And so begins my accidental trip to Syria by train. It was going to be Iran, it should have been Iran- I’ve done my research on Iran. Syria, I know very little about beyond a fairly decent knowledge of Middle Eastern history, and what I picked up on at Sunday School.

However. Syria deserves better than to be compared unfavorably to Iran- it’s got plenty going for it in it’s own right, as far as I can tell. And from your perspective, it’s probably best that I’m not headed for Iran – I would only have bored you senseless with a load of pretentious claptrap about fallen empires, Shahs and so forth, polemics about how oil made the modern world, and generally spent too long talking, rather than listening.

Syria on the other hand- well, it seems to be more discrete. It’s got the oldest cities on Earth, but doesn’t wear it on its sleeve. More to learn, more reason to listen, more discoveries to be made. But we’ll leave that until another day. We’ve only just arrived at Ebbsfleet, and I’ve got hours of train journeys ahead of me, so no rush.

One thing did strike me in the bath last night though as I relaxed, having packed my bags and took the opportunity to survey the road ahead.

The journey I’m planning to make over the next few weeks would have been impossible for my parents or, for that matter, my Grandparents. The trip I’m making would not have been possible when I was born.

In 1988, the channel tunnel and high speed rail links were still being built. To be in Cologne by the afternoon was just hot-air from the European bureaucrats we love to despise. And for my Grandparents, to be in Cologne by afternoon- well, Cologne wasn’t a real place, it was somewhere in the news- a war zone. A World which, to their parents had been within reach, but which in that time had ceased to be a reality.

Tomorrow, I’ll be spending the night at a hostel in Belgrade, run by an American and his wife. Ten years ago, we watched as Americans cruise missiles rained on Serbian rooftops, and as thousands of Kosovan and Serb refugees were marched onto cattle carriages in scenes that belonged to my Grandparents generation.

For the first year of my life, and for my parents, Poland, Berlin and Ukraine were foreign countries. They were secretive police states in a parallel universe. To visit them was to enter a time warp or, at best, an dystopian alternative future which echoed our own but diverged, revolving around Moscow rather than Washington.

We are all Europe now. When you can reach halfway across the continent in a day, traveling slowly enough to see the land in between and a continous belt of people, how can you call the people you meet there foreigners? A Chelsea supporter can live in Cologne or Croatia, a Real Madrid supporter in Rheims. Like it or not, we’re all putting club before country, to some extent.

And Syria? At this stage, all I can offer is uninformed idealism- and geography. There’s no uninhabited ocean between us. The Middle East is no unbridgable pit of disaster, no problem zone taped off and- despite what some might say, no rival civilization to our own.

Such a narrative is bollocks, and is only good for furthering specific interests. Syria didn’t developing a vacuum for hundreds of years, miraculously emerging one September day to devour own own society and everything we stand for. There are castles in Syria where you half expect to see a National Trust volunteer asking you not to touch, and villages where they speak the language of Jesus. That’s not to ignore our differences- it’s the differences that make the distance worthwhile, but our pasts are very much intertwined.

With the English channel somewhere above my head as I write this, don’t forget: to our parents and Grandparents, Europe seemed every bit as far away as Syria does now.