Day Eight
Success
Success. A last look at the house martins as we finish packing. The nests they’d only just started on when we arrived are visibly growing. A successful few days for them.
The organisation that would have been required to leave Shaugh Prior very early just wasn’t viable. We thought we’d be driving against the main traffic flow. Hoped it would be hassle-free. This wasn’t groundless optimism. Half-term started for many on our second Saturday.
Heavy traffic prompts something negative very deep in me. Something that’s more than mere fear, though that would be the word that dominates a lazy headline. I could drivel on about it being the prospect of being trapped when I can’t turn around or turn off. About it being the lack of options, particularly on motorways. But I know it’s something more than that.
As it was, on the motorway between Exeter and Bristol, the south-west-bound lanes were hectic and a couple of times reduced to a barely moving crawl. No single reason, just volume. And a couple of times we were slowed, too. The same cause. The tension rose … but for us the throttling-back was brief. And we’d already planned to go across country before we got up to Bristol, to cut across to The Walled Garden at Mells, not far from Frome. The rest of the day’s driving was fine – for us at least. But we could see a lot of people were heading south west. A couple of days after we’d been home, someone I know said traffic snarl-ups had made the news.
Local
‘Local is good’ is a current mantra, often heard when proposed as a way of fighting back against climate change. But how good? Mells is small, seems prosperous. And The Walled Garden was pleasant enough. Busy but not ruinously. As it was Saturday lunchtime we guessed they were local people dominating, visiting for the food and drink they sell there. What other reason? As far as we knew, The Walled Garden isn’t a major tourist destination. If you like, it looked like a localised version of the coffee shops that have proliferated in seemingly every town and city. And yes, the food and drink was good enough. But there was no choice either. If you’re not able to travel easily beyond Mells? If The Walled Garden isn’t the place for you? What price local?
Coffee shops are nothing new, but consumption seems to be the new leisure focus. Consumption and ‘experiences’. I guess for a lot of us now, we’ve done the bulk of our goods-acquiring. We live surrounded by luxuries even if we don’t appreciate that that’s what they are. So to keep commerce ticking along they need to sells us perishables.
Over and above comestibles, the community garden and nursery there seemed a strong positive, and it all looked and felt like it was doing alright. I’d be hard pressed to say where the garden is in any affluence rating. What’s its target? Upper middle? I’m not sure I care. Class is tedious and in many regards unrelated to happiness, contentment. However you’re positioned, you’ll have your own good aspects and your own bad aspects, your own pleasures and problems. Is pleasure an antonym for problem?
Questioning
Questioning your own happiness after a good holiday doesn’t seem right. But that’s what we found ourselves doing. Normally after a break we’re both pleased enough to be at home again. It’s not as if our day-to-day is a trudge with a holiday a needed reward. But this time around? We both felt the same. Not displeased at being back, but something’s not as positive as it would have been.
The Perennial that I’ve already mentioned seems more of a spectre now; has more of a presence. But after all the making-the-effort-to-talk-it-all-over we’d done, we both know there are grass-is-always-greener realities to consider when it comes to moving on. And that’s in whatever form moving on takes. Coming home should have held no surprises on this front.
Perhaps there’s a hang-over from the two years of Covid-created disruption. The lock-downs, sure, but also all the other phases and their consequences. In terms of breaks from the same old same old we’ve only had one one-week holiday in two years; few day trips. Perhaps that’s why we’re not yet ready to be at home as often as we used to be. Perhaps.
Variety
Variety is the spice of life. You hear that often enough. But how deep a pool to draw on? How broad your horizon? Etc, in a similar vein.
Does variety come with novelty? Does valuing variety equate to valuing the unusual more than the usual? It can seem that way.
I don’t know. Perhaps we – human animals – learned to focus on the unusual, the exceptional as a safety mechanism, an instinctive thing. It might be a threat. What you can safely habituate to, you can, in a positive way, take for granted.
But in our modern, over-stimulated and on the whole safe world? We’re surrounded by the exceptional now – it’s thrust at us down innumerable channels. Perhaps as a response we need to value the ordinary, value the mundane.
In the years when I worked with world news, day in and day out, it was always the exceptional that grabbed the attention. And the exceptional is nearly always the bad. (Nothing’s changed. It’s the nature of news.) As I cycled or walked home from work, some days I had to remind myself that on the whole we all managed to rub along. Life for most people was ordinary, mundane – and OK. I’ve never forgotten that underlying reality.
Give it a context: for all the problems and pressures and everything else, every year there are less than two murders a day in England and Wales. That speaks volumes. That’s not to dismiss all the problems and pressures, nor the murders. It is to change the brightest focus on to the positive. Despite it all, for most people life bumped and bumps along in an fair-enough kind of way. That is an amazing daily achievement. Unfortunately and typically, the harshest, scariest, look-how-bad-life-is focus will be on the murders, the exceptions.
And the same is true of any number of other aspects of our average day-to-day lives in the UK. Exceptions dominate, but they’re unrepresentative. And we forget all that.
Exceptions
Exceptions. Exceptions and victims. Yes, perhaps at root humans focus on exceptions because of some instinctive focus on the unusual.
Or, in more modern times, perhaps exceptions dominate because of the noise of endless sales pitches. The ‘unusual’, wheeled out to encourage purchasing. As we keep on keeping on, having by and large already acquired all that we actually need, the effort of making people keep wanting more has had to become ever louder.
And it’s easy to become casualties in all that. For anyone – you and me both – to become victims. It’s easy for anyone to get stuck on the bound-to-fail treadmill of reward followed by disappointment followed by reward followed by … etc. If you change your own focus away from the unusual, you realise that this is an imposed treadmill.
Treadmill
Treadmill lives. My personal treadmill. A treadmill was (is?) often a punishment for prisoners. Writing that reminds me that while we were on holiday we drove through Princetown – the home of Dartmoor Prison. I can remember, as a kid, seeing guards and prisoners near the gates there, with the prisoners in manacles. My parents explained that they were being marched off to break rocks. Granite, I guess. It made an impression. After all these years I remember it happening.
Is that some kind of vaguely poetic tie back? I’ve returned from a good holiday feeling discontent. I’ve groped around, looking for a cause, an external cause. But I should be looking at me.
No, I don’t think anyone could justly accuse me of being on an acquisition-led treadmill. However, writing these holiday notes and giving them their ‘Unstated’ context has made me realise that I’m often going over what is, for me, over-familiar territory. I’m on a treadmill of my own repetitive thoughts.
My partner will tell you, if I’m ever complaining about being bored, it’s me I’m bored with. Is it stretching things to say that that makes me a prisoner of sorts? I’m not going to labour that. (And yes, you could stretch that back to breaking rocks being hard labour. Ha, ha and, indeed, ha.)
One way or another though, bundled up with your emotions and your hormones and your history and your culture and everything else, you are your thoughts – and I am mine.
Leave aside how dull I am for others. If my own thoughts are now boring even me, if my thought patterns have become my treadmill, if that’s me now, then what’s next?
Problems with travel have also been explored on ‘Getting Directions’ a couple of times, with ‘Grasp For?’ and ‘Travel, You Idiot’.
The Walled Garden in Mells has its own web site which includes an indicative photo gallery. It’s heartening to see they are supporting local producers.
Looking back at this week away chimes with an entry on the ‘Unstated’ site about the potential benefits of curating yourself.
