Maldon to Dumfries
July 30th 1995
My cousin and his family and my aunt, my mother's sister, lived in Dumfries in south-western Scotland, not far from the border with England. My aunt had been sick for a while and my mother was going to stay with her for a week while my cousin and his family were on holiday. I decided to go with her, partly because it was a long way for her to drive on her own and partly because i've never been to that part of the island before and i wanted to have a look at it.
After the usual messing around that always seems to accompany departure on a long journey for most people, we finally left Maldon after eleven on Sunday morning. My mother intended to go to church in London on the way, but in the end it became obvious there wasn't any chance of making it in any sort of time for the midday mass, so we scrapped that plan and decided to bypass London altogether.
The most obvious route to get up to the west coast of Scotland from where we were was to follow the road towards London, until it met the M25. That motorway would then take us around north London to the M1, which is the main London to the North motorway. However, it's not a very direct route and i didn't much like the bits of that journey that took us to north of London, so we decided to cut across country instead.
Driving long distances in Britain is really weird. There's a massive network of really good, fast motorways, which generally speaking radiate out from London, although they also radiate out in a lesser way from Manchester, which is probably the second most important road junction on the island. The general idea is to travel as much of the route as possible on one of these motorways and as much of the rest as possible on one or more of the many dual carriageways which fill in a lot of the gaps where there aren't motorways. The rest of the journey has to be done on normal country roads, which vary immensely in quality and traffic.
This means that it's often faster to go by a longer route, over better roads, than by the most direct route. Of course, you don't get the extra speed for nothing - you probably spend a lot more on petrol flying along a motorway at eighty or ninety miles an hour as you would if you were doing a reasonable sixty or so on a more direct route. With all these factors and the amazing complexities of the british road network generally, you can end up with quite a tricky puzzle to solve, just working out how to get from A to B!
Anyway, we eventually decided to take the most direct route across country to join the M1 somewhere near Milton Keynes. Compared to the traffic-filled concrete hell of the faster roads, this is quite a pleasant journey. We went through Chelmsford, which is our nearest big town and is a weird sort of a place - kind of almost far outer London, but not quite. There's a canal which runs from there to very close to where i grew up, and a railway station where you can get a train to London, but apart from that, there was nothing particularly interesting about the place.
Anyway, from Chelmsford, the road took us near Harlow, which was an ugly concrete mess (or it used to be, anyway - i hadn't been there for years). It was built in the sixties as a new town to accomodate London overspill and like Basildon, the other town like that in Essex, it's characterless, rather depressing and visually very uninteresting.
From there, the road passes through a variety of strange little towns around the border between Essex and Hertfordshire. The sort of places that are just waiting to be gobbled up by the rapidly growing metropolitan monster, that stretches out its tentacles further and further every day, turning unsuspecting little towns, in what once was the countryside, into satellite suburbs of London. Maldon's a bit like that in a way, although it's forty five miles from London. Probably over half the population were either born in London or their parents were. Possibly the only thing that's really saved Maldon from just being a dormitory town is the fact that they closed the railway line in 1964. Of course, the improved road system now means you can do the journey in an hour, that combined with the serious lack of work, means that more and more people really only slept there.
We stopped at a pub somewhere in the Hertfordshire wilderness to have some lunch. Of course, i had the usual choice i'd get in pubs - chips or salad, or both. I chose chips for a change.
Eventually we met the motorway, just southeast of Milton Keynes, that most famous of all new towns. And from there it was mindnumbing monotonous concrete, ploughed through a large chunk of the small ammount of english countryside that hasn't been turned into housing estates or shopping centres, for the next two hundred miles or so.
It amazes me now, just how tiny Britain is. Although i drove around England quite a lot when i lived there, and came to realise that wherever you go, you're never more than an hour or so's drive from the nearest coast. But after getting used to the size of Australia, or at least, the east coast of Australia, it had shrunk incredibly. It wasn't much more than three hundred miles from Maldon to Dumfries, which is almost exactly the same distance as Wyndham to Sydney. Sure, it's a good few hours drive from Wyndham to Sydney, but it's not a journey we even really thought about. It was one of the shortest ones i ever did. But going to Dumfries did seem like a very long way away. Sitting in Maldon, it felt much much further off than Sydney did when i was at Wyndham. It's strange, that phenomenon. I'd noticed it quite a lot before too. I think distance has really got more to do with the number of people that live between you and where you're going than the actual number of miles or kilometres you have to travel.
Between Maldon and Dumfries, if you include London, which is more or less on the way, you can probably find at least half the population of Britain - and certainly half the population of England. London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and all the other towns which make up an almost continuous urban corridor up the M1 and the M6, stretching nearly all the way to the Scottish border. In that strip, i'd be surprised if there was much less than thirty million people. And that was nearly twice as much as the entire popuation of Australia.
In that same distance between Wyndham and Sydney, including the population of Sydney, there couldn't possibly be have been more than five million, as that was the total population of New South Wales (four fifths of which were in Sydney). So in terms of how many people you'd pass on your way, Dumfries is about six times as far from Maldon as Sydney is from Wyndham - which is pretty close to how it felt!
Anyway, somewhere north of Manchester, as we left Liverpool off to our left, we started getting into the less populated part of the journey. Between the Pennines and the Cumbrian Mountains, things began to get a bit more civilized. We were still on a motorway, but the country around us looked a bit emptier and a bit closer to being wild. Not that there was anything that could be described as even approaching wildness in England - unless you'd ingested copious ammounts of hallucinogenic mushrooms, that is! But that bit of the journey was about as wild as it got. In other words, it was slighly less tame than a garden with a lawn and rose beds. Sadly, nature scared the living shit out of the Romans and they started a campaign to completely destroy it so it didn't scare them any more. This campaign had been carried on by their descendents right up until the present day, i thought. You could still see the obsession with road building and chopping down trees in the culture of the british ruling class. If anything, they were more roman than the Romans were!
We arrived at Dumfries in the evening, but at that time of year it stays light till well after ten in those lattitudes and longitudes. It was an interesting looking place and my aunt lived in a house overlooking a river, on the opposite bank to the town centre. Outside the front door, there was a park which ran along the river bank for a few hundred yards in both directions. Not a bad spot to end up after a hell drive up a hideous motorway!