The trees! The sky! Er, the motorway?

Friends and acquaint­ances seem to respond with dis­be­lief when I say that I don’t get out of Lon­don nearly as much as I would like. (OK, that’s not strictly true — they most likely don’t say any­thing of the sort; it’s just my para­noia that help­fully fills in the blanks). But it’s true. Thanks to not being a car driver and achiev­ing an almost con­stant state of fin­an­cial embar­rass­ment, the world is only my oyster if it involves jour­neys that go no fur­ther than Zone 6 of the tube network.

I was think­ing about this because I have sud­denly recalled, with no small degree of hor­ror, some of the weird obser­va­tions that tumbled out of my mouth — seem­ingly bypassing my brain — last Sat­urday night. What happened on Sat­urday? Well, although it might not sound very excit­ing to you, to me it was like — like — oh, words escape me … really, they do. In sum­mary, I vis­ited the wilds of Berkshire, and I went there in a car. On a motorway.

Thrill­ing, isn’t it? Calm yourselves, and I shall continue.

But that’s exactly my point. The sad fact is that it’s ages since I last had the oppor­tun­ity to ven­ture bey­ond the grimy bound­ar­ies of Lon­don and get out into the coun­tryside — it was last June, in fact. As on that occa­sion, on Sat­urday I found myself think­ing that because I spent the first eight­een years of my life in rural sur­round­ings, there’s always going to be a part of me that longs for the coun­tryside. This time, how­ever, I didn’t even have to gaze out at rails or look around at grey-faced fel­low com­muters as I trav­elled to my des­tin­a­tion — an even more unusual exper­i­ence for me.

And that, by way of some form of garbled explan­a­tion, is how I came to make the fol­low­ing state­ments. Read ‘em and weep:

• (whilst trav­el­ling at full speed down the motor­way) “I know this prob­ably sounds a bit ridicu­lous, but it’s rather magical trav­el­ling on a motor­way at night, isn’t it?“
• (whilst trav­el­ling along a darkened stretch of the same motor­way) “Gosh, I didn’t real­ise that there are sec­tions of motor­way without any lights. Isn’t it spooky?“
• (whilst star­ing out of the car win­dow at the almost deser­ted streets of a small Berkshire town) “Look, it’s Sat­urday even­ing and there’s hardly any­one about! How unlike Lon­don!“
• (whilst gaz­ing up at the night sky) “Wow! It’s so weird see­ing a night sky that’s really, like, black — without any of the orange glow from mil­lions of streetlights.”

God, it’s tra­gic. There may have been fur­ther pro­found utter­ances — it wouldn’t sur­prise me at all if I now dis­covered that later in the even­ing I could be heard shout­ing, “Man! Look at all these cool trees!” — but thanks to copi­ous amounts of red wine I was left in no fit state to remem­ber them. A small mercy, I’m sure you’ll agree.

So decide for your­self. An endear­ing dis­play of wide-eyed, child-like naiv­ety, or just down­right pathetic? Whichever it was, there’s no deny­ing that I really must get out of Lon­don more often.