I wasn’t pleased about missing my sleeper train to Copenhagen, but I’ll have plenty of chances to sleep on board trains in the weeks to come, and there are benefits. If I’d caught it, I would have slept through a mist-wrapped passage through the coastland of northern Germany and Denmark, dotted with human habitation but with little sign of actual humans. I don’t count my fellow rail travellers; they’re just as ghostly as I am.

Reading Margaret Atwood’s end-of-humanity fiction probably primed something in my brain to appreciate this early-morning desolation, but it’s still splendid. Wide fields of grain, interspersed with trees and electric pylons, and towering above them all the giant figures of the wind turbines, leaning into the breeze as they flail their arms in silent purpose. All of this emerging from and disappearing back into the mist, as though I’m meant to see it for a short while and memorise it. A sort of memory test.

The world has woken up as the day has gone on, with roads joining the rail as we crossed a bridge, and we’re about to hit a ferry too. That will destroy the last fragments of the illusion and start the day in earnest. Still, I’ve got what I wanted from the morning—an end to the tension of last night and a little bit of easy wonder to soothe the soul.