So there is a certain neat irony that as I was sitting there minding my own business some guy in a rustling anorak came by, spied the book, and cried, 'Aha, that Thoreau chap!' I looked up to find him taking a perch on a seat opposite me. He looked to be in his early sixties, with a shock of white hair and festive, lushly overgrown eyebrows that rose in pinnacles, like the tips of whipped meringue. They looked as if somebody had been lifting him up by grabbing hold of them. 'Doesn't know his trains, you know,' he said.

 'Sorry?' I answered warily.

 'Thoreau.' He nodded at my book. 'Doesn't know his trains at all. Or if he does he keeps it to himself.' He laughed heartily at this and enjoyed it so much that he said it again and then sat with his hands on his knees and smiling as if trying to remember the last time he and I had had this much fun together.

 I gave an economical nod of acknowledgement for his quip and returned my attention to my book in a gesture that I hoped he would correctly interpret as an. invitation to fuck off. Instead, he reached across and pulled the book down with a crooked finger an action I find deeply annoying at the best of times. 'Do you know that book of his Great Railway what'sit? All across Asia. You know the one?'  

I nodded.

 'Do you know that in that book he goes from Lahore to Islamabad on the Delhi Express and never once mentions the make of engine.'

 I could see that I was expected to comment, so I said, 'Oh?'

 'Never mentioned it. Can you imagine that? What use is a railway book if you don't talk about the engines.'

 'You like trains then?' I said and immediately wished I hadn't.

 The next thing I knew the book was on my lap and I was listening to the world's most boring man. I didn't actually much listen to what he said. I found myself riveted by his soaring eyebrows and by the discovery that he had an equally rich crop of nose hairs. He seemed to have bathed them in MiracleGro. He wasn't just a trainspotter, but a traintalker, a far more dangerous condition.

 . 'Now this train,' he was saying, 'is a MetroCammel selfsealed unit built at the Swindon works, at a guess I'd say between July 1986 and August, or at the very latest September, of '88. At first I thought it couldn't be a Swindon 8688 because of the crossstitching on the seatbacks, but then I noticed the dimpled rivets on the side panels, and I thought to myself, I thought, What we have here, Cyril my old son, is a hybrid. There aren't many certainties in this world but MetroCammel dimpled rivets never lie. So where's your home?'

 It took me a moment to realize that I had been asked a question. 'Uh, Skipton,' I said, only half lying.

 'You'll have Crosse & Blackwell crosscambers up there,' he said or something similarly meaningless to me. 'Now me, I live in UptononSevern'

 'The Severn bore,' I said reflexively, but he missed my meaning.

 'That's right. Runs right past the house.' He looked at me with a hint of annoyance, as if I were trying to distract him from his principal thesis. 'Now down there we have Z46 Zanussi spin cycles with Abbott & Costello horizontal thrusters. You can always tell a Z46 because they go patooshpatoosh over seamed points rather than katoinkkatoink. It's a dead giveaway every time. I bet you didn't know that.'

 I ended up feeling sorry for him. His wife had died two years before suicide, I would guess and he had devoted himself since then to travelling the rail lines of Britain, counting rivets, noting breastplate numbers, and doing whatever else it is these poor people do to pass the time until God takes them away to a merciful death. I had recently read a newspaper article in which it wasreported that a speaker at the British Psychological Society had described trainspotting as a form of autism called Asperger's syndrome.

 He got off at Prestatyn something to do with a Faggots & Gravy twelveton blender tender that was rumoured to be coming through in the morning and I waved to him from the window as the train pulled out, then luxuriated in the sudden peace. I listened to the

 train rushing over the tracks it sounded to me like it was saying Asperger's syndrome Asperger's syndrome and passed the last forty minutes to Llandudno idly counting rivets.

 CHAPTER TWENTY

 FROM THE TRAIN, NORTH WALES LOOKED LIKE HOLIDAY HELL ENDLESS ranks of prisoncamp caravan parks standing in fields in the middle of a lonely, windbeaten nowhere, on the wrong side of the railway line and a merciless dual carriageway, with views over a boundless estuary of moist sand dotted with treacherouslooking sinkholes and, far off, a distant smear of sea. It seemed an odd type of holiday option to me, the idea of sleeping in a tin box in a lonesome field miles from anywhere in a climate like Britain's and emerging each morning with hundreds of other people from identical tin boxes, crossing the rail line and dual carriageway and hiking over a desert of sinkholes in order to dip your toes in a distant sea full of Liverpool turds. I can't put my finger on what exactly, but something about it didn't appeal to me.

 Then suddenly the caravan parks thinned, the landscape around Colwyn Bay took on a blush of beauty and grandeur, the train made a sharp jag north and minutes later we were in Llandudno.

 It is truly a fine and handsome place, built on a generously proportioned bay and lined along its broad front with a huddle of prim but gracious nineteenthcentury hotels that reminded me in the fading light of a lineup of Victorian nannies. Llandudno was purposebuilt as a resort in the mid1800s, and it cultivates a nice oldfashioned air. I don't suppose that Lewis Carroll, who famously strolled this front with little Alice Liddell in the 1860s, telling her captivating stories of white rabbits and hookahsmoking caterpillars and asking between times if he could borrow her knickers to wipe his fevered brow and possibly take a few innocuous snaps ofher in the altogether, would notice a great deal of change today, except of course that the hotels were now lit with electricity and Alice would be what? 127 years old and perhaps less of a distraction to a poor, perverted mathematician.

 To my consternation, the town was packed with weekending pensioners. Coaches from all over were parked along the sidestreets, every hotel I called at was full and in every dining room I could see crowds veritable oceans of nodding white heads spooning soup and conversing happily. Goodness knows what had brought them to the Welsh seaside at this bleak time of year.

 Further on along the front there stood a clutch of guesthouses, large and virtually indistinguishable, and a few of them had vacancy signs perched in their windows. I had eight or ten to. choose from, which always puts me in a mild fret because I have an unerring instinct for choosing badly. My wife can survey a row of guesthouses and instantly identify the one run by a whitehaired widow with a kindly disposition and a fondness for children, snowy sheets and sparkling bathroom porcelain, whereas I can generally count on choosing the one run by a guy with a grasping manner, a drooping fag and the sort of cough that makes you wonder where he puts the phlegm. Such, I felt gloomily certain, would be the case tonight.

 All the guesthouses had boards out front listing their many amenities ' Colour TV', 'En Suite All Rooms', 'Hospitality Trays', 'Full CH' which only heightened my sense of unease and doom. How could I possibly choose intelligently among such a welter of options? One offered satellite TV and a trouser press and another boasted, in special jaunty italics, 'Current Fire Certificate' something I had never thought to ask for in a B & B. It was so much easier in the days when the very most you could hope for was H 8c C in all rooms.