“Foolish travel is all about when you realise that carrying locked luggage through Amsterdam is not just about stopping people taking things out , but stopping others from putting unwanted things in...”
What this book is
Racing Trains is a travelogue — but not a guide, not a memoir, and not a record of sensible movement from A to B.
It is the first in a series of travel writings that celebrate the foolishness of travel: missed cues, inappropriate reactions, imagined connections, moments of danger, moments of revelation, and the strange freedom that comes from being temporarily unmoored.
These are mundane routes by bus, train or plane which become unexpectedly catalytic. Not because of where they go, but because of what they allow the mind to do while in motion.
Why this book exists
A travelogue about foolish journeys, movement, and the things you notice when you shouldn’t
Travel is usually sold as efficiency, aspiration, or escape: the city break, the export opportunity, the holiday of a lifetime. Racing Trains is interested in something else. It asks what happens when:
- you wait too long for the No. 44 bus
- you misread social signals on a train
- you imagine strangers too vividly
- boredom tips into invention
- danger and absurdity briefly coexist
As the prologue suggests, foolish travel produces wisdom — not by planning, but by accident…
How the book moves
The book is organised as a series of station stops; short pieces that unfold during moments of transit, delay, or enforced stillness. They include:
- bus stops in Nottingham
- commuter trains through the Midlands
- airport security queues in London
- aircraft cabins in liminal suspension
Each piece begins in the ordinary and slides, sometimes gently, sometimes violently, into the surreal, the comic, or the unsettling. The recurring figure of the Racing Man becomes a travel myth: a symbol of momentum, escape, and the impossibility of keeping pace with the systems we move inside.
Tone and register
The voice of Racing Trains is:
- observational
- dryly comic
- intermittently alarming
- quietly reflective
It is not interested in heroic travel, but in minor acts of noticing and what they reveal about power, fear, habit, and imagination. Moments of violence, threat, or social breakdown are handled obliquely, often through the narrator’s own uncertainty about what has just occurred.
Who this book tends to find
This book is often discovered by readers who:
- travel frequently but distrust travel writing
- enjoy short, essay-like prose
- notice too much while waiting
- are interested in liminality, movement, and social behaviour
- prefer wit to wisdom, and observation to explanation
A final note
Racing Trains is not about destinations.
It is about what happens when movement loosens the mind and the small, strange freedoms that appear when the timetable breaks down.
Where to go next
- For systems and absurdity → Mess Theory
- For bodies and institutions → Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers
- For satire and spectacle → TABLOID!!!
- For reflective labour and ethics → The Business Allotment