The Scotland Route

Not metaphorically. Literally. The laptop is open, Google Maps is open, and I am working out whether the A1 or the M6 would get a family of four to Scotland faster if it actually came to that. Wouldn’t these become bottlenecks and would countryside roads offer a more viable grid to use? Do we need a Land Rover Defender? A tank? You can actually buy tanks on Facebook Marketplace, did you know that?

The five-year-old wants jam, not Weetabix. The three-year-old wants what her brother has. The kettle goes on for a second cup. The route, today, is via Newmarket.

It started as a dark joke between R. and me. “If everything goes tits-up,” I would say, “at least we have got Scotland.” She would laugh in the careful way you laugh when something is not entirely funny. The kind of laugh you save for when reasonable people start saying unreasonable things and you are not certain which category you are in anymore.

Then one evening R. - the former HR director turned nutritionist, the sensible one, the one in our marriage who reads risk registers for fun - said unprompted, “Right, we will need water filters. And jerry cans. Proper ones, not the plastic shit from B&Q.” When the sensible one starts prepping, you are past the joke.

Scotland, for the uninitiated, is the ultimate refuge for the reasonably anxious British resident. Even the Romans said no to Scotland and built a wall instead. Hadrian’s Wall is still standing nearly two thousand years later, a testament to the wisdom of knowing when you are beaten. If everything else comes apart, Scotland remains Scotland. Stubbornly, reassuringly, permanently bloody-minded. Beautiful, rugged - void of strategic importance and hopefully not on the primary target list of any despotic strongman in power today.

The escape planning is not pessimism. It is insurance. I pay for house insurance not because I expect the house to burn down, but because I understand that sometimes houses burn down. The difference is that when your house burns down, the fire brigade turns up. When the country you live in starts feeling like it is coming apart at the seams, there is no number to ring for that.

What I have learned, in the year or so since the jerry cans entered the conversation, is that the route I plan in the morning and the route I actually take are not the same route.

The route I plan goes north. The route I actually take is shorter, and inward.

I close the laptop. I grind the coffee and set the Chemex going, because R. has us off anything that leaches microplastics, along with the rest of the invisible poisons. I put the porridge on. I tell the five-year-old that nobody is having the last Weetabix, because there are six more in the cupboard, and the world is fine. I wipe yoghurt off the three-year-old. I get them dressed. I drop the boy at school after R. drops the girl off at nursery. I come home and I work. In the evening I eat something. We watch something. I read for half an hour and I sleep.

The route is the morning. The route is the kitchen, the school run, the work, the hour of reading. The Scotland thing is the safety valve - the imagined exit that lets you stay. As long as I have planned a way out, I do not need to take it. The map is the medicine.

This book is about the route that is actually taken.

I am a Romanian by birth, German by formation, British by location and paperwork. I lived through one system collapsing when I was small, and I have spent my adult life in two countries whose self-image keeps fraying at the edges. I am married to a Briton, raising two British children, paying British taxes and watching the country that took me in convince itself, every morning, that it is being destroyed.

It is mostly not being destroyed. Some of it is broken. Some of it is being broken on purpose. A lot of it is fine, in the boring, daily, working-out-of-Suffolk way that things are fine. The problem is not the country. The problem is the volume.

The volume is the product. The fear is the product. The neighbour you are being told to suspect is the product. The opinion you did not have before breakfast but have now is the product. Every morning the machine arrives with a new reason your life is in danger, and every morning you have to decide whether to buy it.

I have stopped buying it. Not all at once, and not because I am cleverer than the next person. I stopped because R. wanted real jerry cans and I realised that I was the one who had handed her the script.

What follows is the route I take instead. Some of it is autobiography, because the only authority I have in a conversation about fear is that I grew up in a country that was very afraid, and I have lived in two countries since that are nominally not. Some of it is argument. Some of it is what I tell my own kids about the world they are walking into, which is also what I am still telling myself.

None of it is a plan. It is a route. Routes are walked, not announced.

Scotland will still be there tomorrow. So will Newmarket. So will the kettle, and the cupboard, and the six Weetabix.

The road north is open. I am not going to take it today.