Night Train, Radio 4
This Cultural Life: Neil Jordan, Radio 4
A night train has a whiff of romance and intrigue, espionage and sudden death.
You don’t get that with a budget airline.
So escape the anxiety about the weight of your luggage and which gate to dash to and catch the night train in the company of travel writer Horatio Clare – with a name like that, he is made for smoky palaces of railway stations and old fashioned adventure.
Clare starts off at Gare de l’Est in Paris and travels through time and the radio archives, putting his finger on the pulse of train travel from the Orient Express to the humble French couchette.
Couchettes are not wagons lits – the sleek and darkly shining blue sleeper carriages; velvet and marquetry; dining cars with cordon bleu cooking, beds with proper linen and a bell push, an attendant sat at the end of corridor wrapped in a blanket.
But there’s something about the couchette with those little ladders up to your bunk and the mini soaps.
Things go awry for Horatio, but it’s part of the adventure.
He paints faded blues and pigeon greys, a sky out of a Sisley painting; a young woman in tears listening to music in the Parisian dawn… glimpsed from the night train.
“There’s something lovely about a slow train. I always travel with my nose pressed against a window,” he says.
And there’s something equally lovely about sharing the journey.
There’s something lovely about a slow train. I always travel with my nose pressed against a window
— Horatio Clare
Oscar winning director, screen writer and novelist Neil Jordan featured on This Cultural Life.
His films include Company of Wolves, Interview with the Vampire and Michael Collins.
Jordan is originally from Sligo and grew up in a house full of books and art in an Ireland still wedded to superstition, he said.
The conversation turned to his award winning film The Crying Game and that central character, Dil, played by Jaye Davidson.
Jordan wrote into his contract that whatever distributor took it on could not change it or recut it. He also wrote to critics asking them not to give away the twist – that Dil is transsexual.
One Harvey Weinstein put up huge resistance and said he’d only take the film if Jordan cast a woman as the trans character. But Jordan said: “Jaye or nobody.”
There’s a freshness about someone who has not acted before, he said.
He was proved right and the rest is film history.