There is a kind of travel that is about arriving, and a kind that is about going. The slow train belongs to the second. It stops at stations nobody has heard of, waits for connections that may or may not come, and gives you hours with nothing to do but look out of the window.

That turns out to be the gift. Without a screen in front of you, the landscape becomes the entertainment: fields giving way to forest, a river that keeps reappearing on the left, a town that looks exactly like the last one until it doesn’t.

I have started planning trips around the journey rather than the destination. A regional line with a single carriage, a ferry that connects with the morning train, a sleeper that leaves late and arrives with breakfast. The destination still matters. It just matters a little less than it used to.

If you try it, bring a book you have been meaning to finish, a snack you would never buy at an airport, and a paper map, so you can follow along and know which way to look.