I drove a long way at the weekend. February is not the month anyone chooses for it, but the calendar offered a rare gap and there were people at the other end worth the salt-streaked windscreen, so off I went in the dark with a flask of something hot and a phone full of podcasts I had been meaning to listen to since roughly the autumn.
There is a particular quality to a winter motorway before proper daylight. The cats' eyes, the spray off the lorries, the heater ticking over, and that strange companionable solitude of being one of a few thousand people all heading somewhere with their headlights on at half six in the morning. I rather like it, which I appreciate is not a universal opinion.
the queue, and the guilt that powers it
I keep a podcast queue the way other people keep a stack of unread books by the bed: it grows faster than I clear it, and the small persistent guilt is, if I am honest, part of what keeps the whole thing going. A long drive is the only time I ever make a real dent. By the time I hit the motorway I had something like five hours of backlog lined up, and the simple fact that you cannot reach over and skip whilst doing seventy turns out to be excellent discipline. You actually finish episodes. You let the slow bit play out instead of bailing the moment it stops being immediately gripping.
A few that earned their place:
- A long, unhurried conversation between two people who clearly knew each other well, the kind with no arc and no real edit, just shop talk allowed to wander. Better than most of the polished, produced ones I had also queued.
- Something on the history of a thing I use constantly and had never once wondered about. There is a reliable small pleasure in discovering the boring tool in your hand has a proper story behind it, full of arguments and dead ends and one stubborn person who would not let it go.
- A comedy episode, deployed deliberately around the third hour, because five hours of earnest talk back to back will make anyone strange and a bit weepy at service stations.
The good ones do something on a drive they simply do not do at a desk. At my desk I am half-listening, the other half on a screen, and the episode washes straight past me leaving nothing behind. In the car it gets my whole attention by default, because the only alternative is the inside of my own head for five hours, and on the balance of an average week the podcast is the better company. I noticed I was still turning some of it over days later, which essentially never happens with anything I half-consume whilst working.
the bit nobody warns you about
What nobody tells you about a long solo drive is how much old stuff floats up once the front of your brain goes quiet. Not dramatically. The mind just idles and starts cataloguing on its own. A conversation from years ago I had not thought about in an age. A decision I still am not certain I got right. A friend I keep meaning to ring and somehow never do, who I resolved, somewhere around the second tank of fuel, to actually call this time. (Reader, at the time of writing I have not called him. But I thought about it with tremendous sincerity at motorway speed, which surely earns partial credit.)
There is a stretch up north where the country opens out, hills on both sides going from black to grey to a sort of reluctant blue as the sun finally bothered to show up, and I came over a rise just as something quiet was playing and the whole valley was doing the thing valleys do in low winter light, all long shadows and frost still holding in the dips. I will not oversell it. It was a motorway in February. But it was a genuinely good few minutes and I was glad I had stopped pretending the extra twenty minutes of arriving early mattered to anyone, least of all me.
the way back
The drive home is always a different animal, and this one especially. Tired, full of a good weekend, far less inclined to think and much more inclined to let the miles unspool with something familiar in my ears. I keep a small set of episodes I have already heard for exactly this purpose, the audio equivalent of a worn jumper: no surprises, nothing that demands concentration, just a known voice for the last leg whilst the light goes and the traffic thickens toward home.
I got back well after dark, put the flask in the sink, and within about ten minutes had picked the phone back up and lost the lot. Every small revelation, gone, papered over by email and the low Sunday-night dread of Monday. But I have come to think they leave a residue even when you cannot recall a single one of them by name. I was a touch kinder to myself for a day or two afterward, and slightly more decisive about a thing I had been dithering over, and on a February weekend that is a fair return on a tank of diesel.
So: nothing happened. I drove somewhere, I drove back, I listened to some people talk for a very long time. But it was the best stretch of hours I had handed my own brain in months, and I am already quietly working out the next plausible excuse to do it again. I might even ring the friend.