‘Slick with memories and nostalgia’: writers’ favourite UK trips by car, train and bus

09.04.2024 - 12:45 / theguardian.com

The sequence M77, M74, M73, M80, A9, M90, A90 may not sound freighted with emotional weight, but those roads are, for me, associated with the sadness of separation and the pleasure of reunion. It’s the route I drive between our home in Glasgow and Dundee, where our eldest boy now lives, having left for university.

When he moved out, that’s the way we went. When we visit or go to pick him up, that’s how we go. Those motorways are slick with memories. The gantries warn you not to drive while tired. They say nothing about melancholy or sweet nostalgia.

The first thing we look for is deer. The M77 cuts through Pollok Park and there are often roe bucks and does cropping the verges. You see the white rump first; if traffic is slow, there’s time to notice small antlers. The deer feel like a blessing on the journey.

We pass Stirling, admiring the dramatic castle on its great rock. We pass Dunblane where, in 2012, we took the kids to see Andy Murray on walkabout, celebrating his wins at the US Open and Olympics. He signed their tennis balls. Those signatures are faded now, but still there, and so is Andy – and we’ll never forget that day.

The land changes as you travel east, offering agriculture’s pleasing geometry: cylinders, parallel lines, arcs, hay bales, ploughed fields, polytunnels. Along the A9, near Perth, I keep an eye out for a particular field with a particular tree. It must be a chore for the farmer to work around, and yet it has never been cut down. Some superstition no doubt attaches to it; bad luck to he who wields the axe. It gives me the shivers.

A good place to banish the shivers is the Horn Milk Bar, a roadside cafe off the A90. The circular dining room appears unchanged since the 1960s, its cult appeal heightened by the fibreglass cow on the roof. When the Queen’s funeral cortege passed the Horn, on its journey from Balmoral, the cow was draped in a union flag.

Finally, the end of the road: our son’s flat. The light in Dundee is like Billy Mackenzie’s voice – intense, theatrical, heart-lifting, almost too much. It bounces off the Tay and saturates the city. We pass close to the cemetery where the Associates singer lies, then it’s out of the car for hugs and hellos.
Peter Ross

“You have two minutes on ‘The history of the Great Western Railway in the 19th century’, starting now … ”

The man in the famous black chair was my dad, so as I step on to the Night Riviera sleeper (in its green Great Western Railway livery) my mind spins back 40 years to Mastermind, my dad’s double-decker attic model railway and his vast railway library.

Rail journeys don’t begin on the platform; they begin in the mind. As a diner salivates before a meal, so the night-rail traveller visualises before the journey. My