How do you start something that has been taking up space in your mind for months without end, ticking away in those moments of peace and of chaos, waiting to spring forward out of that box it has been inhabiting at the back of your mind and take centre stage? This thing that excites you and scares you in equal measure. Like any great journey, the best thing to do is just to start. Put one foot in front of the other, one word after the next. But that would seem just too simple and too difficult all at the same time. The paradox of pipe dreams.

My eyes snap wide open, instantly all too aware of the room around me: the sounds of my partner asleep beside me, the cars and motorbikes racing along the overpass above us. I reach out and grab my phone, that portal to the world outside which has the unparalleled power to keep us all in. I tap my deep black mirror, not wanting to catch the look in the eyes which stare back. 7:05am. Damn, it’s time. The time has come — no time like the present.

Hopping back into my car, I join a mass of midday drivers as I pull out of the medieval town centre and crawl into the modern commercial sprawl of nightmares that has sprung up on the outskirts of this gorgeous old gingerbread town. The quaint character of Shakespeare’s Stratford here replaced by corrugated iron, concrete, car dealerships, and retail parks. The soft white snow, now muddied, squelches into piles of slush churned up by a never-ending procession of automobiles — a procession I now find myself stuck in, the motor turning over at a standstill, waiting to join the Birmingham Road out of Stratford and deeper towards England’s second city.

As I drive on through the outskirts of Coventry, I’m struck by the realisation that my journey today has been plagued by a flanking procession of flags unlike any I have experienced at home. Throughout the cities, satellite towns, and villages that populate the West Midlands, a great minority of lampposts on the main roads have been flying the red and white of St George and the additional blue of the Union Flag — only called the Union Jack when it’s flown at sea, though the perpetrators surely do not make this distinction, nor do they notice that a great number have been flown upside down, the sign of a country in distress. I thank the childhood years spent in the Sea Scouts for this obscure flag knowledge. I know it makes this aside rather dorky, but if you’re gonna fly a flag, fly it right.

The burnt orange glow of the setting sun behind me ignites the bare winter branches of the trees which flank my journey. The branches burn brightly in the dimming light of the sky, red and orange the main palette, tinged at the edges with a deep purple running into blue. The trees lining the route of my pilgrimage burn with a sacred fire that flashes back at me, reflected in every clump of fading snow. The road takes me on due east into the coming night, the light fading faster than I could have imagined. I’m chasing a deadline I know I will never make, but the final goal of my journey is one I cannot strike off today’s itinerary, its place in my plans too great to erase.

My adventures of exploration through Yorkshire start ominously, foreshadowing the elemental force which will come to dominate my time in this proudest region of these United Kingdoms.

“If this truly is God’s own country,” I muse to myself, “He has a funny way of showing his love.”

Standing right on the edge of York’s famousShambles, I take hasty shelter from the all-encompassing mizzle which permeates the atmosphere of this archaic quarter of one of Britain’s most time-worn cities. Jogging down Whip-Ma-Whop-Ma-Gate (Neither-Here-Nor-There-Street) I scrunch my head down low in an attempt to minimise the effects of the lazily falling specks of moisture, neither rain nor mist, not quite either but somewhere in between.

Upon setting my GPS, the sheer volume of driving I’m going to have to undertake brings into stark reality just how large this proud region truly is. No wonder I often see social media posts galore around major sporting events theorising how well a Yorkshire national team might perform at the football World Cup – pretty well, looking at the lineup – or where the White Rose nation would rank in the Olympics – 12th at the 2012 Games, above Australia, Japan and Brazil.