By 7.30pm last Friday night, I was racing through the foothills of the Pyrenees at 294kmph, according to the display in the Ave train. The setting sun prised its way through the storm clouds to cast dramatic shadows across the valley. Corrugated ridges of hills on either side – sometimes decorated with fast-spinning wind farms – funnelled the high-speed railway and accompanying autopista northwest to Lleida, the capital of the Catalan Pyrenees.
At the start of the day, I had no intention of being on this particular train. But due to a snarl-up that had begun at Gatwick airport 12 hours earlier, I was trying to catch up with the fragments of an itinerary frustrated by a last-minute flight cancellation. And trying to ignore the nagging reality that this was actually my fault.
