What does 300 miles really mean?

London to Paris. Essentially. Just not quite as glamorous with a touch more Barbour and a shit ton more tweed. In my 20’s when I lived in London and was hot-footing around the globe, I would have taken London to Paris any day of the week and probably quite happily have stayed there. Now I am in my 40’s and life has led me to find joy in other landscapes, I find myself travelling the same distance, in an entirely different direction. Barbour, check! Tweed, I’m working on it…

The point I’m clumsily making is, I don’t think until my husband and I sat down and talked about the distance we’re moving, I fully appreciated just how far we’re going. I met with a friend recently for a coffee and a pre-move catch up and she asked “doesn’t it feel huge? Overwhelming?” I answered honestly, “No, but I feel that… maybe it should?” Husband and I reflected on the conversation I’d had with my friend over the dining table, that evening. Thinking about it, most people close to us have had a similar reaction. Sharp intakes of breath, comments about the extraordinary distance from ‘home’, describing it not as a move but as an ‘adventure’. I was getting the feeling that my perception of our move was so at odds with that of others’, I needed to re-conceptualise the whole thing. SO! I compiled a short, crude list of international Countries that are the same distance from London, that our new home in Cumbria is from our current home in Suffolk. It reads:

Netherlands

Germany

France

Luxembourg

Belgium

Compared to ‘the far north’ or ‘the borders’ they all sound distant, beyond, exotic even. They definitely sound a long way from home. If we were relocating to Europe, I wonder how differently I might feel?

But I’ll be honest, I still feel very measured, calm and genuinely settled about the “enormity” of our move. Maybe it stems from having travelled widely, being blessed with a truly international cohort of friends or having experienced some of life’s more brutal blows and therefore relatively speaking a 300 mile move is akin to a picnic along the Riviera in the sunshine. I suspect it is a combination; rarely are we a product of a single factor. The fact however remains that 300 miles is merely a mechanism of measurement whether it gives an impression of how far the road ahead is, how far we have travelled or indeed just how long it might take to reach our destination. I am of course incredibly fortunate to be sharing the experience with my husband and children, all of whom want to make the move. I think it’s fair to conclude that distance is relative to our experience and our perspective. We're just emerging from a period of modern history where 2 metres might well have been an ocean. Conversely, technology fused these intangible distances and kept us all connected. For me, the question is so much greater than what is distance, but how do we relate to and comprehend distance.

Somewhat less philosophically however, from experience (and I speak from a pre-Brexit perspective) it takes rather longer to travel the length of England than it takes to get from London to Paris anyway.

And that was before the fuel crisis.