Journey to Glasgow
Andrew Leggett
On the 09:46 to Glasgow out of Euston station, it was quiet enough for me to email my submission of a paper for next year’s conference in Boulder, Colorado. Then I made my way through five carriages to the refreshment shop. 10:30, for me, was too early for a beer. But there they were in the cool drinks rack, next to the juice and well away from the diet Coke. I hesitated for a moment, then ordered a coffee and walked back. I reached into my pack, then settled into my seat and opened Ulysses to page 147, reading on from where Bloom was picking his teeth with his tongue when he comes across a vomiting terrier. He thought of ruminants before moving on to Don Giovanni.
Ulysses always presented a challenge to me, but I had made it seventy pages further than ever before, in the same flimsy-spined paperback Penguin edition I bought in my early twenties. It was not very long before I put it away, got out my phone and began surfing Facebook. I shared a couple of Star Trek memes, adding my own jokes as preface commentary. Then I find a post from my friend in New York, quoting Julia Kristeva on intertextuality. I shared it, with my added text: ‘I think she is trying to say that if you’ve never watched an episode of Batman, you won’t understand me when I shout: “Great Holy Rubber Underwear!”’
I returned to Ulysses, managing a few more pages, interrupted only by the conductor on his rounds apologising profusely for the failure of the air conditioning. The chances I might make it to where Joyce signed off ‘Trieste-Zurich-Paris 1914-1921’ on page 650, by the time the trains have taken me from London to Glasgow, Glasgow to Oban, Oban to Edinburgh and then Edinburgh Waverly to Oxford, via Newcastle, were increasing exponentially as the train moved on.
They took a nosedive when we came to Wigan, where a mob of rowdy twenty somethings got on and clogged the corridor, still drunk from their hens do the night before, stinking of vodka cruisers and complaining about the toilet, not confessing to each other which one had fouled it. They were a few minutes into singing raucous parodies of football songs when the train pulled into Preston, where they disembarked. When they were gone, the air smelled fresher. One of the quieter passengers yelled out, ‘Just imagine being the poor bastards who’ve got to marry ’em!’ The entire carriage clapped.
Then the announcement came: departure would be delayed while police searched the train for a missing prisoner. I reminded myself that I was on the way to Glasgow, where one of the bombers had been a junior doctor at the Royal Infirmary. I wondered about the man in lycra who had seemed anxious to push past the rowdy girls to get to the cycle racks at the far end of the carriage.
After a few minutes, another announcement came: that the train would be restricted to forty miles per hour on the rail to Carlisle, due to wet weather and potential flooding. If arrival in Glasgow was delayed more than fifteen minutes, we would all be entitled to compensation. Three casually dressed men and a woman in a business suit immediately jumped up, introduced themselves as litigation lawyers, and ran around the carriage handing out cards. I picked the one in the hand-knitted plaid jumper as the one most likely to be a terrorist.
I opened the book again, striving to follow the stream of Leopold Bloom’s thoughts. Soon my concentration drifted to the koan my friend George had given me: Lying down to sleep, let go of your body and let it fall. My recurrent nightmare.
Then it got worse. A mob of women got on at Carlisle. If it wasn’t for their lowland Scots, they could have been the mothers of the brides. They filled the seats around me and broke out beers and ciders from cooler bags, cackling loudly at every utterance of the fattest and most manic, all the way to Glasgow Central. I found myself recalling Bloom’s sympathetic ruminations on the bovines entering the slaughterhouse. My sympathy ran out quickly.
I waited until the last of them had gone before retrieving my luggage and alighting from the train. I hailed a taxi and was happy to pay the driver the ten pounds minimum for the short trip to the Apex City of Glasgow Hotel.
When I got into my room, I switched on the flat screen and watched the news. The first story was about the man that the police sought on the train. He had been a terrorist who escaped from the kitchen of Wandsworth prison by strapping himself to the bottom of a catering truck. It was comforting to learn that he’d been apprehended, riding a bicycle along a canal in West London.
I pulled off my Doc Martens, opened my suitcase to retrieve my harmonica, pulled my travel guitar out of its case and began to play and sing the blues. I was halfway into the second verse of CC Rider when the guest in the next room banged loudly on the wall. I quietly put down my guitar and lifted my harmonica rack from my neck. I opened a drawstring sack and pulled out the pipes. I blew gently into the chanter until I’d filled the bellows, then let rip with the ACDC solo.
Andrew Leggett is an Australian author and editor of poetry, fiction, interdisciplinary academic papers, reviews and songs. His latest collection of poetry was published by Ginninderra Press in 2022. In 2026, Ginninderra Press will publish his fiction collection, In Dreams and Other Stories. He is an Associate Professor with the James Cook University College of Medicine and Dentistry. Andrew Leggett at ē·rā/tiō.