Travelling the Odakyū-sen, almost inevitably, spurs association with prior train travel, runs of past time and change.

Journey upon journey you give way to lost-in-your-seat meanderings. Or by the window recollections. Odakyū memory chamber.

MANCHESTER-VICTORIA TO BURY ELECTRIC TRAIN

The English 1950s. Yours truly in teens (11-18 years). Seven years, thus, of home to school to home. Word reaches me that this old-fashioned, clanking, separate-carriage train, with its third rail, has now yielded to a multi-hinged modern trolley. But the station names, some of them improbably arcadian, have been retained – Bowker Vale, Heaton Park, Prestwich, Besses o’ the Barn (which gave its name to a celebrated North-of–England brass band), Whitefield, Radcliffe, Bury. The school itself an old-style and work-horse English Grammar School. Entry by 11+. O Levels and A Levels. Aboard the train there was late homework, a first bow into French, Spanish and Latin. School blazers had the obligatory tag of Latin – Sto ut serviam – pseudo-chivalric but not quite the thing as you grew up close to fading textile and coal Lancashire with its silenced factories and un-smoking chimneys. Almost worthily pretentious. Memory summons a Welsh bantam-rooster of a woodwork teacher whose unwitting signature phrase was ‘Right boys, stand by your vices’. The appointment of a High Anglican headmaster led on to the singing of Monday morning religious services in which we were enjoined to Lift Up Our Eyes to Heaven – which we did one week to see some fellow-miscreant had written ‘Fuck Off’ in reverse mirror-writing in the dirtied skylight. It was a school actually built around 1912 in utilitarian red-brick but in an earlier incarnation, some miles away, had been attended by the aristo who became Lord Clive of India. A connection vaunted by the municipal powers-that-were at every turn. Apparently he was expelled. For some obscure reason we were forbidden to go to the station during the lunchtimes, always a temptation as it had a rare snack-machine. A time when you actually bought tickets from the ticket office. Was it school or school train-journeys with those platform and carriage boy-antics where you weathered adolescence?