Night driving

 
Push the button;
Ignition,
As Neon lights
Spark into life,
Electric potential piped
Straight into the
Driver’s cold hands.
The wheel held,
Hushed
Against the darkening night.
Time to go,
Time to

Drive.

I have so many fond memories from my childhood of immeasurably long night drives, either way up north to Scotland, or way down to the south of France.
 

And night drives just remind me of holidays.

Now, grown up and myself a parent, we have done many of our own as a family and watching the children in the back, the light from the dashboard just enough to see if they had drifted off to sleep or not, or helped by the headlights of the occasional oncoming car.
 

As a kid there was nothing quite like waking up and trying to figure out where I was, trying to catch a clue from the fast-passing road signs.

And then of course that question…
 
“Are we there yet?”.
 
🙂
 

Seamus Heaney describes a similar journey so utterly fantastically.

  
Night Drive

—Seamus Heaney

The smells of ordinariness
Were new on the night drive through France;
Rain and hay and woods on the air
Made warm draughts in the open car.

Signposts whitened relentlessly.
Montrueil, Abbéville, Beauvais
Were promised, promised, came and went,
Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

A combine groaning its way late
Bled seeds across its work-light.
A forest fire smouldered out
One by one small cafés shut.

I thought of you continuously
A thousand miles south where Italy
Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.
Your ordinariness was renewed there.

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