Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 18 July 2019

People laughed when I told them my plan but nothing beats the window seat of a stopping train hugging the Ligurian coast

The train standing at platform 1A had no air-conditioning and the heat was stupefying. Latecomers pressing into the carriage reacted to it as to a slap in the face. Those with nothing better to hand fanned themselves with their tickets.

The lady seated opposite me mistook my theatrical languor for conviviality. ‘I’ve been in Florence for a week and I’ve never been so hot in my life,’ she said. ‘But I’ve had such a wonderful time in school here learning Italian. Such a beautiful language. You sort of roll it around in your mouth as if you are tasting something delicious, like olive oil or something. And I made such good progress! I’m sure that if I’d done another week I would be fluent almost.’ A man attempting to insert a suitcase into the luggage rack above us interrupted her to gently ask: ‘Mi scusi. È la tua borsa?’ ‘What?’ she said, startled and affronted to be addressed without warning in a foreign language.

At Pisa I had six minutes to find and board the train to La Spezia. It was the tightest connection of four between Florence and Nice. Five minutes it took me to extricate myself from the carriage and one to sprint to platform 7 and fling myself on the train as the doors closed. This train was wonderfully cold and surprisingly luxurious.

Now I was sitting opposite a raven-haired Italian woman in her mid-forties shouting into one of her two mobile phones. She had conjured her interlocutor so vividly in her imagination it was as though he or she were physically present in front of her and she augmented her speech with exquisitely expressive facial and body language. My theory that she was in a cold fury was refuted when she suddenly laughed indulgently and followed it up with an interlude of fond chuckling.

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