So will the kids, the kitchen table where I plan my escapes, and the coffee that fuels the morning ritual of working out evacuation routes whilst the country I live in convinces itself, for the fourteenth consecutive year, that this time it is genuinely about to end.
The Romans never conquered Scotland, but they built roads, and the roads outlasted the empire. Hadrian’s Wall is still standing as a monument to the wisdom of knowing when you are beaten. The roads, less famously, are still under several of our motorways. Empires fail. Roads do not. The people who travel on the roads do not, mostly, remember the empire that paid for them, and the next empire will pave its own roads on top of these, and the empire after that will do the same. The roads, in a way, win.
This is what reasonable people do during unreasonable times. We build roads while empires collapse around us. We focus on what connects rather than what divides, what works rather than what sells, what helps rather than what hurts. We do not build the roads because we are optimistic about the empire. We build them because other people will need to walk them long after we are gone, and we would like to make their journeys easier than ours.
This book is one of my roads. The road goes inward, towards the kitchen at half past six, towards the silence before the day starts, towards the version of yourself that exists when the medium is in the next room and the door is closed. The kettle. The kids. The walk. The work. The neighbours. The radiator pipes you rebuild with your hands because nobody is going to do it for you.
I started this book exhausted by the constant noise of manufactured outrage and artificial crisis. I have finished it convinced that the noise is loud precisely because it is desperate. The people who profit from your division need you in a daily lather. They cannot afford for you to discover that most of your neighbours are fine, that most of your problems are local, that most of your fear has been put there on purpose by people you have never met, who will be replaced, within five years, by another generation of people you have never met, selling the next round of fear under a different slogan.
If you stop buying it, the apparatus loses you. It would prefer not to lose you. It will work hard to keep you. The work it does to keep you is, mostly, the construction of an environment so saturated with low-grade emergency that you no longer notice the saturation. You take it as the weather of being alive. It is not. It is a microclimate produced by specific machines for specific commercial reasons, and it does not have to be your weather. You can step out of it. The kitchen does not have it. The walk does not have it. The neighbour does not have it.
I am not telling you to disengage. I am telling you to choose. There is a difference between disengagement and selection. Most of the people in your country who are doing the slow careful work of holding it together are not on television, are not on the platforms, and are not asking for your attention. They are the council planning officer who fights ten years for a footbridge. They are the GP staying an extra hour. They are the teacher teaching your child to read. They are the volunteer at the food bank. They are the neighbour with the keys to your house when you are away. They are not selling fear. They have nothing to sell at all. They are simply present.
You can be one of them. You can know the names of the people on your street. You can volunteer for the thing in the village hall. You can sponsor the refugee family. You can plant the tree. You can mend the wall. You can cook the casserole for the widow next door. None of this is on social media. None of this trends. None of this generates a notification on anybody’s phone. All of this is, in the slow accumulation of decades, what civilisation actually is.
The Scotland route will still be available tomorrow if everything else falls apart. I will keep the map in the drawer because it is good to know it is there. The kids may need it one day. They may not. Either way the drawer is fine, and the map is fine, and the route is fine, and the kettle is fine, and I am fine, and we are fine, and you, on the whole, even if it does not feel that way every morning, are fine.
The world has always been broken. Good people have always worked to fix it. That work continues, imperfectly and incompletely, but it continues. Most of it is invisible. Almost none of it is on the news. All of it is real.
This book is my contribution to that work, as honestly as I can do it from a kitchen in Suffolk, on a Tuesday morning, with two coffees in me and a banana being eaten incorrectly somewhere in the background.
Scotland will still be there tomorrow. So will the kitchen. So will the kids. So will the road.
Walk it.
- A.T., Kennett, Suffolk.