Ian McMillan: Holiday memories of strangers on a train

Linguists among my readers will note that, of course, it's light

switch. Unless you live in Lancashire, of course, in which case the word (or words) is "that funny thing on th' wall you click and then th' room goes all dazzly like".

And that's a joke, of course. A joke honed over the last two weeks of recuperation and relaxation.

Yes, I've been on my holidays, and now I'm back with a suitcase full of mucky clothes and presents for my mother-in-law and the kids, and pens and notebooks from hotels and, again for my mother-in- law, a little plastic bag of sugar sachets filched from cafs all over Europe. She puts them on her apple pies, and a bit of German zucker makes them that much tastier.

My wife and I have been to Germany, Switzerland and France on a number of speeding trains (hence the landscape flashing past the window) and we're home with a head full of memories.

There was that odd family on the train to Cologne; they were English but the mother was reading a book, in French, about arthritis.

"This is a book about arthritis," she announced, partly to her two kids, partly to me and my wife, partly to the rest of the carriage and probably also to startled Germans doing their gardens as the train whizzed by. Her voice was loud, let's say.

"It says that magnesium is good for arthritis and it'll stop mummy being disabled in later life."

My sandwich stopped half-way to my dropped jaw. One of the children, a boy with a voice like chalk scraped down a blackboard, piped up. "Maybe you could make a kind of magnesium tea, mummy, and that would do the trick."

I felt like I'd stumbled into a terrible public school sitcom.

The woman thought for a while, and then said: "Yes, but that would probably mean that mummy would secrete out the magnesium later on so it wouldn't do any good..."

Please, missis! Come on! I'm from Barnsley and I'm on my holidays and the last things I want to hear about are magnesium secretions! Magnesium Secretions: sounds like a synth band from the 1980s, full of kids with curtain haircuts.

You could contrast that family with poor old Viktor, a big hulk of a Dutch three-year-old who was being spoon-fed baby food from a jar by his mam on the train from Lyon to Lille, before being plonked down in front of a Smurfs DVD.

He kept trying to hide under the table: I don't blame him. I've seen The Smurfs.

There were many high points: standing at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and realising, with a kind of awe, that it's only just over 20 years since the Berlin Wall came down; looking over Lyon from the top of the hill that overlooks the city, the waters of the two rivers (the Rhone and the Soane) shining with a kind of impossible blue that you only ever see in films; sitting on a little ferry that crosses the Rhine in Basel, attached to a wire, as people bobbed by, swimming with the current, their clothes around their necks in plastic bags.

As my wife said: "I wouldn't do that for a gold pig."

Quite right.

There were a few low points: getting some Swiss Francs from a cash machine and receiving just one shiny 100-franc note and having a mini-disagreement with my wife about what to do. We had to get a taxi and I didn't want to pay with a 100 francs.

She suggested buying a bottle of water. I, for some reason, suggested buying a magazine, and a tired and tetchy discussion ensued; there was the moment when I realised I'd not checked the times on the actual tickets and we'd missed the train to Lyon, and I looked at the tickets over and over again, and I said a rude word over and over again and, unusually, my wife said a different rude word just once.

The fact that so many people all over mainland Europe seem to smoke, particularly outside at caf tables; it makes you realise how far we've come in this country in terms of public health and you realise that smoked baguette isn't any kind of delicacy.

And now we're back and the washing machine is going 10 to the dozen and I'm opening the post and checking the emails and it feels like we've never been away.

Except it does, because we've got the high points and the low points to remember and talk about forever

Long live the holidays, and all who sail in them!