Dale End, Duddon Valley...

Will a week without planes make us reconsider our attitudes towards air travel? Probably not. In the space of a few years we’ve come to regard foreign holidays as a right, not a privilege. First it was one holiday each year, then two, then three. We’ll no doubt carry on flying to exotic locations, staying in the air-conditioned luxury of ‘international’ hotels, enjoying a week of sun, sand, sea and sangria. We’ll meet a few locals, of course - carrying our bags, serving us drinks - but mostly we’ll stay by the pool.

The experience of foreign holidays, though relaxing, leaves many people curiously unmoved. I’ve asked friends, on their return: “How was it?”, expecting to hear of adventures in faraway places, or, at the very least, some amusing anecdotes. Most people can only manage a shrug of the shoulders. “The hotel was good”, they’ll admit, while struggling to find anything else to say. They’d jetted off to a place that, until recently, had seemed achingly distant and exotic - more of a mirage than a holiday destination - and returned with little to show for the experience except for a tan acquired rather too quickly for comfort. It was just a holiday...

It must be about five years since I last got my passport stamped. It’s not that I’ve stopped travelling; it’s just that I’ve just been travelling in smaller circles. My ‘patch’ is the North of England. Now, the ‘North of England‘ isn’t an area you’ll find on any map. It’s not a county, or an administrative district, and whole books are written about what it is and what it means, usually accompanied by an attempt to define its boundaries. It’s a pointless exercise. The North of England is not a geographic area, it’s a state of mind. For Londoners it begins somewhere about Watford Gap services on the M1 and might as well be coloured an unrelieved brown on the map, with the legend ‘Here be dragons’. There are Geordies who look down on Yorkshire folk as “soft Southern bed-wetters”, and Yorkshiremen who insist they’re living in ‘God’s own County’.

My ‘North’ is a rather amorphous area; it expands and contracts, like a rubber band stretched between the fingers of both hands. To the north there’s the obvious boundary of Hadrian’s Wall, though I make occasional foreys into the Borders. To the east is the North Sea, to the west, the Irish Sea. To the South it’s more complicated, and my choices more whimsical. I include the Peak National Park, but not Lincolnshire. Cheshire reminds me of footballers‘ wives; it doesn’t say ‘North‘ to me.

Fortunately, none of this matters. My personal map of the North can continue to expand and contract. But what is important is to keep exploring. Yesterday I had a pint in a wonderful little pub I had never visited, in Broughton Mills, which, though sounding like a West Yorkshire textile town, is actually a tiny community of scattered farms in the middle of nowhere (well, the Duddon Valley). Whenever I think I know the North of England quite well, I am gently reminded that I barely know it at all. I will be happy to keep travelling - not outwards but inwards - for the rest of my days.

I have a favourite quote; it’s quite perceptive, which suggests it’s not an original thought of mine. But, having googled it, I can’t find any other attribution. Never mind: if you get to know one area well, your horizons are limitless...