Highway Home

We look out the window. On the windowsill, there's an assortment of empty crystal jars intended for Pickwick teabags, colourfully wrapped toffee-filled chocolates, or sugar cubes. It's a really traditional English windowsill in a real English farmhouse: Stott Hall Farm on Windy Hill. The fact that it's snowing on the hilly landscape contributes to the feeling that things are as they've always been, and how they'll always remain, if it weren't for the 100,000 cars that pass by the window each day, that is. Stott Hall Farm is situated on the narrow median strip of the M62 highway, the road from Hull to Liverpool that transects North England from east to west. It should be a hellish racket on the farm, what with the traffic and the clinking crystal. But all we hear is the murmur of the man who lives here as if it were a cocoon, in one of the most unlikely places you could imagine. He hopes he can stay here for a long time to come.