This first choice should, perhaps, be disallowed on a category basis. it’s not a short story: it’s an essay, or a snatch of autobiography. Or maybe that modish thing, creative non-fiction. It’s also glorious, so I’m including it. It’s one of several delightful pieces in Sherry Turkle’s curated collation where a wide range of people – scientists, musicians, designers and many more – write about something (or, more accurately, some thing) with a special meaning to them. A cello, an old car, ballet slippers, an early synthesiser. For William Mitchell, that object is rather larger. It’s a steam train.

Mitchell spent his earliest years in “a lonely flyspeck on the absurdly empty map of the Australian interior”, where the Melbourne to Adelaide express thundered through every evening, giving not just a glimpse of another, sophisticated, urbane world but a visible means of one day reaching and participating in it.

Later in life, it was on a train that he realised that he was learning to read, and his love of words grew the trains’ tracks and carriages and gave him a metaphor for thinking about writing (freighting sentences with meaning, shunting words into the right order, and that rhythm – of wheels on tracks or syllables in sentences – is a powerful element of language.)

Even later, after a life lived in major cities, trains are still a powerful evocation for him, although they now evoke the curious child that he once was. The personal joy of this piece for me is that, as a young child myself, I stood by level crossing gates watching the carriages of a branch line trains trundle to and from London, wondering about the lives of the adult strangers I could glimpse in the windows. If trains evoke Mitchell’s childhood for him, his writing evokes mine for me. A beautiful piece of writing, however we classify it.

(It also reminds me of a wonderful line from a Paddy McAloon lyric. Words are trains for travelling past what really has no name.)

Published in Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, ed. Sherry Turkle, MIT Press, 2007