Last week, I watched my daughter’s first school nativity performance on Zoom (how else?). After brushing away a tear after an enthusiastic performance of “Calling All Little Angels”, I started thinking about the journey of the Three Wise Men.
As the story goes, the magi followed a star to guide them to Bethlehem, perhaps travelling for hndreds of miles. TS Eliot’s poem, “Journey of the Magi” – written almost 100 years ago, after a church service and half a bottle of gin – describes a long and arduous expedition that is both a physical and spiritual passage: “…a journey, and such a long journey / The ways deep and the weather sharp”.
Life is easier these days – though we may not realise it. Journeys have new (and usually temporary) limitations, but for those of us who have the good fortune to be able to take them (for the purpose of a holiday), the outcome is usually a triumph.
During the first Covid lockdown, our daily family routine was to walk to the playing fields of an independent school – new territory for us, and now that the gates are closed to all but its pupils, our children look back on it with happy memories each time we pass.
More from Travel
Eighteen months on, we spread our wings for a week in Spain. This was our eldest’s sixth trip overseas. It might as well have been the first, such was her delight in new experiences and unfamiliar surroundings.
A fondness for Serrano ham and Spanish playground song “Veo Veo” endures months later, the discomfort of a lateral flow test now long forgotten.
All around, I hear stories of frustration, trips cancelled, families kept apart, livelihoods on the brink of collapse. But also of unexpected discoveries and happy memories.
Travelling with a purpose
Those biblical magi travelled with purpose, and we continue that tradition today. Migration and escapism are hard-wired into us, and can be satisfied on the shortest of routes – whether our purpose is to put a daily routine behind us for a week or two, to visit loved ones or to satisfy a deeper urge for spiritual wellbeing, travel makes us happy (though TS Eliot might need another half-bottle of gin to endure a Ryanair flight or Covid paperwork).
Of course, the modern challenges that Covid presents are much further down the list for many travellers. Will the destination be welcoming? How accessible is the transport? Will I be safe when I arrive? A manger
might not be practical when there is no room at the inn.
Whether it is plotting a route and navigating by the stars, or packing a bag and waving it off on an airport conveyor belt, every stage of a trip should be enjoyable. Fretting about access, for whatever reason, diminishes that pleasure. My expectations have been brought into sharper focus in the past two years, but I hope that one day soon we will all be able to enjoy the anticipation of a journey again.
As TS Eliot’s magi arrive, they find the place “satisfactory”, the narrator concluding that “I would do it again”. I will, just as soon as I can, and I hope that you will, too.
