At the ripe old age of sixty-three and fifty-nine, with arthritis and diabetes, my wife and I have decided to take up camping, just at the point when folk of our age are promoting themselves onto motorhomes. To quickly kill the image you have in your mind of two of us crawling into a two-man tent, we have bought the biggest tent we could find, inflatable, so no fiddling with poles, we hand pick sites with facilities, and we have mains electric and high inflatable beds, so we are hardly roughing it, and we love it! The great advantage of camping for us is that we don’t need to drag a caravan around or have to carefully select routes that will accommodate a large van, we simply pack everything we need into the back of the car and off we go. With our newfound freedom, we loaded up and headed for Cornwall back in July. Living in Suffolk where we have no motorways, I have decided that I hate the M25, so came up with a great plan that we would set off at 4am, so we could traverse the nightmare road while it was still quiet. Big mistake!! We quickly decided that the M25 is never quiet as we jostled with taxi’s rushing to get people to Heathrow for their Saturday morning flights.
We made the decision to find a route which avoided motorways for our return journey on the final Saturday of our holiday. I sat on Friday evening and wrote a list of directions for Karen as my sat nav would be useless in these circumstances and we set off early Saturday morning. We always knew that the journey would take much longer, but we weren’t in a rush. We travelled back through places like Glastonbury, passing the famous Worthy Farm where the Glastonbury music festival is held most years. We skirted around interesting sounding places like Shepton Mallet, Frome, Trowbridge, and Devizes and headed for Marlborough. As we approached the town, there was no bypass and so we headed straight into the middle of the town at mid-morning on what appeared to be market day. As far as I can recollect this was the first time I had ever been here and I thought it was a beautiful place as we drove up the high street. The sun was shining, the architecture of the place was appealing, people were milling around, nobody was in a particular rush, and I savoured every moment of being in this market town in Wiltshire.
It suddenly dawned on me that so often in the modern world, we rush from one place to another, with only one thing in mind, our destination, and if you are anything like me, you spend your time concentrating on the road ahead and the clock as the minutes tick away. Sat nav’s haven’t helped, their default setting is to get the motorist from A to B in the fastest possible time and I know of people who race their sat nav’s trying to shave minutes off their estimated time of arrival, and I too have been guilty of this practice. As I travelled gently up the high street in Marlborough, I was thankful that we had come this way and I thought about life. There are times in my life when I get up on a morning, feel overwhelmed by all the work that needs to be done and get my head down. I am due to take a sabbatical next year and am maybe guilty of just wanting to get there. I am intending to retire in a couple of years and there are time when I can’t wait.
Around this time each year Churches celebrate harvest festival, and we think about the beauty of nature. I am currently doing the rounds of such services and I think that it does us good to stop for a moment and appreciate all that we have. I marvel that we live in such a diverse country, whether it is the mountainous regions of Scotland and Cumbria, the rolling hills of the north, the amazing coastal scenery, the big skies of East Anglia, or even the impressive architecture of many of our cities. We do well to slow down, savour what we have, thrill at the sights and sounds, and thank God for the wonder of nature.