The day I fell in love with Britain
I remember clearly the day I fell in love with Britain. I was sitting outside a café in Darwin, Australia, drinking ice cold beer with an American, an Australian and a German.
“Why would anyone want to travel around Britain?” one of them asked. “It’s got too many people, the weather’s awful and the food’s crap”.
Good question, I thought: why would anyone want to travel around Britain? If you read the tabloids and watch 24 hours news, you’d be hard-pressed to find any positives about our little island in the North Sea. Ask a Brit to name the World’s most beautiful islands and Britain wouldn’t make it to the Top 50. How can we compare to the tropicana of clear blue seas and soft white sand of islands in the southern and western oceans?
A land of exceptional natural beauty
As I pondered what he had said, I started to think of home. Only then did I fully appreciate what I had left behind. If he’d look beyond the tabloid stories or travelled further than the grey city walls, he’d have found a land of exceptional natural beauty. A land touched around every corner by history and a land of people diverse in their race, religion and origins.
Who wants to travel around Britain?
I searched bookshops hoping not to confirm my fellow traveller’s thoughts that no-one wants to travel around Britain. I found books of journeys made around the island. But, given the option, it seems many travel-writers would grab rucksack, shorts and passport and head for foreign lands. The further away the better. You can more easily find a guide to living with a group of yak herdsman in Outer Mongolia than a trip around the historically-rich lands of Britain. If you have a companion for your travels; a fridge, a donkey or even your aunt, even better, but you still have to do it somewhere else.
Students of a certain age, take a ‘gap’ year (in my day that was when you failed your A levels). Spend a Summer stacking beans in Tesco, volunteering for every shift going, then crawl back to Mum and Dad’s for free board and lodgings, before taking the cheapest flight to the southern hemisphere in search of sun, fun and partying. I know. I’ve been there.
Blank canvas of forest and heathland
I think we all sometimes take for granted our home, the once blank canvas of forest and heathland, which, over thousands of years has been moulded into the Britain we live in today. Everywhere you go there is history. It has shaped the land and the people, for better or worse. As the world has become smaller from the possibilities of travel, we can see places our ancestors only dreamt of.
It should have made us more tolerant, less small-minded. But has this search for new places stopped us appreciating what we have at home?
Pages: 1 2
