ENDLESS Way began life in 2011. That year, Francesca and I took the family on holiday to England and Italy, a trip taken partly to promote the novel Mother Moth, which I had written and Francesca had illustrated.
One rainy evening, at a guest house in Keswick in the Lake District, we decided to sign up to Tripadvisor and post some reviews. We had just come over the mountains from York, stopping at Haworth, the moorland village that was home to the Brontes. The weather was bleak for June, with sudden violent wind blasts and gloomy downpours, lifted straight from the pages of Wuthering Heights. But then the sun would tear a hole and splash the countryside with incredible purples, greens and golds. The grey lit up to glow. Soft gull-wing blue-grey and flashes of emerald. Proof why Francesca loves Payne’s grey. Like metal holding a gem. Unobtrusive. The neglected hero.
We needed a user name for our reviews. Our travels were just beginning and the open road beckoned. I thought of A E Housman’s little poem from A Shropshire Lad:
Ere to the wind’s twelve quarters
I take my endless way.
‘Endless Way’ captured the adventure of the road, and maybe something of its pathos. It was a good enough name anyway for posting reviews about comfortable beds and well-stocked mini bars, even if Alfred Housman had had in mind something more profound. The laconic little word ‘way’ has so many meanings: three letters rhyming with ‘day’ and ‘say’, able to convey everything right up to the ineffable mystery of the Tao.
Later, with happy surprise, it hit me that a website named ‘Endless Way’ could indeed shoulder the true weight of Housman’s poem. In fact, Endless Way could be a travel site about travel and life, journey being the usual go-to metaphor for life.
Plenty of fine websites give advice on packing, how many pairs of shoes to take, and how to find cheap flights. That’s not the purpose of Endless Way. You can take it travelling, but it’s also an armchair website. It’s travel the way a child discovers the world—fire is hot, tickling causes laughter. Puddles splash and knees graze. Whose knees? Who gets wet in the English rain? Is the person frying pancakes—the one who now bends instinctively to scratch an itchy leg—is that the same person that the stuff of life blew hither to knit? The same one who will blow away as ashes on the wind? Is it even the same one who a moment ago cracked the egg to make the pancake mixture? What makes the leg I’m itching mine? Is that because I’m privy to both the itchy leg and the fingertips scratching the corduroy of my trousers? And what about the corduroy? Is that me? I call it my trousers—blown hither too, same stuff, companion through wind and rain.
These are mysteries of cosmic proportions that we’re mostly advised to ignore: ‘Scratching will only make it bleed.’ Or we allow ourselves to wonder. We question. Which is where the trouble starts. Questions don’t lead to answers. They lead to quest. ‘The amazing thing about the universe,’ G K Chesterton wrote, ‘is that it exists.’ Wonder is a wonderful thing. But a dangerous thing. Once squeezed from the tube, you can’t put it back. I used as a child to peel pieces off the wallpaper and marvel at the resulting shapes and images. Like visions in the clouds. And the torn edges would form up continents, maps of journeys, coastlines of islands where pirates had buried treasure. Beautiful torn Rorshachs, like mountain peaks rising out of the mist. Wonder sets off a chain reaction in the mind. Any mind. Young or old. ‘From wonder into wonder, existence opens,’ wrote Lao Tzu, the sage founder of Taoism, who reputedly spent 62 years in his mother’s womb while she leant against a plum tree. Lao Tzu was then born with a long white beard.
