You don’t have to be a climate-change activist to long for Slow Travel

In Sweden, they call it flygskam; in Holland, vliegschaamte; the Germans know it as flugscham, while for the Finns, out on a linguistic limb as always, it is lentohäpeä. Across Europe, a feeling of unease about air travel is growing. In Sweden, where the flight shame movement was inspired by the climatechange activist Greta Thunberg, air passenger numbers are in decline, while rail bookings increase: last year the national rail service reported a record 32 million customers.

But you don’t have to be a climate activist to feel a longing for an alternative to the expensive, frustrating and humiliating exercise that is modern air travel. Who wouldn’t prefer a journey that doesn’t involve endless queues, foul food at Michelin-star prices, being obliged to shuffle shoeless and beltless through security, and peremptory, unexplained cancellations?

I’m currently reading the journals of a woman who spent her early years flitting restlessly across mid-19th-century Europe by train, from Moscow to Naples, via Berlin, Paris and Rome. Her journeys make enviable reading for a modern traveller: compartments “as large and comfortable as a small room”, “excessively polite” station staff, excellent meals in station buffets, and always from the window the changing landscape and briefly glimpsed vignettes of the lives of others.

The demand for speed has robbed us of these pleasures, but there are signs that we are ready to reclaim them, with a growing network of sleeper trains across Europe. The return to a golden age of rail travel will take time: railways struggle to compete with subsidised aviation, and the problematic relaunch of the Caledonian Sleeper service this spring did little

to enhance the allure of overnight trains.

But just as the Slow Food movement has gained traction over decades, so we may find ourselves increasingly impelled towards Slow Travel – not just by flight shame, but by a growing sense that it is the journey, as much as the destination, that matters.

“A Robin Red breast in a Cage/ Puts all Heaven in a Rage”, wrote William Blake. I wonder what he would have made of the photograph of a full-grown lion called Simba, crammed into the front seat of a car alongside its wealthy owner.

Throughout the ages, keeping an exotic wild animal as a pet has been the infallible signifier of the tyrant, the boor, the terminally vain and inadequate. The more magnificent the beast, the more detestable its owner.

In these supposedly civilised times, you would think the belief – popular among Roman emperors, Serbian warlords and the dimmer type of Hollywood starlet – that human prestige is enhanced by the enslavement of a wild animal might have fallen into disrepute. But apparently not. Among the Instagram-happy international jeunesse dorée, a big cat is the most fashionable of accessories. In Karachi, you can reportedly pick up a lion for a mere £7,500, and have it declawed for £250.

The philosopher Wittgenstein wrote that: “If a lion would speak, we could not understand him.” But I dare to hope that behind the fierce, unreadable golden gaze of the captive lions, there lurks the intention that one day their natural instincts will take over, and they will do what lions do to the poltroons who keep them as status symbols.