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I have just spent three years in the company of some of the most remarkable people in Britain. You probably won’t know them personally – or even bother to think about them, yet they are everywhere in our midst. Often they are treated by society with indifference or even contempt – all the more appalling […]

The invitation to breakfast came out of the blue from a former Sunday Times colleague who I hadn’t seen for years. As we chatted over scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in a fashionable Soho café, I realised the plan wasn’t to chew over the old days. He told me he been engaged by the national […]

“Can I have your attention please?” announces Carlos our guard over the intercom, after the train has just come to a sudden halt in what seems to be the middle of an olive grove in the middle of nowhere. “We are just about to change the wheels.” The English passengers aboard our service from Madrid […]

She had been a bright student with a good degree who had trained as a journalist, believing it was somehow an honourable career. Instead, in her first job on a newspaper she was told to dress up in a skimpy outfit and pose for a stunt in the paper simply because she had blonde hair. […]

“Can I have your attention please?” announces Carlos our guard over the intercom, after the train has just come to a sudden halt in what seems to be the middle of an olive grove in the middle of nowhere. “We are just about to change the wheels.” The English passengers aboard our service from Madrid […]

In a world dominated by anoraks, bobble hats, enamel badges and vacuum flasks, railways and fashion are not obvious partners. Most of us boys gave up finding trains sexy when we discovered girls. And most girls – of any age – have never found trains sexy at all.   So there was quite a flutter […]

“Nowt fancy” – as they say around here about the railway journey we’re about to take for 50 miles and through 26 stations on a slow train into the historic and spiritual heart of Lancashire  – passing along the way through seemingly unremarkable towns such as Preston, Blackburn, Burnley and Nelson and all the little […]

They’re the Skodas and the Reliant Robins of the railways – the trains that everyone loves to hate. They have entered the pantheon of Great Railway Horrors along with brown Windsor soup, the curling British Rail sandwich, leaves on the line and the wrong kind of snow. Could there be a moment of greater bathos […]