VIDEO: BEHIND THE SPEAKER A CONSTANT STREAM OF VIDEO PLAYS THROUGHOUT THE PERFORMANCE. IT IS CLEARLY TAKEN THROUGH A TRAIN WINDOW: A BLUR OF TREES, FIELDS, INDUSTRIAL SITES, SUBURBAN HOUSING, THE SEA, TRAIN TRACKS, BRIDGES. THE IMAGES ARE RELENTLESS, BLURRING TOGETHER IN MANY PLACES. THE NEVER-ENDING MOTION IS DISTRACTING.

SPEAKER: This paper is a synthesis of my field notes and video footage recorded during an ethnography of train travel. This research forms part of a wider project on: Travel Time Use in the Information Age.

FIELDNOTES: "I have packed my bags so that they are easy to store on a train, and easy to run with. A paperback novel is in the top, for those unexpected long moments of waiting... This notebook and my camera are similarly accessible, as are my tickets".

SPEAKER: When does the journey begin? Perhaps it began last night when I packed my bag, in the moment of interaction with the technology of the rucksack. It was in that moment when the journey was made as a possibility, when a destination shimmered, materialising. Through that interaction - packing a bag - an ephemeral course was plotted; a faint, yet tangible, connection to a destination.

FIELDNOTES: "It is 11:09 am. I'm on the Bournemouth train, from Lancaster to Preston. I was going to catch the 11:24, but this arrived whilst I was waiting, so I adopted my usual policy of [ignoring the timetable and] catching the next available service. You never know if the one behind will be delayed".

SPEAKER: The timetable plans its own journey for there are no passengers and bags moving inside the world of the timetable. Nothing travels in its electronic domain; it can only imagine travel - its work is a form of imaginary engineering. Its alphanumerics plan an imaginary journey . But, in the world of the timetable, every train leaves on time, has always left on time; its future and its past are in a perpetual utopia.

FIELDNOTES: "[Have had an] espresso. We stop opposite a Pendolino... On another platform [a freight train] trundles through. We sit on the platform. The minutes tick by... Is this a delay? Is this scheduled? Will I miss my connection? The minutes tick on. The train remains idling. We wait".

SPEAKER: The perfect timetable is incommensurate with the ever-shifting world of the traveller, for utopia is merely an addled dream; is without the flesh of the caffeine-saturated traveller. Yet, it is only through the jangled mixing of dream and vice that a train journey is made; in the heterogeneous engineering of timetable and traveller worlds, to borrow from John Law. The train journey is made by infecting traveller with timetable, an inflammation of the joints that alters movement and restricts action, so that sitting becomes coiling, ready to spring to a connecting service.

FIELDNOTES: "12:38... I'm sat in a carriage watching, taking notes, surreptitiously taking photographs. I am a partial-passenger, a lone ethnographer travelling to Penzance; my alien movements, scuttling from carriage to carriage, reveal my otherness to those that [just] sit and sit".

"15:58... Bristol Temple Meads. A woman boards, puts down her handbag on the seat next to her, and rummages in it for a water bottle, a novel, a set of keys - all of which go on the table - and finally a mobile phone, with which she begins to text someone".

SPEAKER: Bottle, novel, keys, phone: train travellers do not fit into train seats, for they are more than the sum of their packed-parts. To become a traveller is to unpack into a billowing shape: a shape that more easily moves, and may translate half an hour in Coach D into exploits within a novel; a shape rather different to one that walks or drives. A traveller spreads, not just from here to the other end of a mobile phone call there, but also into bottles of water and novels of fantasy. Travellers billow out with their chosen technologies of travel, drinking the water that quivers with them on the seat, reading their novel on the table. So that their shape flows into that adjacent seat, into that table, into the wireless text-filled air. Until they stop travelling by train, and must repack, folding themselves away, into stillness.

FIELDNOTES: "16:31 Taunton... The train manager appears, checking tickets. She asks who the two [huge] rucksacks, sitting on a pair of seats [behind me], belong to. You'll have to move them, she says. A woman gets up and sits besides them, pushing them over so that both fit together on the seat by the window".

SPEAKER: A traveller is not merely infected flesh, riddled with timetable, nor are they merely billowing with novels and mobile phones, their motion is also inseparable from their luggage. To make a train journey all that you are, and all that you carry, must travel with one single accord. The travelling-self includes both body and belongings. A train traveller is irreducible to a person and their property, for these may only separate when finally stilled, having either arrived or been lost. Bags, water bottles and a body in motion, although scattered in space, must move together, must be understood together, and make a travelling-person together.

FIELDNOTES: Rewind to "14:24... Birmingham New Street. The atmosphere changes with the change of passengers. I walk through the coaches to introduce myself to the new train manager".

"18:20 Plymouth... Sigh, now I have to say hello to another new train manager".

SPEAKER: A train is crafted into a solid form by axels, trackside signalling, reservation systems, overhead lighting and the rest. But trains are more than technical, they are technosocial beasts. A train cannot move without driver and crew; mobility requires inter-action. It may be solid to the touch, but my train from Preston to Penzance is not so much solid, as flowing flesh. It may appear to hold its shape as it rattles over points, but that shape is also a mutating flow of one train crew at Preston into the next at Birmingham and into the next at Plymouth. Without that flow of crew it would halt, collapse into immobility, and become, no longer a train, but merely a husk on rusting wheels.

FIELDNOTES: "I wander back through the train, which, after Birmingham, has completely changed atmosphere and people... phones ring, people are laughing. In the Quiet Coach it is cold and still, pleasant after the screams and laughter of Coach D. I look up as the sun streams out over the hills, creating bright squares of shadow".

SPEAKER: There are other flows of flesh that comprise a train - its passengers. They are asynchronous flows; incoherent, starting here stopping there, a twisted flux of many journeys. Before Birmingham some are quiet, after Birmingham others are laughing. In one carriage they are still, in another they are ebullient. So, I walk through, not a train, but a series of coaches each in flux. Flows differ from one carriage to the next, from one station to the next. Down the track the coaches flow, on and on, from one form of flesh into another, both translating and transforming. The crew and passengers flow, and the train and coaches mutate, and on it goes until the final stop. So, a train is not a fixed object moving along a line, but is a mutable as well as mobile one.

FIELDNOTES: Rewind to "14:19... Birmingham New Street. A man is sorting out a newspaper, laying out his work, hanging up his jacket on a hook. A woman sits behind him, she has a sheet of SuDoku resting on a magazine, besides it a bookmarked Harry Potter novel... In front of her the man now has his elbows propped on the newspaper, deep into its SuDoku squares".

"15:11... Neither has looked up from their puzzles since Birmingham, despite the sun beginning to flicker through tree and cloud".

SPEAKER: These two travellers fly along down the line on a ray of light from their SuDoku. Inside their numeric world of one to nine, time slows. Their bodies move in puzzle-time; fifty-two minutes of suspended animation. On their ray of SuDoku light their clocks tick slow. Their time is not my time. Their time is stretched, their movements steeped in oil. Are they in stasis, will they move again? The minutes are interminable. I am an ethnographer: writing, watching, glancing, fleeting. My time is compressed not stretched, the journey too fast to capture with ink. They, however, are caught in the sticky web of the SuDoku. Our travel times are not shared but situated, made by our own activity: SuDoku time and ethnography time. Time is personal, as Barbara Adams says. Time is technosocial, I would add. For time is made - made differently through each travellers' specific activities - their particular interactions with puzzle, elbow, field notebook and cloud. Time is made slower, faster, stretched and compressed.

FIELDNOTES: "16:22... Nothing seems to happen. I want to write that something happens, but nothing happens. A man reads a book, reads a newspaper. A woman fidgets and sniffs. A man sleeps. A woman stares".

"16:37... I'm growing tired. Feel rooted now to my seat and table, have sat here too long - seems hard to move".

"16:45... Time is fixed. A man sleeps. A woman looks out of the window. A woman fidgets".

SPEAKER: Time is stretching, stretching. As the journey slides into its nth hour, there is a withering of activity, less happens... and less happens. Automatons stare, their clockwork activities (read, look, work) winding down, until they stop on: look, look, look. As the train roars through the Mendips and Moors time becomes ever more sluggish, thickening around tired limbs like treacle. Travel time has inertia, activities tend to an unchanging monotone. Without change, without activity, time stalls, stretches into stillness, unmeasured. The view simply goes on, the coffee cools, bones stiffen. When travelling by train, time tends to stretch, multiplying the minutes. This travel time inertia, therefore, makes time run slow not fast.

FIELDNOTES: "16:17... A woman starts filing her nails. A man opposite looks up from his book at the nail file. Eek, eek. He winces, looks slightly ill as the flakes fall".

"16:22... She stops filing, and looks out of the window".

"16:35... A woman's phone goes off loudly, wakes up [someone] who looks around, re-arranges his body, and goes back to sleep".

"16:54... Exeter St. Davids... A girl lies back with her headphones on, listening to urban hip-hop. The rap runs out of her ears into mine".

SPEAKER: Ethnography time, time inside a novel, the incessant beat of hip-hop time, time lost in dreams: so many practices making so many times. Yet travellers are more than their active flesh, are billowing mobile shapes that spill out of their seats; their activities - their times - spill out of their headphones, out of their hands, out of the end of their fingernails. And into me. On a train other travellers' activities and times blow into my own shape, slip inside, to infect me. Travel time is contagious. Inside the novel I might be seemingly lost to the rhythm of the plot, my time beating to its change of scene. Yet the eek, eek of a nail file pierces my dreams, injects the cells of a stranger's nail into me. My time abruptly compresses, shocked into rapidity. I am folded, protesting, from an imaginary scene into a falling nail cell in a hot carriage outside Exeter.

FIELDNOTES: "17:48. Plymouth... A cloud catches me and I drift off, dreaming of my destination... The train almost has me, I am drifting into reverie, the tiredness, the white light of Cornwall, the endless munching, the reading, the reading... I feel as though the carriage is air on which I am carried, blown along".

"18:48. St Austell... The clouds are drifting with intent, up the coast, flowing away from the train. [As do I]".

"It is 9:30 am. I'm sitting outside a café, warm beneath a white disk of sun covered by hazy cloud; watching the water slowly slide down the harbour, beaching boats one by one. Around me people wait for their breakfast. A baker turns up, leaps out of his van with a massive tray of warm loaves, and swings past with apologies. The [malted scent] of freshly-baked bread spills into the air as I write".

SPEAKER: When did I arrive? When did the crafting of travel time and train journey end? The moment I gathered in my ethnographic tools, packed up my travelling-self distributed over several seats, and transformed myself into a separate body, paper and pen? Was it the moment the train began to slow? The moment I stepped from the carriage? Or the moment I stumbled, bones still shivering with motion, into my accommodation? Or was it that following morning when I sat, finally still, finally immobile, watching the tide fall, imagining my next journey... home? In these words and images do I travel still?