BACK at the beginning of March – 11 weeks that feel more like a lifetime ago – I had a week off work. With nothing planned, my daughters and I would get up in the morning and decide what we were going to do that day. There was a drive up to Dundee, I remember, to visit the V&A, another birl through to South Queensferry to look at the bridges and mooch around the gift shops. I know I took a day to myself in Edinburgh, visiting book shops and sitting in cafes.

How distant that all seems now.

I can’t remember quite how large the threat of the coronavirus was looming back then. I do recall meeting an old colleague that week and deciding not to shake his hand. There have been few opportunities to do, or not do, the same again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Dundee and South Queensferry in recent days. The thing I’ve found most surprising in these weeks of lockdown is the way I have found myself missing places as much as people. In idle moments I imagine getting in the car and driving away from home, maybe across the Kincardine Bridge and then onto Fife, or down the A1 to North Berwick or Dunbar.

At other times I fantasise about places even further afield, maybe walking along London’s South Bank, or around the docks in Liverpool. Truth be told, right now part of me would settle for a quick trip to Linlithgow, just down the road from where I stay.

Thinking about it, I realise these destinations are only part of what I’m missing. Really, what I’m yearning for is the journey itself, that sense of being in motion.

When I was a kid in Northern Ireland in the 1970s my dad didn’t always have his own transport. Sometimes he got the use of the work van and me and my sisters would sit on the wheel rims in the back. But when he did have his own car, he’d take us out every Sunday afternoon, driving around the Antrim coast with no particular destination in mind, much to my mother’s disgruntlement.

The pattern of those Sundays was passed on and settled in me. When I started driving at the beginning of the 1990s, I would regularly go out for a drive, content with the idea of movement as an end in itself. It felt – it still feels – like a welcome time out of life.

That hasn’t always been the case. In 2006 my late wife was first diagnosed with cancer. On the days we weren’t attending hospital appointments, she would want to go long, meandering drives. We’d end up on Perthshire country roads with only the vaguest idea of where we were, all in a bid, I guess, to outrun the horror that was pursuing us. As if motion could outpace our emotions.

Still, among all the things I miss, I also miss those times together. Just the presence of her as the miles passed beneath the wheels.

There is an argument to be made for the motor car as one of the great destructive forces of modern life; for the way it has transformed – you might say distorted – our cities and our countryside, for its contribution to fossil fuel consumption, for the everyday threat to life which we so casually put out of our mind.

And yet it has been a huge consolation, too. Those of us born in the second half of the 20th century were able, for a short window, to access the world in a way that those who went before us and quite possibly (global warming being what it is) those who will come after us could never hope for.

Maybe that’s what I’m lamenting. The ease of that gone-away world.

No doubt it will come back to some degree in some form or other. We will be able to get in our cars and drive away from home. We may even find a freshness to the places we have visited so many times before, or at the very least an appreciation of the difference of them, the fact that they offer something other than the view from the front window of our homes. That is getting very old, isn’t it?

In the last eight months I’ve lost my wife and I’ve lost my liberty. I can only dream of getting one of them back. Right now, though, that would be something. That would be a start.

And where shall we go when we do? Tell me, where would you like to meet? I’ll bring the coffees.