Last week I took the TRAIN to Rome, all in one day, which was extremely exciting if you’re me! Although getting to St Pancras for the 05:40 Eurostar was a bit dreadful – I especially remember one French-speaking man picking up his suit jacket from the luggage screening belt, and just staring at it helplessly for several seconds before sort of flailing his arms into it. But it was blooming lovely to slump into a double seat and watching the sun rise along the tracks over Lille.
The centre of Paris is so close together that whenever I need to change trains there, I usually just walk between stations – it’s much less faffy than the metro/RER, and means getting to actually see the city for even that short time. Walking to Gare de Lyon went past Place de la Republique, where the monument to the Third Republic has also become a monument of the city’s response to the attacks last year. It’s definitely a monument, not a memorial – the tone is solidarity (lots of flags of different countries) and defiance.
‘Meme pas peur’ – something you might say to a playground bully, ‘[I’m] not even scared!’ or ‘You don’t scare me!’
On Boulevard Beaumarchais I bought a croissant. Although I got to Gare Lyon in good time I nearly missed the 10:41 train to Italy (to Turin, to change for Rome), because the queue for security checks was as long as the queue for the platform. But I made it, and ate my croissant as we passed through the outer suburbs just after eleven.
The Paris-Turin train goes past, and then under, the Alps, when it crosses the border into Italy. (I took a lot of very bad pictures of the mountains through the window, which also captured the reflection of the woman sitting behind me.) Before Modane, the last station in France, French national police came through the carriages to check passports. I think this was the first time I’ve had my travel documents checked within the Schengen zone, and it made me quite sad. One of the best things about Europe is popular freedom of movement across borders; some people (rich people) have always been able to travel relatively freely between countries, but Schengen meant that everybody else who lives in Europe could too. It has been dismaying to watch this carefully built trust and agreement breaking down while I’ve lived here – honestly, in 2012 the EU won a Nobel Peace Prize, in 2016 it’s threatening to kick out Greece unless that country vaguely sorts ‘serious deficiencies in its border control’ (you get the general impression they’re supposed to be pushing refugee boats back into the Aegean). The French police on the train said the border checks are because France is in a state of emergency, something that is – at least theoretically – temporary, but the European Commission is looking at revising border policies more permanently (draft policy probably in March) and I don’t expect they’re going to be moving towards more openness.
It was also sad but not surprising that most of the people pulled onto the platform at Modane, with all their luggage, for further checks were not white. This may have been because they didn’t have magic EU passports, but the impression was definitely ‘bonjour, border control, everybody off the train if you’re brown!’ At least one person on the platform was crossly waving his passport – too far away for me to see what country it was issued by (and unless it was the UK, the US or France I wouldn’t have recognised it anyway), but he, at least, thought it should have resolved the problem. After ten minutes or so they were all let back on the train and we went to Italy.
Starting the day with a bad coffee in London, having a fresh croissant in Paris for breakfast and a giant pizza Napoletana and a litre of draft beer in Rome for dinner, without ever being more than five feet off the ground, was not only a pretty wonderful but something I feel strongly everybody should be able to do if they want to; it is very frustrating that Europe is going in the other direction, and the UK even more so. If we mean it, I’d love a little more policy from ‘You don’t scare me!’