`In a few moments, we'll be back in God's own country'

Ian Jack's Notebook

The East-coast train between London and Edinburgh crosses the border just north of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The line runs high above the sea here and, even in the worst of weather, the views are spectacular, the best on the 400-mile journey; cliffs, ravines, sea, and hillocks of lawn-like grass kept cropped by sheep. A small sign marks the border itself - a white post decorated with national emblems, erected before the war by a publicity-conscious railway company. But you have to be quick to notice it (the trains travel so fast now that I'm no longer sure it's still there). A more striking and natural frontier would be the handsome viaduct over the Tweed - the Royal Border Bridge - but inconveniently, that's a few miles south and entirely, like the town of Berwick, in England. And so the railway traveller glides between two countries - between two sub-nations, or two of the four nations that make up one political state (is that the present formula?) - without noticing. Other than the small white sign, nothing in the landscape indicates a difference.

I've made this journey scores of times, since the days when you could lean from the window and get a cinder in your eye. On the train last Sunday, however, I heard something new. A Scottish voice on the PA system, which usually tells you about the buffet car's closure north of York, said that we were about to cross the border between England and Scotland and that in a few moments, ladies and gentlemen, we would be "back in God's own country".

Some Americans in my carriage got out a whisky bottle and raised their glasses after this remark. I felt more divided about it. On the one hand, a small sentimentalism - the drivers of Saga coach-tours to the Trossachs probably say it all the time. On the other hand, not a remark that could be made in the reverse direction - or not without incurring Scottish wrath and a loss to the railway's trade. "Ladies and gentlemen, in a few moments we'll be back in English civilisation." I don't think so, somehow.

I rang the Great North Eastern Railway to ask about the God's-own-country stuff. Was it a new company policy? A man there said not quite, though the "customer service managers" of trains which were used by tourists had been encouraged to point out interesting features of the line. "In this instance," he said, "perhaps it was felt to be a topical remark."

Fine, I said. I felt like a prig for raising the question. But what about trains coming south; might we expect some jocular patter about the divinity of England? The GNER man, from England by the sound of him, thought not. Commentary would be confined to the architecture and history of the Royal Border Bridge.

This is a tiny incident and a pretty frail metaphor for the United Kingdom's emerging nationalisms. Twenty or 10 years ago I would hardly have noticed it. A playful Scottish guard would have been making a joke. But the success of political nationalism eventually casts everything in a new light. If Scottish nationalism ever attains its ultimate goal, there will be no more remarks about entering God's own country by transport officials. Real nation states need to be careful about that kind of thing (I'm trying to imagine the consequences on the trains from Dublin to Belfast, Paris to Cologne, Delhi to Lahore).

The Great North Eastern Railway is one of the few happy consequences of railway privatisation. It has smart trains in dark blue - most other companies have adopted ice-cream van liveries - and its time-keeping is positively Swiss compared to the chaos of Virgin. The weirdest result, however, must be a new company called Motorail.

The old British Rail service that ran under this name took cars and their passengers from London to various destinations in Scotland. It wasn't cheap, but if you had children and lots of luggage it was a far more pleasant way to get north than spending the day on the M1, M6 and M74. Also, it was simple. You drove to Euston, handed over your car, travelled by the same train that carried the car to, say, Glasgow, where you picked it up again and drove off on your holidays.

The service stopped with privatisation. Nobody bid for the franchise. Then, in March this year, it was revived by a Surrey businessman, Graham Steele. John Prescott officiated at the launching ceremony at King's Cross station, which, as it turns out, was a deceptive venue. This week, thinking of our summer holiday in Scotland, I thought I'd give the new Motorail a try.

How does it work? This is the process for drivers. First, drive (in my case from central London) to Heathrow or Gatwick airports. Get there before 11am. Leave the car and keys in a car park. Return to central London by train or Tube. Meet wife and children at Euston. Take train to Glasgow. Stay overnight in Glasgow hotel. Take bus to Glasgow airport the next morning. Collect car from airport car park, start holiday.

How has the car got there? This is the process. First, by transporter from Heathrow to a freight yard in Wembley. Second, by overnight freight train in open freight cars to another yard at Mossend, near Coatbridge. Third, by another transporter to the car park at Glasgow airport. The cost of a return trip is pounds 250 (soon to be pounds 360) - but that's only the car. Driver and passengers pay separate fares, by rail or air. The total cost in my case - two adults and two children by train - would be pounds 550.

As a way of getting a car to Scotland, it's expensive, ludicrously complicated and, for the ecologically-minded, hardly less polluting than flogging all the way up the motorway. It would seem doomed to fail as a business.

When I spoke to Graham Steele, however, I was disarmed by his explanations and enthusiasm. Because Mr Steele is not a train operating company, he receives no subsidy; hence the price. For the same reason, he has no access to railway terminals such as Euston; hence the freight yards and airports. As to the overnight journey, that happens because most freight to Scotland travels by night. During the day, the tracks are too crowded by passenger traffic. As he says, one of the great problems and scandals of Britain's railways is that so much track has been abandoned or allowed to decay that lines now cannot cope with the traffic that increasingly wants to use them.

He believes he will make his business work. He says he is building a new terminal for car delivery and collection at Wembley, and will be taking cars from Scotland through the Channel Tunnel to Paris and Brussels by the end of this year. I hope he succeeds. In the meantime, I'll be driving to Scotland and stopping overnight, cheaply, at the sister-in-law's in Clitheroe.

Obituaries of Dirk Bogarde have noted shyly that the actor was not "left-wing". He certainly wasn't. In the late Seventies, soon after he had published the second volume of his autobiography, I interviewed him on the way back to London from Bristol, where he'd been signing a few hundred copies of his book. He wore a tight brown suit that had been made for his role in Doctor in Distress (1962), and was utterly charming. Between Bath and Reading, we got through a lot of the usual stuff - his career, his views on acting, stories from his days at Rank - and when Slough appeared I thought it best to spend the last 10 minutes or so talking about the future rather than the past. Would he ever leave his house in the south of France and come home to Britain? "Never," Bogarde said. "Or at least not until the rushes come."

The rushes come? I thought that this might be a metaphor that film people used instead of the Grim Reaper. But I'd misheard him. What he'd said was "not until the Russians come". And come, according to Bogarde, the Russians surely would, thanks to the decadence and feebleness of the West. He had worked out that the Red Army could be at his door within 12 hours of crossing the Hungarian frontier. Then he would have to shoot his dogs - a good, cinematic detail this - and hope he would make it down the refugee- choked roads to the Pyrenees or a Channel port. "I may be lucky," he said. "I should be in my early sixties by then [he was then 57] and if I stay, my age may save me from the internment camps."

That was a different time. Nobody could then have predicted that the Russians would indeed command the beaches of the Riviera, but as business racketeers rather than tank-drivers; Western decadence was more powerful than we knew. In any case, Bogarde sold his farmhouse and moved back to London a few years later, after his partner died.

He was a clever, witty man with a justifiable conceit about his acting ability. In the bookshop in Bristol, they served sandwiches for lunch: floppy English sliced white with some damp ham and tomato nestling inside. Bogarde took a bite and shook his head with the evident appreciation of a gourmet tasting Beluga: "You know, try as you might, you just can't find this kind of bread in France."