We became ensnarled in a Bank Holiday tailback on Monday, just north of Cambridge. We were about two-thirds of the way home after a weekend at a Folk Festival, the pace slowed and the forest of red tail-lights appeared. I find it hard to be equanimous in a traffic queue. On a train, all I need do is accept the delay, and the uncertainty, but more than that, nothing is required. I simply have to wait patiently and, on most train journeys, I am supplied – over-supplied – with comforts: a drink, snacks, a book. 

With a car, I have to remain alert and be ready to play my part in every frustrating forward-inching. Any worries (is my ankle starting to hurt, will my knees get stiff, is the clutch getting worn, what about the engine temperature?) bring home to me that this metal, mechanical box, which represents freedom, speed and ease of movement, is now cumbersome and trapped, and so, since I am responsible for it, am I. The situation is edgy and claustrophobic and I feel powerless. 

Hence we pulled off at a services and stopped for coffee, hoping the congestion might quieten down in the meantime. It didn’t. 

I used to live in Cambridge, and subsequently a good friend also lived, for a while, just to the east of the City. Our location was not entirely unfamiliar and, crucially, the roundabout to the services had one more exit, the white-signed directions to a local village. Reader, we followed them, meandering through back lanes, the softening late-afternoon sun streaming golden, the horse-chestnuts, eager harbingers, already abandoning their summer foliage and presenting crisped, curled autumnal leaves, furling back to display the rich weight of prickled conker cases. A few miles further, we picked up an ‘A’ road which headed back towards the city, and eventually deposited us at a motorway junction further south, beyond the congestion. We resumed our normal route. 

Was this quicker? I doubt it. Was it more pleasant? Undoubtedly. 

I depend upon Google for my navigation as much as most people, I imagine, and it remains an appreciated marvel. Nonetheless, I have long had a fantasy wish-list: I want it to judge things qualitatively, not merely quantitatively. It can tell me the quickest route; it can tell me the most fuel-economical; it can tell me how to avoid road tolls, or motorways. But, when I am heading to the south-west, I want it to tell me that going along the A303 will include the heart-lifting sight of Stonehenge. I want it to know that I find the M1 soul-destroying, while the A1 reverberates still with rattly post-chaises and even fictional thundering hooves, as Peter Brownrigg races towards London to foil the assassination attempt on Queen Elizabeth, in Cue for Treason. Perhaps AI will be able to do this and, for that, I may well feel wonder and gratitude, emotions singularly lacking in my confused feelings about AI at present. 

It felt unexpectedly rebellious to choose a route unsupported by Google. But not rebellious against Google; the challenge came from my own absorbed, default settings. I have forgotten that the journey is more than the route.

When I was little, we lived close to where my parents had grown up. And so, sometimes, we decided which way to go simply for the pleasure of it. Such as Nickleton’s Brow, which my father enjoyed for the straightness of the road, picking up remarkable speed such that my brother and I felt it was as exciting as being on a big dipper. In my memory it was a hugely steep gradient and we were flung up into moments of weightlessness, but tracing this on Google Streetview suggests that the childhood intensity was conjured only from the atmosphere in the car. 

I now realise that, for my father, these journeys were often an autobiography. Frequently, we passed the house where he was born (in the front bedroom, the window of which overlooked the village green). We might go down by the church, where his father and grandfather were sextons, and the path where he learned to ride a bike. Often, we took the road he used to travel to work, and to the town where he met my mum. Then on to the house they had bought together, our home. Dad talked little about his childhood – my mum was much more forthcoming – but he drove us through it repeatedly. He shared it physically.  

The conversation between my parents as they reached a decision (or, more realistically, my father announced his choice) drew on strange local names:  Sheephouse, Grimeford Lane, the Headless Cross. It deepened my sense of specificity and particular, and inter-connected these waymarks in a web of landscape. Frequently, we would leave one place, travel along an unfamiliar road but then arrive somewhere recognisable. My experience, sitting in the back, was an emotionally rich zooming in and out between the known and the strange, lost and found, lost and found, trusting my father to keep me safe and take me home. Only as an adult and a driver myself did the environment flatten to mere roads from which I might, in turn, choose a route.

Route is a word whose origins lie in the breaking through which was needed to traverse an inhospitable landscape. We create a route by hacking down trees, clearing a path. We impose a hardwearing, more level surface which enables passage – for merchants to trade, armies to march, messengers to travel, and minstrels and players to take their songs and stories. All this is rich and human and, as it were, inevitable. Nowadays, as the Google-line works out the way to get me somewhere, what lies between is merely the space preventing me from already being at my destination. In Google terms – often in my terms – it is an inconvenience to be minimised by one metric or another (time, cost). 

But, for all I am swept up into this common humanity of experience, when I travel I can (I must) make it my own. While time and cost do matter, there are differently measurable factors as well.  With whom do I travel? About what might we talk? Where might we stop? What do we want to look at on the way? Twice now, I have tried to type the word ‘diversions’ and put ‘diversations’ instead. I am tempted to offer it as a neologism: a portmanteau of conversation and diversions.  When I arrive at my destination, what experience do I want to have had? Without getting too Robert Frost-y or kitchen-fridge-magnet, what journey do I want to have?

Recalling yesterday’s journey, I remember the light and the horse-chestnuts, I remember the pleasure of making gentle progress, of passing half-familiar places and sign-posts. Perhaps all I mean is the pleasure of actually noticing where I was.

Thinking back to when I was a child, I don’t remember where we were going, or where we had been. I remember the moments when the view opened out and we could see the moors, or the reservoirs, or look across the valley. I remember the tight bends and the odd, strange, attractive things to look out for – signposts, and stocks, and barns and gateways, curved white-metal fences and half-timbered houses. His hands on the wheel. The feeling of safety.