What can travel teach us? That the grass isn’t always greener...

THE elderly gent at the Jubilee party extended an arm in the direction of a building 50 yards away. ‘That’s my house,’ he said. He raised his index finger a few degrees and trained it on the hilltops five miles away. ‘That’s England there.’

Between the two lay nothing but gorgeous, rolling countryside.

Jimmy Johnston, 88, is from these parts. He was born in Solport just over the Border in North Cumberland and later settled in the hamlet of Southdean on the Scottish side. The move wasn’t such a big deal. Same neck of the woods, really.

If there was a happier man at the shindig his village threw to celebrate the Queen’s platinum anniversary on the throne, I didn’t spot him. He became pensive only at the mention of his wife Norma, who died in 2000, two years before they would have marked their own golden anniversary.

It was with Norma that he made his only excursion beyond the shores of his beloved Britain – a bus trip to Ireland. ‘I’ve never been to the north of Scotland or the west of England,’ he told me.

Erratic

Travel is said to broaden the mind. I’ve been to John O’ Groats and the Northern Isles beyond – to Land’s End and both over and under the English Channel.

Tomorrow, easyJet’s erratic schedules permitting, I’ll cross it again and breathe a peaceful sigh if, through the clouds, I spy England’s south coast receding in the distance.

Tears may well in my eyes – they often do – at the first glimpse of the Tramuntana mountains of Mallorca bathed in sunlight, rising out of the Med’s timeless blue.

This is more a pilgrimage than a holiday. I make it every June when a global pandemic has not grounded aircraft. When it has, I am bereft. I wanted to tell Mr Johnston of the bougainvillea in bloom at this time of year, of the rural Mallorcan villages I know – Orient, Fornalutx, Galilea – and the long, lazy lunches of local produce and vino tinto which ease the soul.

But I tell him none of these things because, of course, it is my soul, not his, which needs easing.

Looking out from my berth in Scotland’s largest city, our nation appears marooned in an age of unprecedented dysfunction. Transport Secretary Jenny Gilruth sees no problem with Scotland fans arriving at Hampden for the match with Armenia and learning that, if they want a train home, they’ll have to leave at half-time.

Over in the health brief, people are told not to bother the hospital A&E departments their taxes bankroll. Ring NHS 24 instead. You’ll be better looked after on the phone.

Our cars are under attack by green vigilantes letting down tyres and by government straining every sinew to stop us using them while presiding over a public transport system that would shame developing countries.

Our parliaments in Edinburgh and London appear locked in a race to the bottom: a pathetically puerile walkout by the Scottish Greens during a Jubilee debate; a Tory MP viewing porn on his phone in the Commons; the aforementioned Miss Gilruth defending the indefensible so shrilly the Presiding Officer took seven attempts to get her to belt up; open warfare between a Westminster government and its backbenchers…

How seductive the thought of 1,500 miles distance from the whole bally lot of them. How soothing the prospect of a week’s break from driving, from eking out tanks of fuel because you know the next one will inflict yet more injury on the bank balance.

Yes, we plan to use public transport in Mallorca. It actually works there.

Superficial

Sitting alongside this contented octogenarian at the Queen’s Jubilee bash, it occurred to me I travel not to broaden the mind but in search of equilibrium for it – and the enemy of equilibrium, all too often, is this place, this nation, where I live.

Perhaps many of us Scots appreciate foreign travel because we understand less of our destination country’s problems than we do of our own. We may think the grass is greener there merely through the superficial, touristic nature of our visit.

But, whatever its levels of dysfunction, the thing I have never encountered in Mallorca in annual visits stretching back almost four decades is deep-seated division.

I see it almost daily in Glasgow, that dear green cauldron of grievance whose council refused to lift a finger to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. I love the place and yet, for equilibrium, require regular changes of scenery.

One hundred miles away in Southdean, Jimmy Johnston is different. It is, I suspect, the constancy of his scenery, of Scotland and England both visible from his kitchen window, that keeps him grounded, both figuratively and literally.

He talks of the cities as angry places, breeding grounds for unattractive outlooks on life and, in view of the fact such an outlook now pervades the local authority in my home city, I find it hard to disagree.

I did not share with him my plans to be further from this land than he has ever been. Instead, I gazed at this patch of Scotland – and England – with new eyes and filled my nostrils with clean Borders air.

Here the artificial dividing line, a stone’s throw from Mr Johnston’s home, that urbanites fuss and fret about, is invisible, almost meaningless. Life seems immeasurably better for it.