StoryTrain

By Alessandro Caselli and Marzia Bosoni

Ten stories which have trains as their common denominator.

Train cars, railroad tracks, notice boards, railcards and validation machines are everyday things for people who regularly take trains to their places of work or study.

Railroad workers, operators, tourists, students and commuters are the type of people often found in train stations.

But what happens when an outside element enters this familiar picture? These ten brief stories portray the interaction between the ordinary and the unusual; the idiosyncrasy of commonplace events and the singularities present in each of us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Sep 6, 2018
• ISBN: 9781547545759

Book preview

To Yeboah, who I may never meet again,

with whom I engaged in a pleasant chat.

And to Afenah who listened to it.

Introduction

On occasions it's a guy looking over your shoulder at your newspaper and commenting on the previous day's football scores, those that you couldn't care less about.

On others it's a 1968-inspired activist who is still fascinated by politics, and simply has to share the events he has just heard on the radio with you.

Sometimes it's some foreign girl chasing a train that has just left, taking her forgotten money, bags and documentation with it, while she is surrounded by people who don't speak her language... not even English.

Other times it's a former university professor, a writer, a land, sea or desert traveller, or even a lady who spreads her things on the bench, not letting anyone else sit down.

Sometimes it's a former convict, an illegal immigrant, who asks you to read some legal documents from the court house and explain something not even you can understand.

Other times it's a madman escaped from a madhouse that no longer exists; a lover of motorcycles and good wine, carrying his house stuffed inside a suitcase. A madman who normal people avoid and define as 'not normal'.

But what does it mean to be 'normal'?

Being normal nowadays means accepting only those who are held to be normal by the herd; that is, only those who are exactly like all the other normal people, and who have nothing to teach each other because they are all monotonously similar. Being with the normal people means accepting only their rules as valid and missing out on the possibility of meeting scores of other people who are different from you and who you can learn from.

It's up to us to decide if we want to cut ourselves off from these different people, if we want to live alone in a world of only normal people, or if instead we want to allow our path to now and then be crossed with that other much more winding path of these people, listening to their stories and being