The most fundamental divide between men and women doesn’t lie in their attitude to Carla Bruni, rugby league, slim panatellas, tinted moisturiser, fabric swatches, Bacardi Breezers or even scented candles. There are women I know who enjoy a pint and Castella, even as they flick through the pages of Tatler. Indeed, some of them even worked at that magazine. And there are men of my acquaintance who find time in Diptyque a welcome release after foreign-exchange dealing and karate training. The grace notes of tuberose and sandalwood presumably set off the thick cloud of testosterone very nicely.

No, the real dividing line between men and women is trains. I have yet to meet any (although the pages of The Times may end up acting as catalyst for a new Facebook grouping) Women Who Love Trains So Much They Would Willingly Pay Nearly £20 For A Book Purely About Train Routes And Another £15 For A British Railways Pre-grouping Atlas And Gazetteer Of All UK Train Routes, Live And Defunct Since 1900.

But I have.

When the news broke this week that National Express was going to have to surrender the East Coast Main Line franchise, my first reaction was not (as it should have been): “What does this mean for the public spending envelope?” or “How will this affect the delicate debate about the role of the state as either provider or enabler in a time of economic retrenchment and technological upheaval?” No, my first thought was: “Ah, yes, the East Coast Main Line, distinguished by the single-track section that runs over the Montrose Basin, which gives the unwary approaching traveller the queasy yet romantic sensation that the railway line is adrift at sea.”

Like many men I sometimes take the opportunity to fantasise in bed. But in my case it is about the virgin routes in my Rail Gazetteer that I haven’t yet had the chance to explore. You may weep for my shrunken life, but I have to confess that one of the experiences I am most looking forward to in the next few weeks is a business trip to Penrhyndeudraeth. For many people — most in fact who are allowed out on their own after dark — the idea of spending six hours on a train to North Wales might be, at best, an opportunity to catch up on some reading, and at worst, long waking hours of forced inactivity that they will never get back, with a limited choice of hot beverages, none of them with sprinkles. For me it’s an awfully big adventure, in preparation for which I spend hours before slumber reading and researching.

And the book that will hold me absorbed, in anticipation and during the journeys is Benedict le Vay’s Britain from the Rails: A Window Gazer’s Guide, a quite superb, indeed incomparable, combination of maps, railway trivia, engineering insights and breathtaking landscape features to look out for. It also has, and I know this will be a prerequisite for many of you men out there, a quite superb gazetteer.

My excitement on coming across this book meant I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, or like stout Cortés, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific. Yet when I tried to communicate the tremulous sense of joy this volume has brought into my life to my wife, I might as well have told her that I was now going to die a happy man because, after long years of pining, I’d found a worm at the bottom of the garden. That so banal a discovery could induce such transcendent joy was beyond her.

And, as ever, Mrs G’s wisdom is representative of shrewd majority opinion. There are no women (precious few men, mind you), but absolutely no women I know who find in contemplation of the Georgemas Junction (where the Wick-Thurso line divides) a source of endless blissful reverie. And I am, in any case, almost certainly the only person I know who, although he admires almost all of Irvine Welsh’s work, is disappointed that Trainspotting doesn’t have more detail about Corrour station and the dynamics of the Crianlarich to Mallaig line.

A mollifying entertainment

The passing of Mollie Sugden cannot go unmarked. Miss Brahms and Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served? were to me as Aphrodite and Hera; twin goddesses, representations of two Platonic ideals of femininity, seduction and nurture. And now both gone.

There will be, and you’ll get it undiluted from me, nostalgic sadness at Mollie’s passing. And then, I am sure, there will be the counter-reaction from wittier and sharper writers, who will point out how dreadfully tatty, camp in an ugly and reactionary way, and plain crudely unfunny AYBS? was with its double entendre you could see coming a mile off, etc, etc . . .

Well, they can keep their Film Studies scorn to themselves and let the rest of us remember AYBS? with affection. Unlike some of the genuinely dreadful comedy of the Seventies (Love Thy Neighbour, Mind Your Language etc) AYBS? was warm, inclusive, national pantomime, a retail drama with principal boys and old dames that kept our spirits up as the lights were going off. God bless you, Mollie, and let’s give Captain Peacock a knighthood before it’s too late . . .

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

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