Counter-Heritage

A Film Called Happiness by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering in a thin sleeping bag on the seat in a compartment of an ancient railway carriage parked up for the night in the deserted, unlit platform at Thurso station. The end of the line, the far north of Scotland, the most northerly point of the British railway network. And don’t you know it- the sky is blacker than black, the windows of the carriage rimed with ice, inside and out. There are four of you. You broke into this train at midnight; four fifteen year olds, full of chips and glowing from under-age beer drunk in a pub that couldn’t care less, in possession of a purloined carriage key. You came up here yesterday, across the vast and empty moorland on this train, and you will head back south on this train at daybreak, and now you are sleeping on this train, or trying to sleep in the bitter chill. For the past four days trains have been your home; they will be your home for the next three, too. 650 miles away, on the outskirts of London, your mother is wondering where the hell you are and what you are doing. And what you are doing is bashing, which your mother finds difficult to understand. This is your life. You are a Basher, and you are in the (self- appointed) top tier of railway cranks. To the outside world- the normals- you are just another ‘trainspotter’, but you are not a trainspotter. Merely seeing trains and noting their numbers is not enough. You are a basher, and...