Vanessa and I took the train to Sheffield and back on Saturday. Vanessa has a disabled persons railcard so it cost us £14 total with me travelling as her carer for the journey. We had a notebook, train wine and snacks, phones for AV recording and Trains are… Mint by Oliver East to peruse too. We had some consent forms ready too in case we struck up conversation with anyone and they were happy to be recorded, but really this was about just being on the train, thinking and chatting.
The outbound journey was initially busy due to football. We recorded some ambient noise and as the train slowly emptied and the sun started to set we took some photos and video out the window.
We made a note to research what disabled access each station has.
We reached Sheffield in no time (the same time it took with the kids a few weeks earlier but it felt much quicker!) We stayed on the train when we reached Sheffield and the train conductors changed shifts. People boarding at Sheffield appeared to be going home from evening events and then boarding at Meadowhall from shopping trips. As we drank and chatted about ideas and made notes we felt like people were watching and listening to us like a performance (consciously or not).
Two ginger woman drinking red wine out of gold stemmed glasses (charity shopped, of course), eating vegetable crisps and houmous, laughing and talking about mental health, poetry, workshops, funding and flyers.
This made us think about how to play with the idea of performances on trains – perhaps our next journey we will go in character and see if different characters elicit different responses. We also had an idea for one of the train journey workshops to be based on automatic writing whilst watching out the window.
The train toilet was overflowing and flowing through the carriage and then we spilled a bit of wine on some bubble wrap and filmed that to conclude our journey.
