Correspondence From Limbo

I’m sitting on a bench on the platform of Bideford train station. A few others sit scattered about; two mothers pushing prams, a woman with a sour face and her husband, a pair of young lovers who seem incapable of not laughing at each other’s little jokes and comments. Aside from the two women with the baby buggy’s, we all got here the same way, by cycling the five miles from Torrington Station. Both stations closed in 1965, and the distance between them was later turned into a cycle path and added to the Tarka Trail network, a collection of cycling and hiking routes that follow a rough approximation of the path taken by the fictional Tarka the Otter in the Henry Williamson book of the same name.

This is the first time I’ve cycled in years. My legs ache; despite taking up running earlier in the year I haven’t yet built up much stamina. My parents, ever the adventurous sort, wish to cycle on to Instow, a small village three miles away. Three more miles of gruelling cycling, on pavement that isn’t level and is in desperate need of repair. But, despite all the misgiving I have about moving on, I’m looking forward to setting off again. Rain is forecasted to come later in the afternoon. It will come down in buckets, confining us to Instow’s local pub, where the only food available to buy will be terrible cornish pasties.

Yet a disappointing lunch in an average pub or the threat of bad weather isn’t why I want to set off again, nor is it the increasingly severe looks that the woman with the sour face is giving me. No, I want to leave because I wish to get back on the open road, to cycle with the wind in my hair and what remains of the sun on my face. Simply put, I want to travel.

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I’ve loved travelling ever since I was young. I don’t mean exploring a new place, although I possess a deep fondness for that too, but instead the process of going from one place to another. There’s nothing quite like sitting in a car, music blaring in your earphones, and watching the world go by. I’ve been lucky enough to visit some amazing places, but my favourite parts of those trips have almost always been the journeys, not the destinations. Some of that can be attributed to the scenery, but there is also the feeling that you get while passing through a place, whether it is a small, picturesque town or miles of beautiful countryside and knowing that you won’t stop there, that you might never return there in your entire life. I’ve always found that travelling provides this beautiful fleeting sense of connection that it is difficult to find anywhere else.

But travelling doesn’t just provide a chance to look at the scenery, it also offers stories. In his video covering the videogame Death Stranding, George “Super BunnyHop” Weidman commented that his biking the length of the USA allowed him to become a more interesting person. It gave him stories that he could tell, ones of having to ascend mountains while carrying a bicycle, or of accidentally dropping his sleeping bag in a swamp. While I can’t claim that my own adventures have ever been as exciting, I do still have my own stories. I have slept on the floor of a ferry while travelling the channel from France. I have sat in the burning sun outside an airport, waiting for my step-father to return with the car we had rented. I have been stuck in a traffic jam somewhere between Winchester and Nottingham with my best friend, sitting in a cramped car for hours on end, listening to the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack and slowly losing our minds. Although that story is nowhere near as bad as the time the two of us got stuck on the side of a small country road with a flat tire in the middle of the night…

But travelling hasn’t just allowed me to see new places or experience new stories in my vain attempts to make myself appear more interesting. It has also helped me come up with new things to write about. From pieces of fiction that spring into my head as I see something interesting on the side of the road, to this very piece, inspired by the amount of travelling I’ve done over the years.

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I’ve been spending some time travelling recently. Long stretches of time in a car or on a shuttle bus, music blaring in my ears, taking in the views. They vary from rolling hills to the grey tarmac of motorways. In Devon, I watched as sunlit beaches gave way to farmland, tall towers rising ominously in the distance. I imagined these towers to be sinister entities, containing secrets at their peaks that should never be revealed to the world below. Even though they were just Wi-Fi towers, the image stayed with me and continues to occupy my thoughts to this very moment. In Kent, I travelled back and forth from Gillingham to Canterbury, staring out the window at the motorways that criss-cross the country like a spiders web. I occupy myself with podcasts or essays on films or games that interest me. Meanwhile, the world moves around me.