Easter mini-Interrail, day one: Bordeaux - Glasgow

Back in December there was a sale on the Interrail site for global passes with, if I remember correctly, 25% off. Of course I bought one, but being poor at the time following the Sparkly-Tat Tour, I was only really able to justify a four-day pass (in first, naturally, we're not savages) with two potential projects in mind:

• how far can one travel using a four-day Interrail pass from the south west of France;
• in how many countries is it possible to have a beer in a day, following in the footsteps this magnificent man (or go further and aim for four days aboard the Betty Ford Express).

As I agreed to go to England for Easter and as I have four days of travel available to me, I decided to use a pass to travel rather than buy point-to-point tickets which were quite expensive by the time I remembered. Financially speaking, it wouldn't be a waste of a pass to do the trip there and back without distraction, but it would it be a moral waste not to seize the moment and have a little mini adventure along the way. Because of the way Interrail works – one day out, one day in – and the geographical position of France, having a little adventure in Europe that includes the UK becomes a challenge because the fact of leaving France uses up a travel day and then going through it uses up another travel day, which is why the Sparkly Tat tour ended in the UK.

I decided instead to take a train from somewhere near Saint Pancras to somewhere in The North and have a little explore of the UK. Of course, I called Avanti out of curiosity to check whether they could make me a seat reservation and found myself a few minutes later, like last time with the Sparkly-Tat Tour, with a reservation for a single window seat thanks to a lovely lady called Rabia, whose patience was commendable. Then I made Eurostar and TGV reservations and booked a hostel and before long it'd snowballed into a full-blown mini adventure with excitement and potential for scenery.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, because the thing proper all started yesterday, in fact, when amid a whirlwind of "Oh, right, yes, I'm going to Scotland", friends took me to Thiviers to catch the 16:36 train to Bordeaux so I'd be in the right place for the 5:58 what-hell-is-this TGV to Lille this morning. I had tried to get it to work with public transport taking a slightly later TGV from Angoulême, but there were no onward Eurostars from Paris with pass-holder fares available, so this was the second-best thing. At the station in Thiviers there is a new cooperative café and co-working space, and we had a quick exploratory coffee before my train came and I was waved off into the unknown to arrive in Bordeaux a couple of uneventful hours later.

My elected hostel is just a ten-minute walk from Saint-Jean, in a redeveloped area at the back of the station where workshops and cisterns once stored water for the steam engines of the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Midi. The hostel is nice, has a bar, restaurant, roof terrace (with pool) and is a variation on the pod theme that I'm starting to think is a perfectly acceptable alternative to a hotel. The surrounding area including some old station buildings became a historic monument in 2018. From the roof of the hostel there is a good view of the shunting yards (if that's your kind of thing) and the end of the train shed of Saint-Jean. I didn't know this when I booked so it was an added nerdy bonus, and I had some fun watching the things go back and forth before going out for drinks with friends and a somewhat disappointing falafel near the station that appeared to have been fried by someone who had never seen a falafel before.

After about three hours of restless sleep, brought on in part by an inferior pillow and slight indigestion, I finally relented at about 4.45am, fifteen minutes before my alarm was due to go off, and crawled out of my cosy little pot to make myself a coffee in the communal kitchen using a saucepan, because the kettle wasn't working. That inside me, a leisurely walk took me to Saint-Jean where I was surprised to find things already open and people bustling about, so bought a coffee, orange juice, and a chocolatine to consume from my window seat on the top deck of the 5:58 TGV to Lille Flandres.

Of course it left on time because it's a TGV and I consumed breakfast and did my best to snooze because it was dark and there was nothing to see. The train manager was on form and made a succession of amusing announcements about the etiquette of mobile phone use – "we ask passengers to use their phones in the vestibule to avoid sharing their banal family dramas with other passengers" – and using earphones – "be quiet, we don't want to know how it ends". "Thank you for using the TGV, not as green as a skateboard but a lot more stable."

The Raileurope site only allows you to set preferences for seating, so I wasn't able to directly choose a place isolée when booking, nor was I able to reach anyone at the SNCF by phone, so I resorted to a somewhat hit and miss approach of booking the passholder reservation through to the payment stage, then checking the assigned seat on the SNCF web site to see if it was satisfactory. At one point I considered placing sufficient options on the SNCF site to block out the seats I didn't want, but that would have required over forty open tabs and by-choice interaction with SNCF Connect, so when Raileurope assigned me a seat I deemed acceptable (window, direction of travel, nobody opposite) I took it.

I managed some successful snoozing only to be woken up somewhere around Saint-Pierre-des-Corps by the presence of a needy child and its over-indulgent parents who had taken up residence in the four-table in front of me. Spawn spent far too long practising its new vocabulary in between bouts of climbing over the seats while parents somehow took turns to achieve sleep, but peace was briefly restored at Charles de Gaulle when they got off, only for all glimmers of hope to evaporate as quickly as they had manifested when an obnoxiously loud Antipodean family of three adults and two feral spawn arrived to replace them.

When people have train tickets and have to look at them to find out which carriage their seat is in, it seems strange that they don't then make the effort to memorise the next two digits so they know where their seat is, rather than stand in the middle of the carriage demonstrating they know how to recognise and read numbers out loud at full volume. Finally they took up occupancy in the four-seat in front of me and the two-seat opposite and and spent most of the remaining journey shushing a child whose unholy whiny chant of "Mum, I'm huungry, wanna eeet" was cacophonous because it was wearing headphones and couldn't control the volume of its voice, and delivered without it looking up from something very important on its tablet.

Rather than just removing the headphones and telling the child how to behave in public – or even better, applying a muzzle or removing the thing altogether – they just shushed it more and more loudly until a stern "could you please be quiet?" in my best boomy voice learned from my mother had a mitigating effect. The intended recipient of my ire, Hungry Spawn, clearly didn't hear my request because of its headphones, but the accompanying perpetrators of the brood were sufficiently embarrassed that they got control of the situation by stuffing it full of more crisps. I got a smile and a nod from my neighbour.

The TGV arrived in Lille Flandres at 10:34 and I had about three lovely, toasty hours between trains to do some little jobs – find a post office, buy some Fervex – before I launched Street Art Cities on my phone to distract me with a little moment of getting lost looking for street art, via a bonus church. I don't know how I found this app, but on first play it's a great way to discover places and things to look at without having to work hard, which is my kind of tourism. I "found" two but I wasn't playing very hard, but I'm looking forward to having a proper go with it in Glasgow when I'm not walking around with luggage. Had I known beforehand that Lille Europe has a left luggage facility, I'd probably have used it, but I'll know for next time – the mantra of my travels.

The Eurostar experience at Lille Europe is significantly less stressful than that of the Gare du Nord, and despite the early-morning horror, I think it is the better run as at the other end there's plenty of time to get onwards trains and no need to set foot in Montparnasse-Maquis-de-Sade or use the line four. Check-in and security was as swift as that in Brussels Midi – with a man holding a sign telling us not to bring ordnance on board for fear it would delay the train – and boarding was hardly taxing when the train pulled in, on the dot, to platform 45. Smiley Eurostar staff greeted me on board and almost immediately asked what I wanted for lunch.

With only an hour and twenty minutes between Lille and London this was served almost immediately and I enjoyed my couscous, beetroot, hummus, and other-stuff lunch with a mini bottle of white before the very smiley lady brought coffee and then more coffee – I practically mainlined the stuff – to accompany the ginger cake thing and keep me alive until we arrived in Saint Pancras on time at 13:57. It was a brisk walk to London Euston in lovely sunshine, and the half hour I'd left between trains was only just sufficient as I arrived with a little under ten minutes to find the connecting 14:30 Avanti service to Glasgow Central. I located and settled into into my comfy window seat (K12, if you're interested) which only a few days previously, the lovely Rabia had found and reserved for me.

It is clear that I have displeased someone, for coach K contained a family with a gurgling baby that probably made fewer irritating noises than the three adults looking after. They were clearly used to shouting at each other in real life, a family tradition they were kind enough to share with the other inmates of coach K by forgetting that we were there, while the train manager announced that coach A – at the other end of the train – was the designated quiet coach, as if to taunt us. To attempt to placate the people forced to climb over their bags, everyone in their interactions was referred to as "darling" or "sweetheart", but it did nothing to help. Along with the baby, they had installed bags of paraphernalia and games, as well as a selection of American-accented singalong YouTube videos (London Bridge is Falling Down now makes me twitch) to help while away our shared four-hour journey of terror. I remembered that I had come equipped with child-cancelling earbuds, so deployed those strategically and found they worked well to avoid the stabbings.

Shortly after we pulled out of Euston, lovely Scottish ladies emerged from the kitchen to ask whether anybody would like any lunch ("oh thank you my darling"). I had the Brie and red onion quiche served with a red cabbage coleslaw, and a can of sparking water. Wine was available, but as I have a bit of a cold trying to take hold I decided to stick with water, as I'd had wine with my first lunch. Earbudded up I snoozed my way through most of the journey, battling to stay awake after a night with no sleep and a 5am start, probably missing the best bits as they flew past the window.

At some point I was brought a lovely cup of tea and some biscuits. The service Avanti West Coast provide to pass-holders is very civilised indeed, and in the evening we were offered more food again.

Approaching Oxenholme Lake District things started to get very pretty outside and as we ventured forth from Penrith the views were really splendid indeed. The bits that I saw from the window were glorious, although the Pendolino's tilt mechanism was quite successful in thwarting any attempts at photography that hadn't already been foiled by the glare from the sun.

Arrived in Glasgow Central a few minutes after our intended 19:17 it was already 8pm and cold by the time I'd found my way to my hostel and checked in to my six-person room. I considered going out looking for things to do but in my very tired state decided the best I could do would be to find something to eat. For dinner I feasted on a fine falafel wrap which I washed down with a can of Irn Bru, declaring it to be the dinner of the gods. The falafel wrap was exceptional on taste, but was let down artistically by falling apart as it was being eaten, so I think the Trelleborg falafel is still in the lead.

In the hostel lounge, a young couple sitting at a table in the middle of the room quietly consumed each other's tonsils unpeturbed by the excited multi-lingual chatter of the other guests conversing or eating around them.