Forty-something, dressed tidily in grey and white, sinks into her booked seat on the Edinburgh to London train. It’s heaven. No-one can ring me up – (no mobile, no intention of having a mobile). I may well have left something cooking unattended in the house but I am not there to man the fire extinguisher. If my loved ones return to a smouldering heap it will be six whole hours before I hear about it. Meanwhile I have an ever-changing view, a packet of cashew nuts to nibble and a copy of Malcolm Gray’s The Highland Economy, because I’m researching a book and I must not waste time… I also have a copy of Vogue, er, because the photography is so lovely and it is quite a long way to London, and we all need treats….possibly.
    They got in at Newcastle; the two charming Masons. It’s the great uncertainty of train travel. With whom will you share your table? Someone you know can be the worst. It happens all the time on the London train. People in Edinburgh go to London a lot – and for the day, to check up on their grown-up children and visit the Monet exhibition. They return paralysed on the six o’clock from King’s Cross. Fortunately they are speechless with fatigue by then, but in the morning they are as bright as buttons, spreading brochures all over the seats and, in kindly fashion, waking you from your slumbers so you don’t miss the magnificent sculpture “Angel of the North” as it appears for a micro-second somewhere around Tyneside.
    I still don’t know how I understood instantly and with absolute certainty that my travelling companions were Masons. I feel I saw something… but I no longer know what it was. After all, lots of people wear impeccably black suits with blindingly white shirts. Lots of people have clean shoes. Quite a few smile a lot. They were senior and they were plotting and they were on their way to a meeting. Of course I wasn’t listening, exactly, being buried in The Highland Economy, but the gossip was rather distracting, the jargon not unfamiliar and they themselves rather engaging. “Can we bring you coffee?” they asked. “Chivalry is not dead in Newcastle.”
    It was the apron that surprised me. I mean, there was no attempt to hide it. Of course, those tables in trains are not very wide and if you keep your mobile phone in the same flat, battered case as your apron, and you want to make a call, you just put the case on the table, open it and well, there it is. I mean, the apron. So much for secrecy, I can’t think why I worry about spreading my copy of Vogue all over the table, if some people are bold enough to produce Masonic aprons.
    Like the Ancient Mariner, I just had to tell them, as I cast my plastic coffee cup into the bin and gathered my possessions. “Your organisation paid for my education, I mean, years ago,” I stuttered, and ran. They just smiled and nodded, suddenly, surprisingly, inscrutable.