Overland to Greece: the cold and rainy first leg

 Only four days into my latest travels, and time is already doing that thing where it feels like a thousand years ago since I arrived at Victoria coach station in the freezing dark of a Monday morning, wrangling through the London Underground my giant wheelie suitcase and the too-tall-for-doorways guitar on my back.

The coach from London to Paris is a very odd mix of people. It's wildly cheap and takes a very long time indeed, which clearly attracts a certain section of the market, that section seemingly being Latin Americans, immigrant families with lots of luggage and the occasional London teenager keen to get started ASAP with the TikTok and tunes out of their phones' speakers.

The coach was so cheap that I bought the seat next to mine too (something they actively offer you at less than double the price of one seat) so it was actually a very tranquil and meditative 11 hours of London traffic, white cliffs of Dover and, eventually, long after the sun had set on Monday evening, the chaos of the Paris périphérique.

As has been the theme of these travels so far, it was pouring with rain and extremely cold in Paris that evening, but I managed to stroll around a bit, have a beer while staring into space and pretending not to be listening to the French conversations all around me, then found myself at a punk rock gig in a little sticky-floored venue just off the Bastille. There's something dream-like about these solo wanderings where, as a man, your existence goes completely unacknowledged and you can float on the edge of various societies in an almost documentary film kind of way. The soaking wet shoes and socks on my return to the hotel were all too tangible though.

It's much quicker to get from Victoria coach station to a grotty Paris music venue in photo-montage form than to do it in real life

Absurdly early the following morning I got the train to Milan, which covered the boring sections of central France in the hours of darkness and had arrived in more scenic climes by the time the sun rose. It's Very Fast Indeed from Paris to somewhere South of Lyon, then the same train becomes a kind of winding alpine cattle-herd of a thing, with stops every twenty minutes at which no one gets on or off, and the snow on the platform is increasingly menacing-looking. Eventually we crossed into Italy and the Alps quickly eased off, replaced by rain.

The sound made by a wheelie suitcase coming upon sharp rocks hidden beneath the snow

One more slog up and down Metro stairs with my giant suitcase and, before you know it, you're breezing along a canal in the Milanese rain looking for a place to have a beer and some free Italian crunchy snacks. The rain was unrelenting and the cold somehow more intense than Paris, but the strolling was second-to-none. I chatted to some American Winter Olympics people on a tram (not team members sadly, but marketing and events drones but, being Americans, were still fun to chat to) then wandered around an art gallery called Pinacoteca di Brera which left you in no doubt as to what they thought Jesus and Mary looked like in 16th Century Europe. You could probably get a BTEC in crucifixion if you were really concentrating.

My Milan hostel was of the co-working-space, everyone's doing something important-looking variety. This included the reception staff and the bar staff and the people in my dorm who were all very concentratedly scrolling Instagram, so no fun was had. I left early the following morning to get the train to Bologna.