RECONNECTING..

There may be some truth in the old saying that `it`s better to travel than to arrive,` but I guess that depends on where you`re going to or coming from.   We`ve just enjoyed another week in Cornwall, this time revisiting favourite places on the north coast.  To get there, it`s a 300 mile drive from here in Kent and I have genuinely lost count of the number of times I have driven up and down the A303, the 92 mile stretch from Basingstoke until it joins the A30 just before Honiton in Devon.   The simple truth is that to go `on holiday` has always resulted in an almost unconscious automatic choice of heading south west to various destinations in Devon and Cornwall.

And so, over the years, the A303 and I have not only come to know each other rather well but also to have become friends.   I like the A303.   I like the way it shrugs off the crowded, fast paced, manic south east and within a couple of miles of leaving the M3 you are swept through the north Hampshire countryside to Andover, famous for Reg Presley and the Troggs; and I begin to feel it in my fingers and feel it in my toes that this road is once more taking me to places where I want to be.

It sweeps across the wide open spaces of Wiltshire, flirts with the north Dorset outpost of Bourton and enters very rural Somerset, where you are treated to glimpses of Cadbury Hill with its shades of Camelot, then the Somerset Levels and signposts to tempting places like Compton Pauncefoot, Stoke Trister,  KIngsbury Episcopi and even Wales, until the A303 finally enters Devon and is transformed from the strident dual carriageway it was 80 miles ago into an almost apologetic single lane carriageway to become subsumed by the A30.   If Tom Fort had not already done so I think I could write a book about this magical highway to the sun but I`ll content myself with the comfort of reconnecting with all it has to offer and all it has to say - I don`t even mind the threat of traffic hold-ups on the approach to Stonehenge or the idiosyncratic Ilminster by-pass.  Gives you time to think. And look around.

Polly Joke this time last week

And so, thanks to the A303, last week I was able to make another reconnection, this one devoid of anything man made.   Most of the joys of my life are simple.  One of them is to stand on the shoreline on a quiet Cornish beach, like Polly Joke pictured above, to feel the wind, hear the waves, breathe in the air, look out at the sky and the ocean and, for a fleeting while, feel part of it all and feel reconnected with the real world and where we all came from all those millions of years ago.   And to wonder whether, after all, the arrival might not be better than the travel.  The jury, as they say, is still out.