You might remember, back before Covid, when life was ‘normal’, at three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, the Volkswagens, Audis and Jaguars clogging up the pavements of Kensington, Parsons Green and Hammersmith would one by one nudge out, and make for the Great West Road, duly clotting the A4 like a fast-food addict’s aorta.
To all points west they would go – to the dewy hamlets of Hampshire, to the honeyed villages of the Cotswolds, to the pebbled beaches of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, to the curvaceous nooks of Devon’s South Hams.
But there is another way you can go, my friends, one which isn’t west. You can go east. And, boy, does it pay dividends. Among the great bifurcations of life – coffee versus tea, sirloin versus ribeye, pheasant versus partridge – there is one that stands supreme: east versus west.