The coach left at 8.45pm. the journey will finish at one in the morning. It's now just after 9.30.
The man feels like he's been travelling for a lifetime.
His new Walkman plays a tape of the Smiths and the Blue Nile. He's in love, but he hasn't got a girlfriend.
"Great music," he writes, "perhaps only becomes great when the music becomes inextricably mutated by external factors. Like memories. Especially memories."
He pauses, looks out of the window. Sees a haunted face over grey fields, then nothing.
"Two things must happen at once. The music encapsulates an emotion - a profound human emotion, so deep it hurts. The old-but-true quip: 'Love is a pain in the guts'. On a physical level: a churning half-agony. Mentally: like forever seeing with but one eye, eternally focused on one person.
"Happiness and sadness are not two extremes of a line, but differing shades of grey on the arc of a sphere. True love is so extreme that it nudges the border of sadness - a glorious, burning, holy sadness. Love of this sort is a deep joy - etched with tears of disbelief - so different from the frothy, insubstantial floods of everyday contentment. It threatens to last forever, and collapses in a day."
He pushes the volume a little higher.
"Music can sometimes dig down and capture these elemental feelings. We all know something of that truth - and even the crassest of pop musicians can achieve some sort of grandeur - the grandeur of emotional truth.
"However, music - more so than any other art form - is based on repetition, upon getting to know every nuance, every note, every syllable. We cannot drink from music and then discard the song like a husk.
"Music is ever-changing, social - we add to its meaning. Alone in a room, with others - memories become bound into the very fabric, the very soul, of the song. We are as generous as music itself."
He pauses. He knows the next song on the tape is 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle', a song of love for a child that has pushed roots deep into the fertile soil of emotional universality. He dreams memories so real -
He is there again. Her room in the city - the pictures on the wall, the new hi-fi - all is before him with complete exactitude.
A perfect afternoon. Lying on the bed, listening to music, talking. But when 'The Hand that Rocks the Cradle' began they were kissing - long, hard, greedy, leisurely, heavenly kisses.
Perhaps this time it will all be different.
- but on the coach the movie starts and disturbs the man's recollection.
"Sometimes there is absolutely no link between the music and the perceived emotional content," he writes.
Yes, you see what he is remembering now. Bowie's 'Sound and Vision'. No, it is not on the tape.
This song will forever mean that pub in the Northern Town. It is just after they split up, drinking cider, listening to the only song they like on the jukebox.
That is what the sound of Carlos Alomar's guitar will always bring to mind.
'A Walk Across the Rooftops' is playing now. An affirmation of love. It reminds him of someone else, so very long ago. His stops writing. His pen is weak.
They love to live in the past, you see. They strive to remember every detail - every emotion, every sound and sight, every texture, every taste and smell. The shelves of the mental library cannot be allowed to become too dusty - but covered in dust they soon are.
There are the well-thumbed classics - red for pain, golden for love - but most volumes are completely ignored. And yet they are so scared of forgetting - it is never enough simply to realise that it did happen. They have to go there. Revisit. Their lives are a constant remembrance.
But hush. Now he sleeps. Let us leave him for a while.