GCSE English Language — Paper 2

In Praise of Slow Travel (Modern travel writing, 2019) There is a particular kind of stillness that belongs only to a train pulling away from a station — a moment when the platform slides back and the world opens, and you realise that the journey has, finally, actually begun. I have been travelling by train across Europe for three weeks, from the grey northern coasts of England through France, into Spain, and back through Italy. I have covered slightly more than four thousand miles. I have not once felt the urge to arrive. This is the peculiar gift of slow travel: the journey is not something to be endured before the destination — it is the destination. On a train, you cannot pretend that the space between places is dead time. The light changes. The landscape shifts from flat plains to the violent geometry of mountains. You eat, sleep, read, talk to strangers, and wake up somewhere entirely different. What we have given up in our enthusiasm for budget airlines is not merely time but texture — the accumulated sensation of distance, of genuinely moving through the world rather than being teleported between airports. We arrive exhausted by airports and call it travel. We do not arrive anywhere; we are deposited.

Letter from a Traveller on the Great Western Railway (Victorian letter, published 1847) To the Editor of The Times, London Sir, — I write to you from the railway carriage itself, having just completed the journey from Bristol to London Paddington in two hours, thirty minutes — a feat which, not ten years since, would have required a full day's jolting discomfort by stage-coach. The sensations of railway travel are difficult to render in prose. One sits in what amounts to a small furnished room, drawn at a speed which the eye cannot reconcile with safety, and yet is perfectly safe. The fields rush past in a green continuity that begins to resemble painting more than landscape. Villages appear and vanish before one has formed an impression of them. Whether this constitutes genuine travel, I am not certain. My father, who journeyed by mail-coach, knew every public house between Bath and London, every stretch of bad road, every ostler by name. He arrived with knowledge accumulated mile by mile. I arrived knowing nothing of the country I had passed through — only that I had passed through it very quickly indeed. Speed, it seems to me, is a form of abstraction. The railway gives us distance; whether it gives us travel is another matter entirely.