Stuck at home during lockdown Esa Aldegheri revisited her memories of a road trip from Orkney to New Zealand and put pen to paper. Free To Go is an excellent memoir that explores both those events, and she written exclusively for BooksfromScotland about what freedom and constraint mean to her.

Free to Go
By Esa Aldegheri
Published by John Murray

When I woke up on the 1st of February 2020 I didn’t know that by evening I’d have planned out a book on freedom and constraint, borders and connectedness, motorbike journeys and motherhood. All I knew was that the insides of my eyelids felt they had brambles for capillaries, and that my stomach was twisting in knots of deep apprehension.

I was hungover from having raised too many parting drams outside the Scottish Parliament the night before, at a defiant gathering of people who sang and wept as the United Kingdom left the European Union and took Scotland with it. I was sick with worry and fear for the future of my Italian-Scottish family and many others. As the day jangled on, my anxiety clotted into anger, then urgency: the need to weave a story to help navigate times of increasing restrictions, where wide horizons and the freedom of adventuring were somehow in dialogue with borders, restrictions and fear.

Between mugs of restorative coffee, I turned to what I knew: my own memories of open borders, when I drove a motorbike halfway across the world with my husband. I planned to juxtapose the vast freedoms of a motorbike adventure with the limitations on free movement brought by Brexit. Of course, another thing I didn’t know was that in a few weeks my Brexit worries would be eclipsed first by the catastrophic impact of Covid in Lombardy, where my Italian family live, and then by the pandemic lockdowns in Scotland.

Free to Go evolved during months of claustrophobia and fear when my main escape was into memories of free travel, and as my mind flitted between memories and reality the book shaped itself around the twin strands of freedom and constraint. The adventure of travelling is narrated in the past and progresses geographically, following the motorbike journey from Scotland to New Zealand. Remembered journeys are interwoven with a narrative in the present tense which is anchored to the cycle of seasons through one year of pandemic restrictions.

At first I thought it would be simple: then, freedom; now, constraint. But as the book grew, I saw that these two strands are so closely woven that one never exists without the other being close by. The motorbike journey featured many constraints – from visa refusals to physical attacks and almost being deported – which enraged me and made freedom of travel shine all the brighter. Over a year of pandemic living I found new ways to regain a sense of freedom, and those discoveries delight me still.

Delight and freedom, constraint and rage recur throughout Free to Go. A lot of the rage comes from the fact that I travel this world as a woman – and in my experience it is a world which often assumes that women drive pillion, both on motorbikes and in personal relationships. Far too many men have interrupted me, when I started telling them about Free to Go, with variations on “Oh, how nice – a view from the pillion!”. No, pal. Just – no.

This is also a world which I travel as a white woman with a strong body and a Good Passport, accidents of birth which mean that I have liberties which many, many others lack. Writing Free to Go made me appreciate just how much the freedoms I enjoy as a traveller – to go where I decide, to leave if I want to and return safely home – are extraordinary and precious. I would like to see more travel writing which celebrates the delight of moving with curiosity in the world while also acknowledging that not everyone is equally free to go.

The process of bringing a book into the world also confirmed that, to me, writing is in itself a freedom. As a child in Italy I learned a song with the refrain i libri sono ali – books are wings – and I found this to be true, in the sense that writing Free to Go freed me to fly across the world through words, away from the suffocations and fears of lockdown. Writing is also an act which takes memories, thoughts and stories out of my mind and sets them free into the world, like birds. Who knows where they will roost and nest – what an amazement, thinking of that. What a delight.

Free to Go by Esa Aldegheri is published by John Murray, priced £14.99.