Paul Merton's Secret Stations

I don't know why I have this pull towards programmes about trains. My railway obsessed brother would argue that it's genetic.

But this isn't Michael Portillo's Grand Tour style Continental journeys, staying in sumptuous imperialistic hotels, riding high-speed express trains wearing ridiculous fluorescent jackets. Instead here is Paul Merton in a flat cap and tweeds, visiting youth hostels and stations in such remote corners of the country that you have to stick your thumb out to stop the train. Once aboard you have to tell the guard where you plan to get off, otherwise the train will trundle straight through. For these are station request stops. There are apparently 152 of them in the UK.

Merton travels from Devon to Wales to Cumbria and Scotland on amusingly named lines (Looe Valley, Kyle) to amusingly named places (Luxulyan, Pontarddulais, Drigg, St Keyne Wishing Well Halt). A lot of the trains are no bigger than buses, but the last is the night sleeper to Fort William from London Euston, which deposits Merton in the middle of a vast isolated moor on the Scottish estate of Corrour.

Merton visits nuclear waste facilities, supermarket depots, espionage schools, wedding dress shops and china clay mines. He cheats at a spot of fell running. He walks through doors that lead nowhere. He overpays for a churn of Devon Ambrosia cream. He joins a male voice choir. He visits a station (Reddish South) which has only one train a week, running in only one direction. The service keeps going because it would be more expensive to petition Parliament to abolish it, but it has three loyal passengers, and three loyal trainspotters who wait to see them get off at Denton and get the bus home.

Paul Merton is always Paul Merton - jovial, witty, surreal, prepared to wear a funny outfit and point out the ridiculousness of life without being rude. It was a peaceful, enjoyable watch for a Sunday night, even if I was watching it about 30 years before my time.

Arisaig

West Highland Line going over the Glenfinnan Viaduct

We once spent a week in Scotland overlooking the West Highland Line to Mallaig. We stopped briefly at Arisaig, where Paul Merton tells us that the Special Operations Executive trained spies in the Second World War. I've also spent a beautiful week in Pembrokeshire, where Merton learns to operated a signalbox and meets the man (Dixe Wills) whose book Tiny Stations inspired the series. I've visited Devon and Cornwall many times. I've also spent a day exploring the bleak West Cumbrian coast, dominated by Sellafield and nuclear risk.

Aberfelin, Pembrokeshire

But I don't think I have ever had the pleasure of visiting a request stop station. Something to save for my retirement perhaps, assuming any of them are still open by then. Reddish South possibly.

The Night Manager

Mm, so sleek. Le Carre has been made all Ian Fleming and Cubby Broccoli - no more the real phlegm and soggy broccoli of the school dinner atmosphere of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There are diamonds, martinis, fast cars, expensive watches, and an opening titles sequence straight out of Shirley Bassey. In fact, I think Tom Hiddleston is probably using this as his casting reel to be the next 007, once he gets a little craggier. He's certainly got the charm for it. Although his charm had well and truly tipped over into psychopath territory by the middle of the second episode.

The Night Manager's M is a very pregnant Olivia Colman as Angela Burr, with an unidentifiable northern accent and no budget for central heating. (Here, in the cold, there is real phlegm.) I am not sure who she is working for. She seems to be half of a two-person team who occasionally have meetings at MI6 in Vauxhall or the Foreign Office in Whitehall, but otherwise are rogue roamers. Mrs Burr can fly to Zermatt in an instant, despite being in her third trimester, and is able to eavesdrop on conversations from Cairo to Mallorca.

There is no Q. Hiddleston, as Jonathan Pine, has to raid dustbins to retrieve Sim cards, and break into his own safe. But Pine's army training means he's a dab hand at breaking a man's arm, ejecting someone from a snooker room, or tying an electrical extension lead round their neck. But he'll also pour your champagne perfectly, seduce you Bond-style in a flash, relocate you to the back of rural beyond, and never seems to sleep.

The baddie is Hugh Laurie, who is charming too, but with a dash of snake poison just below the surface. He is Richard Roper, a wealthy philanthropist giving speeches in front of a Unicef flag while dealing arms to the evil warlords behind it. He is calm, affable, terribly reasonable - but the terrifying is unmistakably there. It will surface, and soon. For now, Pine is lying in Roper's Mallorcan villa with two black eyes and a broken nose. He is a mystery to them. Is he mussel man or muscle man? We're not sure how they are going to find out. They've done the Google side of things, unearthing his CV and Burr's false trail of identity for him. But they aren't yet convinced. I suspect there may be a waterboard in the wardrobe.

Tom Hollander, Roper's sidekick Corcoran, is more openly threatening. But even he is jolly nice about it. Affable Rev, laced with strychnine. "I will hood you and hang you up by those lovely ankles until the truth falls out of you by gravity. Toodleoo."

Maadi, Cairo

What a difference between the luxurious hotels where the Night Manager works and the places we have stayed. It must be because we aren't multi-billionaires or illegal arms dealers and don't tend to arrive places by luxury yacht or helicopter. Our abode in Maadi, Cairo wasn't grotty so much as basic. A skyscraper hotel of brown glass, with an empty swimming pool on the roof and slightly creaky plumbing. But it did have a view of the Pyramids, glimpsed across the Nile behind the minarets of the mosque next door. Loudspeakers perched on the minarets woke us daily at four with the morning call to prayer.

Empty rooftop pool

View of the Pyramids and River Nile

Or you could say that the Pyramids had a view of our hotel

Cairo seemed even busier and crazier than the chaotic Cairo in the midst of the Arab Spring depicted in The Night Manager. We didn't dare cross a road in our attempt to find somewhere for dinner. The traffic was lethal. We ate pizza in a restaurant down the street, surrounded by potted palms and men smoking hookah pipes.

More The Night Manager's style

And then the action moves to Switzerland. Not being a skier, the only time I have been to Zermatt, I was 15 and staying in a Eurocamp tent with my family somewhere near Susten. The train from Visp was more rickety than the streamlined red SBB models ridden by Pine, and for some reason I have in my head that it was powered by steam. Once there, the shops were full of tat, and my mum got locked in a public loo while my brother made up a jingle for Peugeot cars. Which he pronounced Pee-go. But I do remember the beautiful Matterhorn; a wisp of cloud clutching at its pinnacle that would never quite leave.

Zermatt tourist tat

My family munching at the Matterhorn

80s glamping in Susten

Only in Devon has our holiday accommodation looked similar. My parents had quite the knack for finding dodgy cottage rentals. No TripAdvisor then, you see. Farmhouses with bad carpets, stubborn chickens in the garden refusing to lay eggs, and Alan Wells winning the 100 metre gold at the Moscow Olympics on a fuzzy black and white television screen. Here it was my brother's turn to get locked in the toilet.

And Then There Were None

All photos are of the Farne Islands (not racist)

Ooh, this was good. Really, really good. Dark and nuanced and taut and fun.

We recently read And Then There Were None in our mummies book group. Thankfully, knowing the culprit in advance didn't diminish my enjoyment of this Boxing Day television adaptation. Although I would like to know how much of a genuine shock it was at the end to those not in the know. In the book, you only find out the murderer via a message in a bottle tossed out to sea and washed ashore a while later. In the television adaption, the villain walked into the room for a chat with the final victim as she choked in a noose. The murderer then went calmly to his room and committed suicide. Some interaction between the murderer and the final victim (who hangs herself) is alluded to in the book, as a crucial chair gets moved back against the wall, but it could also be assumed that this happened post-death.

Seal island

So the story is as follows. Ten seemingly unconnected people are lured to an island off the Devon coast by someone with the initials UN Owen. (Unknown, geddit?) The island originally had a racist name, then another racist name, but now the more acceptable "Soldier Island" seems to have stuck. (However, anti-Semitic remarks in the opening few pages of the novel have thus far been glossed over and are still to be edited out.) Some of the ten think they are going to the island to work, others for a break, others for a bit of a laugh. But a few more background checks may not have gone amiss, for they couldn't be more wrong. On the first evening, a gramophone record shrieks out their crimes. They have all in some way been responsible for the death of someone else, and for this they must pay. They are then bumped off one by one by persons - well, UN Owen. Except that there is only them on the island, it's too stormy for anyone else to land (or anyone to leave), so it's got to be one of them. Each murder takes the pattern of a line of the rhyme "Ten Little Soldier Boys" (or earlier racist versions thereof). On the telly, the murders were a lot more gory than implicated by Agatha Christie's clinical, succinct prose. There was a lot of blood.

The book has a rather "stiff upper lip" approach to the whole business. So I loved the darkness of the television adaptation, the portrayal of the psychological stress of watching people being killed and knowing the inevitable was coming. The suspicion of everybody. The lack of escape options, with no chance of rescue thanks to the aforementioned timely storm (not yet named). The meticulous planning of the whole thing is so sinister, so spooky. The television characters had few redeeming features.  Their past crimes were more clear-cut, premeditated and evil than in the book. The book led you to believe some of the people's wrongdoings may have been accidents, but no chance of that on the television. Some characters exhibit no remorse whatsoever. Others were clearly tormented by the past, but perhaps only now that it was coming back to torment them. Big time.

Now, I have never received a letter out of the blue, accepted its invitation to put myself on a train and gone off for a few days to an island to watch people get murdered. I write this post merely as a little shout-out of love for my book group, who "literally" (boom-boom) saved my life when it was set up four years ago. They are a group of the loveliest ladies in the world. (You know who you are.) Our monthly meet-ups are the highlight of my month. (They are often the only night out of my month.) We take it in turns to pick a book and to host. The books are usually short and not too complicated for mums with not enough time to read. (Though someone once chose Possession, and we forgave her.) There is always wine, crisps and cake, and plenty of good cheer and comfort in girl power. And we always do make a reasonable attempt to talk about the book before sliding into the inevitable chat. Outside of book group, our children have play dates. Some of us have celebrated Christmas and New Year together. Mummies need each other. And there is solidarity in good writing and good company.

Distant rainbow