Travel Alert

Vague Plans are being made in the Cornwell household: these are to Go Away, this weekend, to a green and pleasant corner of The English Countryside. Those vague plans involve driving 123 miles to farthest Norfolk, in a car as old as me that will eventually get up to 60mph if gently coaxed with a shitty stick over a series of days. And then driving 123 miles back.

However, we have forgotten a Crucial Detail.

"Len says he's around this weekend, so yes, it's a good time to visit," Ian reports. Then, reading more of Len's email, the Crucial Detail occurs to him: "Oh! ... It's the long Bank Holiday weekend, isn't it."

There is a pause. Before Esme, it would have been a silence. We look long and hard at one another. Ian's eyebrows are pulled quite far up his forehead. Mine look like %.

"The traffic's going to be terrible," I augur.

"No, it isn't," says Ian cheerfully from Planet Bollocks. "Anyway, it's not one of those Bank Holidays."

"You mean those Bank Holidays that are closest to midsummer, when the whole country says Oh! This is the last Bank Holiday until August. Let's all 60 million of us get in our cars and go somewhere else? No, it's not one of those Bank Holidays at all."

"We'll set off early," Ian lies. Even Esme hasn't woken up before 09.30 since That Time With The Calpol gave us all jet lag.

Another pause. I feel the Zen peace of resignation settle over my shoulders.

The Divine Comedy wrote a song called 'National Express' that perfectly captures how I feel about situations like these. It is one of my very favourite songs, and I should have included it on that post about the music I can't live without.

(The word "arse" is muted in verse 2, by the way, because it makes Auntie BBC drop her knitting and faint.)


Any poor fule who has been on a National Express coach journey from A to B in England knows never to do so again. Eleven slow-moving hours of your head going d-d-d-d-d-d-d against the shaking window of a hermetically sealed lager fart on wheels, your feet baked by the raging malfunctioning floor-level heating and your knees gripped with early arthritis, your arm shrinking away from the beer-scented plumber trying to fall asleep on it and your glazed, sad eyes staring at motionless Luton traffic, are surely the most convincing argument that there's no place like home, so stay there.

And the Divine Comedy know this, and wrote the most joyful, celebratory fanfare about it, and every time it comes on the radio I turn the volume ALL the way up. I love this song as joyful as a coach is shit. I love the Blitz Spirit of taking a grinding rectal ache of a sodding long journey and choosing to celebrate it.

You love it too, don't you, honey.

Which is why, traffic or no traffic, I look forward to this weekend with enthusiastic masochism. I love our road trips, even though - and especially because - the car is 38 this year and you have to shout to make conversation inside. The traffic will be fucking awful, Ian will bitch and moan about it with his special brand of eloquence, it WILL rain, Esme will whine and want and need things and make us all sticky, and my arse is going to be numb from 1971 suspension - mine and the car's - before we've even left London and entered Little Chef territory. This is the birthplace of humour. BRING IT ON.

And of course there are things to genuinely love: the B-roads; the pretty scenery; the funny village names; the stops in one-eyed backwaters for rusty tea served by orcs in hairnets. And we might even get to see the sea!

It ought to make for a halfway decent blog post. Let's wait until after the weekend to find out. Maybe this was it.