Categories: uncategorized
Date: 21 September 2006 13:55:45
I had everything explained to me on a train.
This is one of those memories where the setting is at least as important as what happened. I was sitting in the buffet of a train from Paris to Strasbourg. It was a French train, except that the buffet car was German. I find it entertaining how different countries manifest their culture in such banal things as railway carriages, and how then stepping from one carriage to the next can feel like crossing a border. I distinctly recall the French carriages with their modern polished chrome and plastic surfaces giving way to the German buffet with lots of wood, even a wooden-framed door leading into it, all very 1950s (even though the coach would have been built in the 1980s or even 90s). Now you might wonder why a French train would have a German buffet, and what the implications were for the quality of food. In short, I have no idea as to why the buffet was German and the food would probably have been worse as a result, but fortunately I was just getting a coffee so it didn't matter too much. (For those who don't know, German coffee is much closer to British coffee, i.e. not worthy of the name coffee, but it is at least much cheaper than French coffee). I was on the train with a colleague and good friend. It's bizarre, in fact, to think that at that stage I had only known her three years, because it feels now (and indeed felt then) as if I'd known her for ages. (I suppose when you're young three years would seem like ages. Trust me, it's not - three years is a blink of an eye). Well, we had been sharing an office and working very closely, which probably explains why it felt like we'd known each other longer. And we were travelling together to a conference in our field in an incredibly obscure location - the train to Strasbourg was the first in a sequence of trains diminishing in status, size and speed, as we wound our way further into the depths of rural Europe. So anyway, there we were in the buffet car and I happened to mention that I didn't understand something, knowing that my colleague was an expert on it. It's part of my job to not understand things - I'm really a professional ignoramus, for which I'm very well qualified. In fact, if I do ever start to understand something I can rely on my appalling memory taking away all the keys to my understanding and returning me back to a state of complete ignorance in a very short time. Still, sometimes I feel I would like to understand things and sometimes I even do something about this. This occasion on the train was one such time, and it proved very successful. My colleague explained the thing I didn't understand and it's connection to several other things I didn't understand, which she also explained. I ended up actually knowing something and I still know it today despite my usual ability to forget. I tend to feel that if something is explained well enough and made clear enough then it will make sense well enough to stay in your mind no matter how bad your memory is. The problem is that usually I'm trying to remember things that make little sense and do not tally with other facts that I do know. So it was an instance of getting excellent personal tuition, and of seeing the benefits of that, and it was an instance of understanding something at a very deep, and deeply satisfying, level. I had a similar experience in 2001 during the protests about the price of oil in Britain. An editorial in the paper explained what was going on in a way that was different to what everybody else was saying, but in a way that made sense of every aspect of what was going on, and simply rang true. It was such a pleasure to feel that level of understanding. And all too rare.