic of all the grand international European stations. I spend what feels like forever running around the station both inside and outside searching for the entrance to the metro. Now, that’s not romantic either but it kind of interests me how it runs on thick rubber tyres – you could plonk these trains in the street and they’d run just as well, I reckon.
While I’ll never love Paris like I love London, I think I definitely want to go again for another ride on the Eurostar.