TAKE A BROADER VIEW

YEARS ago I was chatting to a colleague who told me she had never been to Edinburgh.

We were in an office just five minutes from the place where locomotives leave Glasgow for Scotland’s capital four times an hour and take less than an hour to get there.

She was in her mid-20s, had lived in Glasgow all her life, and not once, out of idle curiosity if nothing else, made the trip.

Weeks ago, at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, I met a staff member in her 40s who told me she had never been to St Andrews, 12 miles away.

People travel from the world over to see the place, but not a hospital worker from just over the Tay.

These revelations were some preparation for this week’s report from Keep Britain Tidy which says almost one in five British children has never visited a UK beach, but it is still a shocking figure. If travel broadens the mind, what does squeezing your horizons do?