have some idea of when I can have a hot chocolate in an even hotter bath. Those things are important too. I ask myself sometimes whether Mungo sometimes sat in his canoe wishing he had stayed home. He must have done, surely? Maybe I didn't get so much of his blood after all.

The journey for the modern Mungo is just to get out for a while - not to know where the heck you are or where you are likely to be in an hour's time. A petite, digestible randomness of direction is so much more appealing when you are trying to hold down a job and a number of extremely demanding houseplants. So it happened that I drove off with two bemused friends for nowhere in particular (without a map, I might add, but with the torn remains of an old map's cover on the back seat in unintentional but striking symbolism).

It is worth mentioning that we live in England. Moreover, we live near the middle of England. That means: no coast for 100 miles at least, no chance of finding ourselves in need of passports, no scary and impassable rivers, not a great chance of being imprisoned by a local chief, and a really pressing need to be back before nine the next morning. Mungo Park, one imagines, would have hidden under his canoe in shame. Still, it was snowing. A bit.

When Chaucer's pilgrims set off for Canterbury, I have the feeling that they got going at a fairly brisk pace and with some sense of direction. Even the more adventurous seafarers when it got to the sixteenth century doubtless set off with purpose from port and only calmed down a bit when the winds settled down. As for us, our Livingstone-esque penetration of the hidden England began when we hit the early evening traffic jam heading towards Witney. This did not bode well, it must be said. We were not even sure whether we would just head back bored in twenty minutes. Admittedly, we were prevented from doing this due to the proximity of other adventurers both in front and behind, blocking our chance to make a U-turn, to shun the adventures ahead and return to our cosy haven of the Dreaming Spires. However, the names of the cars - Explorer, Focus, Probe, Pioneer, carried with them echoes of old time adventurers: a modern day wagon train. While we could almost hear Sir Edmund Hillary goading us onwards, it was somewhat unfortunate that our adventure-mobile bore the distinctly unadventurous moniker 'Passat'. Furthermore, finding that our first random decision was one that stopped us from getting anywhere at all faster than two miles per hour gave us the impression that all hope was lost.

I felt a little like old man Mungo reaching the Niger and realising I had forgotten to bring an oar. The very difficulty we had encountered suddenly became a reason to go on. The bright lights of the traffic jam in the early evening, half invisible in the rapidly disappearing snow, were irresistible. We had to go on. Turning back would just make us seem even dafter. Was this, I wondered, the real spur of the great explorers: to head on, because going back is embarrassing? When the great linguist and energetic nomad George Borrow kept going through England and then to the Europe and the Far East in the early 1800s, was he just going because coming back without stories is really pathetic? Certainly, Lavengro and his other writings have enough spurious information in them to suggest that he must have felt a little insecure (or perhaps just insincere).

Soon the traffic subsided and we went on down through the now really rather beautiful but darkening snow towards Cheltenham. The road is familiar to me, but the blanket of white that had built up disguised it almost completely and made the roads extremely hard to drive along. Naturally, I decided to rev up and get away from them quicker nearly causing the loss of three young lives for no good reason at all.

There is nothing much to speak near the centre of England when it snows. The few church spires that usually peek intriguingly out from rows of hedges in summer disappear in the blankness, and the fields of varying colour that jigsaw around you on either side of country roads go a predictable shade of white. When Dr Johnson and his sidekick Boswell travelled north towards the Western Isles of Scotland they had vast, dark, 'sublime' mountains and strange huts occupied by God knows whom. It was all unknown. The English Midlands, especially the southernmost parts around Oxfordshire, are just flat and lacking in bits you might recall as "that wonderful, peculiar so and so" or "the huge looming thingumee". And in the snow it is just like the Antarctic but more hedgy and English. In other words there's a small inn