Twice a month for the past couple of years I've taken the Eurostar between London and Paris. Before that it was every few months for about a decade. It is now such a routine, such a part of life that I feel quite attached to it and often as if I partially live on it. The Eurostar is certainly the one thing that enables me to live the life I do. I started taking photos from the window at some point - often the early morning and evening light in northern France is otherworldly, ethereal. Certain views I've never captured, or tried to, such as the point far before Paris where a curve in the track gives you a perfect view of the Eiffel Tower in the distance if you sit on the left. Emerging from the tunnel into France is one of my favourite things - accompanied by a hundred phones bleeping their arrival onto foreign soil. The sun always seems to be shining. The first image is one of my favourite photos I've ever taken and I joke it should be on my business card. Hometown: Eurostar.
Now my Eurostargrams have taken on a different light, when I see the rails glinting, the brush next to the track, I think of fences, people trying to get in, on. The number of small dwellings along and near the track between Paris and Calais has increased rapidly, which you don't usually see when your train is whizzing past at speed.
One night last month my Eurostar journey began at 7.13pm at Gare du Nord and ended at 12.10pm at St. Pancras the following afternoon. The final Eurostargram is of the train at Calais while we were waiting to be rescued. We wanted to go to London. They so desperately wanted to go to London. There was nothing to say, no one to blame. A night of living disaster movie scenes, of unexpected humour, camaraderie and of course stoicism. When we were finally rescued, our new train picked up speed rapidly so as not to allow anyone to stop it or get on it, flying past a group of men sitting in the sunshine on an embankment at the side of the track.