I fell into this through a glossary. Plaque tournante. The words unsettled me even before I understood what they truly meant. The turning place. Not just some junction where paths cross, but a point where the weight of a single decision bends the rails of your life onto a new course. Like the time I parked my car before formation and a military policeman stopped me for speeding when I wasn’t speeding. It isn’t a crossroads, not really. Crossroads imply options laid out before you, inviting you to pick them. This is different. This is the moment when the path beneath your feet shifts almost imperceptibly. Your weight shifts from something unseen, and suddenly the way forward isn’t just another choice. It’s the only choice that remains. You stand there alone because some choices can’t be shared. They’re too raw, too precise, like a key turning in a lock that no one else can see. The people who love you might walk beside you right up to the edge of that place, but when the time comes, they can’t step over the threshold with you. And that’s the thing about a plaque tournante, it doesn’t just turn the path. It turns you. And no one else can do the turning but you.

I like sharing a campsite with chickens and goats and sheep. It’s barebones in the best possibble way. Some of these places can be over produced like they’re trying to create a luxury experience in a field.

This place, Grange Farm, is the opposite. It’s just grass, canvas, animals, weather and the small practical ritual of keeping yourself fed, dry, and reasonably human. Although, three days without a shower and I’m starting to feel ferel.

On the first of July I started a 31-day weblogging challenge. I wanted to blog in the original sense of the word: not posts designed around hooks and calls to action, but entries. Entries as field notes, half-formed thoughts, fragments, or full on essays if that’s the way text goes.

Last night I wanted to read something close to the way I’m trying to write. Something observational. Embodied. Simple in time and space. Definitely less theory and more of what is around me.

I was reading Tarot of Self-Discovery, but it was getting heavy with archetypal psychology, and out here I didn’t want more interior landscape. I wanted solid ground.

So I scrolled through the Kindle and found, somehow, a book I don’t remember buying: Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways. From the title, it sounds like just the thing I’m trying to avoid. But then the subtitle kicks in with this: “compiled from the diaries, manifestos, notes, prospectus, records, and everyday utopias of the pedestrian resistance.”

That felt close to what I wanted.

Especially pedestrian resistance. That sounds intriguing.

There’s something beautifully ridiculous about camping and caravaning.

Looking out across this fieldand I’m thinking at that here we are, modern humans with houses, central heating and air conditioning, broadband, sofas, fitted kitchens, proper beds, cupboards full of things – and for pleasure we hitch a small white box to the back of a car and go sit in a field under a grey sky.

And yet somehow it works.

Maybe the secret to the absurdity is that we’re not really leaving comfort because we hate comfort. We’re leaving it because too much comfort can become stale and invisible. The house becomes so much background noise. And we lose ourselves in the routine of living.

So we drag a miniature home into a patch of grass and make life awkward enough to notice it again.

You become aware of the wind direction, the damp grass, the neighbours you’ll probably never speak to beyond a nod, the small choreography of plugging in, levelling up, putting the steps out, and finding where the toilets are.

It is absurd. But it’s ritual absurdity.

In essence, we’ve setup a temporary village made of caravans, cables, folding tables, dogs, children, gas bottles, mugs of tea, and people pretending not to watch each other reverse badly into pitches. For a weekend, everyone agrees to live slightly closer to the elements and slightly closer to one another.

Maybe the caravan is a compromise between the cave and the house.

Not quite wild. Not quite domestic.

And maybe that’s why we love it because it loosens the spell of ordinary life just enough for us to feel ourselves living it.