“It was Aunt Lovey’s belief that all ordinary people led extraordinary lives, but just didn’t notice.”
The quote, from a novel by Laurie Lansen, came to mind when I was recently prompted to think about my writing from a different perspective. The idea, from Simon Sinek, is to think about the ‘why’ before thinking about ‘how’ or ‘what’ I’m going to write. And the why, for me, has something to do with Aunt Lovey’s belief in finding the extraordinary where we often just see ordinary.
Because it’s not just people’s lives that are more extraordinary than we sometimes realise: it’s the route that I always take, but never really look at; it’s my garden, or the park that I’ve walked around a thousand times, but never really seen. It’s the nearby town, or the next one over. It’s the footpath that I’ve never followed, or the road I’ve never tried. Sometimes, it’s that brown tourist-information signpost that I always ignore because, hey, I live here, I’m not a tourist.
I love getting under the surface of things – people and places especially. Not in an intrusive way, but just by noticing, by paying attention. What sustains me are things like random chats with complete strangers, the stunning contrast of a ladybird on a dark green nettle leaf, the sudden vista of a blooming yellow rapeseed field against a clear blue sky. These are the accidental encounters that appear when I keep my eyes – and my heart – open.
And then there’s the things that I seek out. The Levellers once sang: “I like to walk in ancient places, these are things that I can understand.” And honestly, I can’t find a better way of putting it. I’ve been drawn for most of my adult life to stone circles, ancient forests, holy wells and springs, and even very old churches. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these special places are peppered throughout our little island, once you start looking. Sometimes they’re a little hidden away, but therein lies the adventure.
But I also have other, more contemporary draws: the individuality of bus shelters in different areas; the experience of car camping; and the hidden city streets that you stumble upon without a map. Although I also have a great love of maps and can lose myself for hours, scouring an OS map.
I guess I’ve always been a bit of a seeker. So where does that impulse come from? The influences are varied: my family history, literature, songs. As a very young child, I hitchhiked, in the arms of my far-from-conventional parents, all over the country. Later, when my parents had a car, we went to festivals and I remember being fascinated by the stories of the hitchhikers we picked up. And later still, I travelled the festivals with my own babe-in-arms, in our bus home.
I devoured books: On the Road, The Grapes of Wrath, Down and Out in Paris and London, and even The Road Less Travelled. I was brought up with the music of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, and later I added to these with bands like Culture Shock, The Levellers, and The Pogues. But possibly most of all, and intertwined with all of that, was my experience of feeling like an outsider, and the incremental healing that occurred through tiny interactions with people and places.
Belonging and connection: from a young age, these were reached for. They have become, over the years, central to who I am. And I found these through noticing, through treasuring, through engagement with places and people, both in my locale and on road trips near and far.
The point is that I don’t have to go far at all. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love foreign travel too. In fact, one of my favourite holidays was cycling through France on a rickety old sit-up-and-beg bike with rod brakes. It took me a long time to realise that it was simply the pace of travel, the opportunities to really notice, that made it such a memorable trip. And that pace, that level of noticing, can transform even the most mundane journey.
My lived experience was further bolstered when I went to university, late in life. There, I read Zygmunt Bauman’s revealing juxtaposition of tourists and vagabonds, and Tim Cresswell’s politics of mobility, not to mention Judith Okely’s immersion in ‘The Traveller-Gypsies’. My world lit up because here was unexpected proof that I wasn’t alone in my world, nor my orientation to it. They helped articulate parts of my own world back to me.
Yet somehow, I came full circle and returned to the life of an outsider, living in a truck. But I no longer feel like an outsider.
I feel deeply rooted in the countryside around me and in the people of my community. Not just the other travellers nearby, but the people who pass randomly through my life and leave a little trace of themselves, a little bit of their story, with me.
We are all extraordinary in our own little ways, and we live in extraordinary places. If we take the time to notice.
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