This may be a bit of winter lunacy, but having been busy with very local issues recently I decided I wanted to get away from it all for a week or so.
When I was young there was a man on the TV who caught my imagination. It was a man called Ian Nairn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Nairn
I didn’t know this at the time but apparently he was a prominent architectural critic but for me he was an eccentric TV presenter. My memory of him (clearly I missed most of his TV output) was him driving down France in a Morris Minor convertible.
Well, there he is. No matinee idol but the picture catches his quirky and rather grumpy approach to TV presenting. And probably life in general, though if you read the Wikipedia entry he drowned his sorrows in beer and dies at only 52 of alcoholism and cirrhosis of the liver. It turns out he is buried in Hanwell cemetery.
This is his modest gravestone – I may make a pilgrimage, but how you find it in a vast graveyard is an interesting task.
The reason I mention Nairn, is that he is the inspiration for my road trip. He had a distinctive way of navigating (remember this was c 1970 so Waze and Google Maps were not available). He mounted a compass on his dashboard, decided the correct compass bearing would get him there, and used the compass at every junction to determine which road to take.
The idea was that he would discover the kind of scene he treasured - ordinary places, sometimes with charm and great individuality, others with no particular interest or distinction. I have always enjoyed myself when I travel around. Popularity and fashion are not my bag at all and I often find tourist attractions very dreary and disappointing. Yes, like Nairn there is a bit of eccentric in me.
I am not quite sufficiently eccentric or disciplined to follow Nairn's approach but I put ‘no motorways’ into Google maps and plotted the route in an approximate imitation of the Nairn approach. Of course, I don’t posses a Morris Minor Tourer and it would probably be an unwise conveyance when we expect freezing rain, ice and large drifts of snow where I’m heading.
My plan is to blog on Guy Lambert’s blog Facebook and on this newly minted guylambert.blog website to give daily updates. Assuming I survive and the network does likewise 😊
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