Forever Bimbling
by Tom Hamp
When a friend at university declared that, every Friday for the remainder of the term, she was going to get on a bus with whoever fancied joining her and spend the day wherever she ended up, I interpreted it as another crazy pandemic idea, alongside zoom cocktail parties and that brief obsession with Tiger King, in the early days of lockdown.
Yet looking back, her spontaneous trips perhaps also reflect the adaptability of the much talked about “experience generation” — those from their late teens to early thirties who are known to be concerned less with objects and more with events, prioritising social rather than material value. Eventbrite research in the States recently found that 78% of those aged 18–34 would rather spend money on “experiences” than on material objects — speaking to my own friends and family in the same age bracket as we bemoan a year of what seems like lost time, the percentage often seems a lot higher: people aren’t focused on the next big spend, but the next trip abroad, the next meal out, or the discovery of a new bar.
Yet this year, we have been dubbed the “Covid generation” — lucky enough to largely have avoided serious illness, but seemingly destined to a sparse job market, unable to do “all the things you’re supposed to” in the most independent years of life, and cooped up in family homes we thought we’d left behind. Whilst this bleakness does have some bearing on reality, Emma’s bus trips are just one indication that the desire for new experiences has not been completely quashed. Instead, perhaps, it has been re-channeled, and focused more on the new experiences that can be offered from within familiar places. She may not be returning to many of the Oxfordshire towns she discovered on her bus travels, but it was her spontaneity that made us realise that Blenheim Palace was so close to the city. As well as the grounds, Woodstock has some brilliant independent pubs, and it’s now a spot that we’ll book in for once a term, lockdown or no lockdown.
Perhaps, then, there was something prescient in Bimble’s launching just before the world was plunged into lockdowns and isolation. Indeed, whilst much of this year has been desperately sad for so many, it has also given us the chance to discover and cherish places that we would perhaps never have made the time for. I’m almost embarrassed to think about the number of times I walked past fantastic independent cafes (see my Bimble!) in my local area, simply because I never thought I had the time. I’ve been to more independent pubs in 8 weeks at Oxford than I did throughout my first year, and I’m sure I’ll remember them so much more clearly than I do the homogeneity of being in the same pub chains every week of my first term. And now that we’ve had so much time to find the little places around us that we may never have known existed, perhaps we’ve also learnt that we don’t always need to travel to far-flung places for excitement, but that new experiences can be found on our doorstep too. Our wanderlust hasn’t gone away, but maybe it has taken 2020 for us to realise how much we can bimble close to home.
