Thursday 6 March

There is something most therapeutic and calming about train travel. As a child my father would tell me of the grand opening of the Manchester to Liverpool railway in 1830, of Stephenson going like the clappers to Eccles with the fatally injured Minister of Trade who had inadvertently stepped in front of his Rocket; of the Duke of Wellington entering the Manchester environs and being pelted with stones as the tricolore hung provocatively from bridges inches above him; of the Prime Minister then opting to remain within the safety of his carriage as he shook hands to round off a brief but much-celebrated visit to our sleepy city. In our six-shelf compartment within the Krakow to Berlin Schlafwagen, there is just enough room to shake our heads at the appalling smells already created by our fellow dormers, but when Bateman tries to unpack some treasures plundered from Poland’s fair streets (and art galleries) he finds little room to shake his booty. The buffet car screams for us before the whistle has time to sound.

Having given a nation your time, patience and money - along with a splash of blood and patch of skin - one may feel a certain entitlement to move on, but just as Poland appears to be ratcheting her steely grip into something approaching a stiff wave goodbye, we find she tightens it one last time, without warning. The train is dry. We discover this innocent, gut-wrenching fact only after traversing at least a dozen juddering carriages, each packed with screaming Scandinavian teenagers returning home from a fieldtrip, each teenager in his or her own varying state of hysteria and undress. Poor Bateman lasts only four cars before glancing askance at a tightly-knickered blonde. The fact that we are running, I tell myself, will make the beer taste all the sweeter when we stop. The train is dry – that is the law. You must have a ticket to be on the train – the conductor with the moustache has taken ours, we explain to the other conductor with the other moustache. We get shouted at in Polish. I give him the option to shout at us in English, German or French but he prefers to shout at us in Polish in much the same way as I would choose to use Italian if describing a particularly beautiful woman or protesting a sudden rule change in a long-running parlour game.

Yet has this country let us down before? Never in the long run, and we’re on this train for 11 hours. After the teenagers have put their far-too-relaxed schoolteacher to bed and eventually cleared the bar, our supplier of pickled cabbage juice unexpectedly lets her hair down. Beer is steadily secreted from her back passage – she is truly a miracle worker! Or at least healthily in advance of the law that in April will change to permit such simple decadence, announcing a period during which the train guards will, presumably, be wearing Hawaiian shirts while blowing their whistles in time to the latest jazz. Still, I cannot see them letting go like the maverick female Policeman who matches us drink for drink (why am I reminded of Jemima?) in the rickety smoking platform between carriages 66A and 66B most of the way to Germany.

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