Missing your turn…

Sometimes I miss my turn. I’ll be driving along, thinking about this or that, and when I glance to the side I realise that the usual road I’m travelling on isn’t the usual road I’m travelling on at all. I’ve missed my turn and I’m somewhere else.

It doesn’t happen often, but it happened to me this week on the M62. One moment I was driving here, the next moment I was driving there.

Well, St. Helens actually.

I’ve never been to St. Helens before and didn’t want to go this time. As I drove the wrong way along the M62 looking for a junction to turn-tail, I noticed something tall and white on my right in the trees, in the distance – it looked like a very long face.

The sign on the gates said Sutton Manor. Sutton Manor used to be a colliery until the early nineties, today its woodland reserve and the long face is ‘Dream’, a 66ft high sculpture by Catalan artist Jaume Plensa.

Standing in front of her was a real experience, made all the more real and experienced by my complete lack of pre-knowledge of her existence. She’s been here since the summer of 2009 just waiting for me to find her. How could such a surreal and beautiful object not be reported wider? How had I missed her until now?

After a long straight road, missing your turn seems the right thing to do - it takes you somewhere else, somewhere unreal and wonderful -- and you can’t get there with a map!