You know you’re in trouble on an English train when they start handing out tiny bottles of water.
Such was the case on a rainy Sunday afternoon at York Central. My train home was on time until, two minutes before it was due, it wasn’t. An announcement: “for the attention of passengers on platform 3: due to a failure of collective imagination, your train has disappeared into a puff of curdled possibility just south of Thirsk.”
The man in the travel centre was unflappable. He wore two things: the air of an official diviner, and red robes of ceremonial office (in this case, the London and North East Railway).
His eyes focused on points beyond our shoulder as he told us to gather on the delayed train sat at platform 5a. If any was to head south, this was the likeliest, and we huddled masses could hunker down in its carriages.
I followed his mystical advice, saying goodbye to my companion at the platform and finding a seat in coach D for DESOLATION. The people on the train were fraught, having waited here over an hour already, Scotland a lunchtime memory, London a fading future dream.
William Gibson has a theory that jet lag is your soul being left being on the other side of the world, waiting to come back to you like lost luggage. In the liminal space of a delayed train, the spirit hardens against one terribly plausible future. Scientists call this the rail replacement bus of the mind.
The Scottish man tasked with distributing the Highland Spring was a wee burn of cheeriness in our carriage of doom. “My shift finished an hour ago,” he said, to no one in particular. “It’s always overtime somewhere.”
At 6pm the announcement came: we wouldn’t be moving til seven at the earliest, and even then, only as far as Doncaster. Plans change quickly in climate change affected English winters. I was meant to be changing trains at Grantham, with time enough spare to make a quick pilgrimage to its stone tribute to the mighty woman who made all this possible. I had been warned earlier about this: “please don’t get arrested at the Margaret Thatcher statue.”
I did the maths and realised my dreams of returning home that night were increasingly unlikely.
I stuck my free water in my pocket and abandoned my travels til tomorrow.
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Tomorrow came and is now today, and the broken rails and landsips of Sunday seem to have been fixed and patched up respectively.
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On Saturday, as Valentine’s Day turned into Valentine’s Night, we took a walk by the Ouse, the sky orange and the footpath increasingly One With The River.
Even light relief Guardian columnists are writing about the endless rains and noticing that normal might not be coming back.
The only way to future-proof England’s transport infrastructure and communications networks is to invest heavily in rail, building new lines and connections and shoring up the stuff we already have.
But instead, I look out on new roads being built, inducing further demand for SUVs, 4x4s, and other increasingly inefficient and outmoded forms of transport.
In lyrics for my band The Highchurches I write about England disappearing under the mud, muck and silt; looking out the window of my train, these songs to be coming true in real time. Glancing up, I see brand new out-out-town housing estates already underwater.
Who to live in these estates and houses in the middle of nowhere? How will these people get to schools, theatres, and places of work and worship? Where will the kids play, mingle, and dream?
Answers on a soggy postcard, please.
jamesofwalsh 
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