I drove a long way last weekend. Not for any particularly good reason, just family at the other end of the country and a gap in the calendar that lined up for once. Six hours up, six back, the kind of drive where you set off in the dark with a flask and arrive having had three separate small revelations about your own life, none of which survive contact with the kettle once you get home.
I have come round to thinking the long drive is one of the last places I actually think. Not problem-solving, not the focused kind where you sit and grind at a thing. The other kind, where your hands are busy enough that the front of your brain shuts up and the back of it gets a word in. The phone is in the door pocket, face down, useless. There is nothing to react to. It is the closest I get to meditation, which is to say not very, but more than I manage sitting still.
the queue
I keep a podcast queue the way other people keep a to-read pile, which is to say it grows faster than I clear it and the guilt is part of the system. A long drive is when I finally make a dent. By the time I hit the motorway I had a good four hours of backlog cued up, and the discipline of "you cannot skip back ten seconds whilst overtaking a lorry" turns out to be excellent for actually finishing episodes rather than half-listening and bailing.
A few that earned their place:
- A long, rambling tech interview I had been saving, the sort that is two engineers talking shop with no real arc and no edit. Better than most of the polished ones.
- Something on the history of a thing I use every day and had never once wondered about. Always a small pleasure, that, finding out the boring tool in your hand has a story.
- A comedy one purely to break the spell, because two hours of earnest conversation back to back will make anyone strange.
The good ones do a particular thing on a drive that they do not do at a desk. At a desk I am half-listening, the other half on a screen, and the episode washes past. In the car it has my whole attention by default, because the alternative is the inside of my own head for six hours, and frankly the podcast is better company. I noticed I was remembering things from them days later, which almost never happens with anything I consume at work.
the bit nobody warns you about
What they do not tell you about a long solo drive is how much old stuff floats up. Not in a dramatic way. Just, the brain idles and starts cataloguing. A conversation from years ago I had not thought about in ages. A decision I am still not sure about. The friend I keep meaning to ring and never do, who I resolved, somewhere around the third service station, to actually ring this time. (Reader, I have not rung him. But I thought about it very sincerely at seventy miles an hour, which surely counts for something.)
There is a stretch of the M6 that is genuinely beautiful in the right light, hills opening up on both sides, and I came over a rise just as something quiet was playing and the sun was doing the thing it does in late July, low and gold and a bit smug about it. I am not going to oversell it. It was a motorway. But it was a good few minutes, and I was glad I was not in a hurry, or rather glad I had stopped pretending the extra twenty minutes mattered.
The drive back was different, as it always is. Tired, full of the weekend, less inclined to think and more inclined to just let the miles go by with something familiar in my ears. I have a small set of episodes I have heard before that I keep for exactly this, the audio equivalent of a worn jumper. No surprises, no need to concentrate, just a known voice for the last leg whilst the light goes.
I got home, put the flask in the sink, and within ten minutes had picked the phone back up and lost the lot. All the small revelations, gone, replaced by email and the faint dread of Monday. But I think they leave a residue even when you cannot recall them. I was kinder to myself for a day or two afterwards, and slightly more decisive, and I will take that.
So: nothing happened. I drove somewhere and drove back and listened to some people talk. But it was the best six hours I had given my own brain in months, and I am already half-planning the next excuse to do it again. Possibly I will even ring the friend.