Happy Epiphany! As the tinsel is stowed and families and visitors disperse into the damp chill world a certain pall of depression may descend, assisted by too-close attention to national news bulletins.
The answer does not lie in goblin-mode and biscuit tin, but in an old-fashioned remedy: day trips! University College London, with an unerring academic eye for confirming the bleedin’ obvious, concludes from research that the ability to travel to new scenes,
even for a day out, is a positive health benefit.
When constraints stop people travelling 15 miles from home to see friends and relatives or attend clubs, UCL says, it isn’t only problems requiring medical care that count. Loss of geographical mobility makes health in general poorer, and loneliness and its risks more likely. Researchers found that wellbeing does relate clearly to “the number of different places people visit outside their local area”.
The survey was carried out in the north of England but the principle applies almost anywhere when budgets are tight. Given a choice, most people will use their leisure to get about a bit. But that choice is a luxury: if you don’t have a car or enough money for petrol and parking, your four walls and street may be imprisoning. Only some — like London’s over-sixties with “freedom passes” that operate all the way from Shenfield to Reading and Hertfordshire to Kent — will find it cheap or free to take a day out beyond walking distance. Yet there is, the report unsurprisingly says, real physical and mental benefit in visiting, mixing, roaming, shopping, admiring fresh views and getting home with something to talk about.
Obvious it may be, and admittedly a first-world problem, but the report is a simple reminder of real deprivation, grown worse in the age of private cars and apparent governmental scorn for those without them. Rural buses are scarce, and train strikes and unpredictability create either impossibility or anxiety around this simple luxury.
Advertisement
Nor is this just about the elderly; UCL’s study focused on older people but exactly the same constraints apply to family trips, restless teenagers, young workers and indeed the five million now working mainly from home. We are all hard-wired with a primitive longing for the occasional fresh view; not for nothing does modish psychobabble speak of being on “a journey”.
We need real journeys, however humble. That is why lockdown did none of us any good; “shielding” was a form of psychological cruelty and so are the present dour warnings not to risk getting hurt because the NHS is broken. These things matter.
