Adventures in Filmland.

I'm half an hour early at Lanyon Street Station (formerly, inaccurately, Central Station) because I'm always early. It's a mistake. Normally, I could get a beer or a coffee. I could peruse the poor quality magazine selection, eat a foot-long baguette or sit down and have a think. But there aren't any seats in Lanyon Street anymore: Covid has done for comfort. The station is an empty cement box echoing with the screams of feral kids, streaming in from the country every ten minutes. Covid has killed people, and it has also killed people watching. It has robbed us of places to relax in public, or places to relax near strangers. I'm standing, conspicuously scratching in a notebook, while the staff eyes me suspiciously: I have the shifty hauteur of a management narc. 

I always do this when travelling anywhere: I build half an hour of fuck up time into every journey because, traditionally, I have always needed fuck up time. But I have changed as I've got older. I plan as much as possible. I leave early. I have a horror of being late, of appearing unprofessional. So, I'm hanging around this distraction-averse bunker on my own for an extra half an hour. 

The romance and poetry of rail travel is gone, probably forever. Hercule Poirot would have had the "Murder on the Orient Express" sorted in minutes flat if it had taken place on the Belfast to Portstewart train. "Zey all did it - right, I'm getting off at ze Antrim. Mon invoice is attached." 

Travel is awful now. Air travelers in the Fifties could anticipate a gentleman's club ambiance in the skies: smoking, drinking heavily, wandering about, seat-belt-free, and waited on busy hand and foot, by people who were professionally nice. A golden age of prestige travel. 

I wonder if you recall the Imperial Leather family from soap adverts in the seventies and eighties? They were a clan of improbably rich germphobes traveling in a private jet, each of them slopping around in a bath, lathering Imperial Leather soap into their skin. It sounds odd now: flying the foamy skies with tub-fulls of slippery lotus eaters, but it seemed distinctly plausible, given what we knew of the luxury of flight. 

Now we surrender our shoes and have our belts swabbed. We drink screw-top wine on a plane the size of a shed, our knees tucked into our chests, reading our in-flight magazines about ten exciting things to do in Oslo or Ghent. And that was when we could still fly!

Can you still get Imperial Leather? It sounds Victorian - there's a definite whiff of the Raj about it: grown men wanting to smell like a well-worn saddle. I think Trumper do a Spanish Leather Cologne, that actually smell like Cedric Hardwicke's Driving Gloves. Imperial Leather, sadly, only smelled of soap. 

Thank God the Imperial Leather family never got their hands on Badedas bath salts. We'd be talking electrifying, airborne incest. Don't believe me? Things happen after a Badedas bath.  

The train arrives. We pile on - it is the busiest train I've been on in a year. My mask remains tight over my mouth, the hand gel worried between my fingers. We roll out of Belfast for the heady delights of Coleraine and the Riverside Theatre - the location for the five short films I have written and am about to direct. 

Extraordinary scenes. 

*The mum in the the Imperial Leather family is Catherine Schell. And now I want to be on a long haul, twin tub flight with her*