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ROAD TRIPS

MY FAMILY recently bowed to the inevitable and acquired a Volvo.

For the past decade, we have managed without a car, using public transport enthusiastically, taxis indiscriminately and renting for longer road-trips.

Covid-19 made us rethink this freewheeling approach. This summer, when we drove to visit my parents then to holiday in Scotland, it was, excitingly, in our own car.

From couples boarding Greyhounds in Simon & Garfunkel songs to classic accounts such as Jack Kerouac’s On The Road and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, I often think of the roadtrip memoir as an American genre.

But brilliant on-foot forerunners closer to home include George Orwell’s The Road To Wigan Pier and Laurie Lee’s As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning.

There are entrancing novels that explore not just the inner world of the person at the wheel but also the communities and landscape being traversed. In Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day, butler Stevens is encouraged to take his new American employer’s stately car for a ‘motoring trip’ to Cornwall.

Stevens’ ulterior motive is that he will visit his former colleague, Miss Kenton.

As a post-war landscape unfolds, where the rigidity of class structure has shifted, Stevens is forced to question his loyalty to his politically disgraced late boss, Lord Darlington, and also recognise how a life in service has oppressed him emotionally.

I am writing this to a soundscape of drumming rain and a mistswathed view of the Isle of Skye across the Sound of Sleat. Rain or shine, I find this scene magical.

What I find hilarious about Scottish author Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos is how bored his teenage girl choristers are with their Highland hometown. On a trip to Edinburgh, for a schools’ choir competition, they are determined to go on the rampage.

Whatever scenes greet you from whatever window this summer, savour them.