Packing is easy enough to prepare for a Michael Palin sort of journey. You get a nice, practical blue shirt, a pair of chinos, a beaten-up linen jacket, a good anorak and a pair of desert boots. Then you set your face in an attitude of inquisitive English amiability and off you go.
I could do a Palin. He's often described as a great British role model but he's not an unattainable one. We have lots in common: Taurean, provincial upbringing, educated at Oxbridge, love Spike Milligan shows, travel a lot, don't care if we travel alone but care a lot about eating (Palin's recently published diaries are full of descriptions of meals: he is the original hungry Python). And like him, I am described as being nice and, like him, resent it deeply. Nice people have a bond. We should all carry laminated cards saying, a) I'm not that nice - I lost my temper about the missing toothpaste cap only last Wednesday; b) 'nice' does not mean 'an unassertive pushover' - not all the time, anyway; and c) what's wrong with being nice anyway?
My mission is to explore Palin-land, the places where he grew up, in a single day. Let's be truthful: this is not going to be an exotic escapade of the sort Palin undertakes, the sort with last-minute dashes, mad connections between boats and trains, extreme climates and exotic misunderstandings against dramatic backdrops. No: we'll be travelling through England from the middle to the north, then east, then southeast on a rainy day. The main logistical issue is whether the nation's various train companies can get me from A to Z - or rather A to Q via F and L - successfully. Because if the trip is to be done properly it has to be done by train. Palin is a boyhood trainspotter turned adult train evangelist. 'I can still get excited by trains,' he says. 'There's a certain romance and glamour to a train journey.'
Maybe so. But it's a little hard to find that romance and glamour at 08.38 at my local station of Leighton Buzzard. The nice revenue management executive (he'd have been called a 'ticket clerk' when Palin was growing up) kindly explains my itinerary for getting to Palin's childhood home at Ranmoor involves boarding a train to Sheffield via Stockport. The commuters in black suits gingerly step around puddles and fumble with briefcases, newspapers and umbrellas. My chinos, fine if you're up the Ganges or down the Zambezi, are not coping well with the low-pressure system over Bedfordshire. The wet cotton and cold winds combine to create a kind of in-trouser air-conditioning unit.
There's not much to see of England on the way to Stockport, just flat fields and pylons doubly fuzzed by the speed of the train and the incessant drizzle. Two middle-aged businesswomen in identical black-and-white print dresses get on at Rugby and talk about gross misconduct. The fields fuzz by. But there's plenty to do. Taking a train in 2007 is a little different to taking one in Palin's youth. Then, his only distraction was a regular supply of Biggles books. Me, I've got a laptop, phone, digital Dictaphone and iPod. The latter is loaded up with lots of Elgar, Palin's favourite composer, and a CD of Palin's diaries, read by the man himself. His reassuring family-doctor tones, so often heard fighting congruity over footage of the Yangtze or Svalbard or Timbuktu, are perfectly at home here in the world of cheap-day returns, packed lunches and tidy fields.
There's not a huge amount of glamour and romance at Stockport station either. The dark suits of the commuters have been replaced by the putty-coloured slacks and beige coats of the northern retired on leisure breaks, and the jeans and new hairdos of the girls going down to London for shopping. So I settle into the purple splotchy interior of the Stockport to Sheffield train, thinking no man ever took a more mundane journey in the history of travel. Then England decides to reveal one of its secrets. Stockport to Sheffield follows the Pennine valleys. We roll beneath crags and tors, see sheep slowly ascending deep green hills like pilgrims, pass stone farmhouses, red-brick railway stations - the whole Harry Potter-goes-to-Narnia-with-a-Hobbit-in-tow magical English experience. And it's the perfect landscape for adventures - or, indeed, ripping yarns - a place for boys to make dens, ford streams and discover escaped prisoners of war and lost kingdoms. Or dream up TV comedy series.
