Somewhere between Bristol or nearby and Penzance, Seat 70
Newcastle to PenzaNce DAY 1
Intro
I’ve learned that sometimes the most useful conversations are the ones you don’t plan.
BLOG
After Bristol or nearby, a young woman sat down beside me in Seat 70. Within half an hour, large chunks of the afternoon had simply disappeared. Not because we were having a formal interview or exchanging practiced stories, but because two people who had never met were having an actual conversation.
I know her first name but said I would not use it . She works for a West Country company—partly the retail side, but also the company training. For the past few years she’d been working for them, their HQ is in Somerset, but now spends most of her time travelling around and training staff at different branches. She’d just finished two weeks at one branch and was heading home. She mentioned she was looking forward to cooking properly again; she thought she’d make cottage pie that evening.
Very early in the conversation, I told her I was a writer working on England’s Edge during my 33-day South West journey. I also asked, explicitly, whether she’d be comfortable if I eventually wrote about our encounter.
She said: “Go for it.”
That mattered. It meant what followed was genuine conversation, not covert fieldwork.
What emerged was someone thinking through her own independence in real time. A few years earlier, after a relationship had ended, she’d taken a flight to Scotland on her own—the first time she’d properly travelled by herself. She discovered she liked it. She liked deciding what to do without having to account for herself to anyone else. She just decided, and she went.
That clearly resonated with me. I was several hundred miles into a 33-day solo journey, and here was someone explaining what made solo travel feel necessary rather than just possible.
Her education was interesting too. She had studied for a Creative Arts Degree, and her dissertation examined how social media affected younger people—this was the Instagram and Snapchat era, before TikTok became what it became.
But here’s what caught me: despite researching something entirely digital, she’d done much of the actual work using paper and pens, physical books and libraries. She could see different ideas side by side that way, compare them more easily on paper than on screen.
I found that wonderfully appropriate. My England’s Edge project exists inside phones and laptops and cloud storage, but I’m also obsessively collecting paper: leaflets, receipts, maps, newspapers, physical things. Digital and physical information do genuinely different work.
She mentioned products her company had launched—including drinks she’d actually been involved in creating. One was a coffee with a cocktail-type flavour. The other was a tea with a twist of another well known tea, which sounded genuinely interesting. These weren’t just beverages she liked; they were real things passing through a real company’s stores, giving me a small window into the culture of the organisation she worked for.
She’d also tried to buy a property in her town recently, three separate times. All three had fallen through. The most recent involved a survey that revealed the building was structurally unstable. The owner then asked for a free copy of the survey—the information that had destroyed the sale. She eventually recovered about half of the money she’d spent. It was a small bitter lesson in how information becomes currency.
She grew up in a coastal town with her mum, and that relationship kept surfacing naturally in the conversation. She’d even taken her mother to Eastern Europe for a birthday trip after doing an Interrailing month around Europe with a friend —Eurostar across the channel , Amsterdam, Berlin, and a few other cities including some Eastern European ones I couldn’t quite reconstruct afterwards.
When she left the train, I made sure she had the England’s Edge card and understood that she could follow the journey online but only if she wanted to.
REFLECTION
What stayed with me wasn’t a life story. It was the encounter itself.
A woman heading home after two weeks away. I am heading towards my home for the next 33 days. Two strangers who had adjacent seats and spent an afternoon discovering that we weren’t strangers anymore.
Observe – Experience – Understand – OBEXUN
Just before I finish the note: she’d mentioned an indoor market in one of my stops worth visiting. When I get there properly, I’ll look for it. That’s what conversations do—they alter the possibilities of the places you’re heading towards.
Jess Ambrosine (Author name of Geoff)
Xxx