wishful thinking

If trains had always been as high speed as David Leavitt makes them in his latest novel, the number of cars in the world would never have reached 600 million.

Leavitt's novel The Indian Clerk centres around the life of the Cambridge mathematician G.H.Hardy during the First World War.
There's a moment (according to this week's TLS) when one of the characters goes to spend the weekend with his mistress. He catches a late Friday afternoon train in Cambridge and arrives on the Cornish coast in time for supper at 8pm.

National Rail Enquiries says that anyone leaving Cambridge late afternoon on Friday (5.15pm) will only get to Truro (not even on the coast) by 11.44pm. Let's hope the mistress wasn't (40 miles further on) in Land's End.

pic: Land's End