Part 1

The noble art of going nowhere fast

There is something quietly absurd about traveling nine hours by train to cover a distance a crow would manage in two. But crows don’t have first-class seats, and they certainly don’t have a glass of Bordeaux at their disposal somewhere around the 200th kilometre, so perhaps the crow is not the benchmark I should be using.
Me voilà donc dans un Intercité plutôt confortable — tellement confortable, en fait, que la sieste me tend les bras avec une insistance presque indécente. I have resisted, heroically, because I have been accumulating a list of programming tasks on my phone for weeks, the kind of list that only gets addressed on long train journeys or during particularly dull dinner parties. Today, mercifully, it’s the train.
I don’t take the train often. The car is more convenient, the destinations I favour tend to exist in a curious blind spot in the French rail network, and the cost — well. My brother flew to Los Angeles yesterday in roughly the same time this journey will take me to reach Vannes. Carcassonne to Vannes: nine hours, two changes, and a detour via Paris that would have baffled even Verne. Geography, it seems, is merely a suggestion when SNCF draws its maps.

And yet. The train does have its compensations. At 320 km/h, the countryside doesn’t so much pass as flee — hedgerows, church spires, a stubborn tractor — all of it streaking past like a film reel someone forgot to slow down. The seat is wide, the table solid, there’s a power socket (civilisation’s true benchmark), and there is wine. There is always wine when one is not driving, and one is emphatically not driving today.
I note, with the mild satisfaction of someone who has noticed this pattern before, that my first-class carriage is invariably positioned directly adjacent to the bar carriage. Proximity to temptation as a design feature. The SNCF knows its clientele rather better than it lets on.
Bordeaux awaits, with its change of train and whatever dignified loitering a mainline station permits. But that is later. For now: 320 km/h, a glass in hand, and a to-do list meeting its long-overdue fate somewhere between Narbonne and the Garonne.

À suivre.