After the roar of the Intercity train, the slow sway of the branch-line carriage. Nowadays British Rail call me ‘You the Customer’ but I prefer my old-fashioned appellant, ‘Passenger’. Don’t you think ‘I glanced at my fellow passengers’ has a more romantic and promising air to it than ‘I glanced at the other customers on the train’? Customers buy cheese, loofahs and condoms. Passengers may have all these in their luggage but it is not the thought of their purchases that makes them interesting. A fellow passenger might be an adventure. All I have in common with a fellow customer is my wallet.

At the mainline station I ran beyond the booming intercom and the ‘Delayed’ board. Behind the parcels depot was a little track that used to be the only track at this station. Years ago the buildings were painted burgundy and the waiting-room had a real fire and a copy of the morning newspaper. If you asked the Stationmaster the time he would pull an enormous gold Hunter from his waistcoat pocket and consult it like a Greek at Delphi. The answer would be presented to you as an eternal truth even though it was already in the past. I was very young when such things happened, young enough to shelter under the Stationmaster’s paunch while my father looked him in the eye. Too young to be expected to tell the truth myself.

Now the little track is under sentence of death and may be executed next year. There’s no waiting room, nowhere to hide from the squalling wind or beating rain. This is a modern platform.

The wheezing train shuddered to a halt and belched. It was dirty, four carriages long, no sign of guard or conductor. No sign of a driver except for a folded copy of the Sun at the engine window. Inside, the hot smell of brakes and the rich smell of oil colluded with the unswept floor into familiar railway nausea. I felt at home at once and settled to watch the scenery through an evocative film of dust.

In a vacuum all photons travel at the same speed. They slow down when travelling through air or water or glass. Photons of different energies are slowed down at different rates. If Tolstoy had known this, would he have recognised the terrible untruth at the beginning of Anna Karenina? ‘All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own particular way.’ In fact it’s the other way around. Happiness is a specific. Misery is a generalisation. People usually know exactly why they are happy. They very rarely know why they are miserable.

Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true.