“A seeker of radical strenght Keeps everything on track, Feeble force yields at length, Not sure where to go back. When one can’t find courage, And all the efforts seem vain, It’s advised to fight like a sage: Be powerful like a bullet train! Too much work and no play Can make a brain go astray! Determined to live and stay Can lead life into a long way.”

“Breathlessly you reach the station just as the train is arriving! But alas, the train doesn’t stop. It keeps going. It doesn’t care how forlorn you look as it passes by. It doesn’t even see you! But wait. What’s that sound in the distance? Another train is coming soon and it is yours. A train that will take you to a more beautiful place.”

“I woke up early and took the first train to take me away from the city. The noise and all its people. I was alone on the train and had no idea where I was going, and that’s why I went there. Two hours later we arrived in a small town, one of those towns with one single coffee shop and where everyone knows each other’s name. I walked for a while until I found the water, the most peaceful place I know. There I sat and stayed the whole day, with nothing and everything on my mind, cleaning my head. Silence, I learned, is some times the most beautiful sound.”

“I know you have it in you, Guy,” Anne said suddenly at the end of a silence, “the capacity to be terribly happy.”

“Of course, in our train of thought, we would all like to think we’re on the right track, or at least the same railroad company as the right track.”

“This was supposed to be yesterday. I was sitting on the Cardiff/London train, supposedly about to write this very column, and realising something quite terrible. My head was entirely empty. A vast echoing void. Bigger on the inside, but with nothing in it. You could drop a pebble in my brain and wait for an hour to hear it land. No actually, you couldn’t – that would be aggressive and unhelpful, so keep your damn pebbles to yourself.”

“My heart is warm with the friends I make,And better friends I’ll not be knowing,Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,No matter where it’s going.”