I imagined mahogany panelling, velvet upholstery, and silver service. Or at least the illusion of it, briefly conjured up on a commuter train heading south to the sea.

The original idea was simple: transform the Gatwick Express into something dreamlike. A musical, immersive event that would take passengers from Victoria to Brighton not just geographically, but imaginatively. A re-creation of the luxury and romance of the original Orient Express. We would overlay sound, costume, stories and more. There would be performers, passengers-as-participants, from Gatwick as Munich to Preston Park as Sofia. I wrote about it here: Gatwick on the Orient Express.

As preparation, I decided to take the real journey. From Brighton to Istanbul, via Paris, Strasbourg, Munich, Salzburg, Vienna, Budapest, Arad, Bucharest, Sofia. A twelve-day train ride across Europe. A backpacker documenting the journey with his phone and video recorder. There would be research—but in a suck-it-and-see way—no preconceptions, and at the very least, a low-carbon holiday.

I wanted each city to speak for itself. A cursory hour in Strasbourg (on the Gatwick Express – a “we don’t stop here” Clapham Brexit Junction), for Vienna to breathe Mahler, a Bartokxic Budapest and so on. I expected each stop to have its own flavour, a local signature. And as we traversed Europe, to experience a gradual “Orientation”.

What I found was different.

Paris was joyful—an impromptu street concert by the canal, African music, dancing, laughter. But as we continued towards Budapest, everything felt increasingly familiar. Similar to the UK but with better croissants. Stations blurred into one another. I should add that our worst experience with train timetabling was, ironically, in Germany. We arrived in a rainy Munich 4 hours late, and so tired that the hotel receptionist instantly upgraded us to the best room in the building!

And then came the oddities. Young people on the trains speaking English, not from school, but from online gaming. Graffiti on every piece of rolling stock, in every station, across every country. A strange consistency in the language of defacement. The overnight (luxury!) sleeper from Arad to Bucharest shook, rattled and rolled the night away (the bottle of red wine that the “Man in Seat 61” recommended was most welcome). And the night train to Istanbul – ejected at 1 am with our luggage to pass through security and passport control on the Bulgarian/Turkish border.

In the last stretch to Istanbul, the train felt slower, the landscape barer, the infrastructure stranger: until the last stage: a modern metro train at Halkali, 25km from the heart of the city. A city in the midst of celebration (the end of Ramadan) and unrest (student protests). 

I had expected the journey to be aesthetic. Instead, it became political.

Every country we passed through bore the signs of a shift to the right. In France and Germany, murmurs of nationalism. In Hungary and Romania, more than murmurs. And in Turkey, we arrived days after the mayor of Istanbul had been imprisoned. Protests were suppressed. Surveillance was visible. The romantic journey had become an encounter with fragility.

At times, I thought of Mr Norris Changes Trains. Isherwood’s novel, full of veiled identities and polite conversations in dining cars while the world tilts toward authoritarianism, felt uncomfortably apt. Like him, I was on a train moving east, speaking softly while the political volume rose outside the windows. And like Norris, many people I met were improvising their way through uncertain systems—charming, evasive, a little hunted.

I also thought of Cabaret—(I’ve just rewatched it), the tension beneath the sequins, the moment the song turns and the light shifts and we realise the audience is no longer in control. Gulliver’s Travels, too, wandered into my thoughts—not the children’s version, but Swift’s biting satire, where empires squabble over which end of an egg should be broken. It’s a short leap from that to nut identities (see below).

Kafka, of course, was never far. The endless logic loops, the systems with no exit. And Orwell’s ministries—Truth, Love, Peace—hovered behind the Ministry of Direction (again, see below) like ghosts in a waiting room.

In Istanbul, a final image: the soundtrack to Crossing the Bridge, a film about the musical soul of the city, played in my head as we cruised the Bosphorus, flowing through a place both ancient and hyper-modern, defiant and watched. At times, I thought of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Pamuk’s novel, filled with characters caught between conflicting ideologies and personal truths, felt acutely relevant. Like his protagonist, I was navigating landscapes where political pressures shaped everyday interactions, where identity was constantly negotiated, and authenticity had become risky (although possibly not so much in a kebab restaurant).

Somewhere on the journey, I had stopped thinking about vintage champagne and started thinking about which identities survive a purge.

Back in Brighton, I mulled on the Orient Express project. But the jazz was quieter now. The aesthetic was still useful—but only as misdirection.

And then something strange happened. A conversation with Chatgpt, initially about using the card game UNO to structure a train-based performance about minority identities, began to morph. What if the passengers were each part of nut cult/sect/religion/party? A walnut, a cashew, a peanut (not technically a nut), or a banana (definitely not a nut). What if each nut was made of a different metal—gold, titanium, copper, bismuth (class, affluence etc.),—and by the direction in which you worshiped/prayed to/swore allegiance to – obviously strictly North, South, East, West (or are you deviating)?

What began as farce became allegory. The Ministry of Direction was born. And if you are finding all this confusing, hopefully all will become clear when it becomes clear to me.

The Ministry issues absurd announcements, increasingly sinister:

“All Bismuths must now present proof of iridescence.” “North-facing Coconuts are attempting to restructure the train’s philosophical axis.” “Bananas are no longer considered biologically plausible.”

And somehow, it worked. It let the story breathe in absurdity while remaining anchored in truth. The rules changed. The passengers complied. Or resisted. A musical game unfolded. Accordion, Ableton, voice.

The Ministry of Direction now stands at the heart of the project. A blend of Ministry of Sound and Ministry of Truth. Absurd, bureaucratic, and oddly danceable.

At UXCamp Brighton, I plan to prototype a short version of the performance/game. Twenty minutes of identity confusion, nut classification, and directionality. But the larger work is still ahead.

The train will still run from Victoria to Brighton. But this time, the journey won’t be blue velvet and silver spoons. It will be announcements that don’t make sense. It will be music that turns on itself. It will be the rules that change mid-station.

The project isn’t dead.

It just changed carriages.