Prologue

I was never really a great fan of motoring holidays. I did try it once. It was a camping trip to the south of France. It wasn’t a success. The idea that you can relax by staring at a strip of tarmac for several hundred miles, on the wrong side of the road, while at the same time trying to work out whether to go clockwise or anticlockwise at an approaching roundabout, struck me as delusional.

As if this were not enough, there were thepriorité à droite signs to contend with. You could be chugging along on a busy road when, at any moment, one of those Deux Chevaux cars, with the canvas sunroof fully rolled back and loaded up with agricultural produce, might jump out a few yards ahead without any warning. I was in a perpetual state of alarm, fully expecting to collide with a ton of garlic or asparagus. My reaction to this absurd rule of the road was to crawl along at 30kph, as a result of which a long line of angry drivers built up behind me, unable to overtake because of oncoming traffic, but who, when they finally managed to pass, did so with fists waving and horns blaring.

Add to this the fact that your non-driving partner keeps up a perpetual eulogy about the wonderful landscape that you want to see but cannot, because you’re trying to keep both of you alive, and you have a recipe for disaster. It was not a good way to impress a new partner. You could argue a case that this was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate coolness under extreme duress, but I failed the test comprehensively. The whole idea of a driving holiday, I concluded, was a contradiction in terms.

This explains why I’ve tended to turn to less conventional forms of transport when thinking about a holiday. So, when my brother invited me to visit him in the US, I booked a berth on a cargo ship bound for Chester, Delaware. It took eight days to get there, and was as tranquil and relaxing a journey as any I can remember. And a couple of years later, when Joan and I went to Hong Kong, we decided not to fly but to get on a train at Morpeth in Northumberland and get off ten days later at Kowloon.

We were regaling a group of friends with the details of these journeys while sitting round a dinner table after a particularly strenuous ceilidh dance, when Rob, who was opposite us and getting increasingly agitated, leaned across and said, ‘Clive, for heaven’s sake, why can’t you just be normal?’

‘Oh, normal is boring,’ I said. ‘It’s much more interesting living on the edge.’

Which is why, several decades later, when there was a commotion from England’s edges, I sat up and took notice. The prime minister of the day reckoned he had his ear to the ground and knew exactly which way the political wind was blowing. He was having to deal with an upstart from the far fringes of the right who was stirring up the people, making them feel disgruntled and blaming it all on our European friends. So Dave called a referendum about whether we wanted to stay friends or split up and go our separate ways. ‘It’s all right,’ he assured his parliamentary colleagues, ‘they know on which side their bread is buttered and would never dare to leave. Trust me, I know the people.’ He didn’t, and we did. As we all know.

His mistake was that he had failed to take note of what was going on, on our edges. The people who lived there were seething with rage because they had been ignored. ‘Forgotten,’ they said. So when man-of-the-people Dave asked them to support him in sticking with our friends across the Channel, they gave him a kick up the backside and sent him on his way. And when the new government came in, it promised it would look after all those people living on the edge. To prove it, they pronounced a sentence of death on the internal combustion engine. ‘We’re going electric,’ our new man of the people told us.

The unlikely juxtaposition of the referendum and the announcement that we all had to start buying electric cars prompted me to revise my ideas about motoring holidays. Electric cars seemed to me – and, I might add, my long-suffering wife – just what we had been looking for. The previous year, we’d had solar panels put on the roof and part of the deal was a free ch