THERE’S a fun quiz on BBC Radio Wiltshire called Clueless. It’s on the Sue Davies Show. Listeners phone in with their answers to local place names from obscure clues and advise how to get there. Last Sunday the puzzle was how to get from the Fovant badges to a place whose clue was “Get yourself in a muddle and deep underground.”! Tis-bury. Geddit? Great fun, and intensely local. Getting from Fovant to Tisbury involves a bit of a debate- via Ansty or Swallowcliffe? Now there’s a teaser for you.

I remember a dear old boy in Biddestone recounting how “I went to Chippenham (two miles away) once – on the way to the war ‘twere.” More recently a highly intelligent and very able young woman from Box who did some work experience with me admitted that she had never been to London before (fair enough); indeed, with the exception of a school ski-ing trip she had never in her 18 years left the Corsham area.

We love the ultra-local. We love the places we know, where we are comfortable. We love the localism of BBC Radio Wilts and the Gazette and Herald. That’s the way we humans are. We build a nest around ourselves. Home Sweet Home. Home is where the heart is.

But are we parochial? Quite the contrary. Some of the most ‘local’ people I speak to around North Wiltshire also have some of the greatest worldly wisdom. They are keenly interested in what is happening in Parliament and beyond.

My dear old friend Miss Kitty Sparkes from Chippenham, who is 102 years of age and remembers being a nurse in the Blitz with only a pan instead of a tin hat, has the sharpest of minds and the keenest of interests in what is going on. (She is one of the staunchest Brexiteers I know as well.) ‘People from Somewhere’ are those who are well grounded, their feet in the Wiltshire clay; able to look out from certainty to uncertainty from the known to the unknown.

“People from anywhere” are the jet-setting liberal elite who would despise localism and patriotism as ‘parochial and outdated.’ Saddest of all are ‘People from Nowhere’ who have neither local nor international roots. That way lies misery.

So let us rejoice in the truly local - the best route from Fovant to Tisbury. But let us at the same time look outwards; be local, not parochial; be aware and intelligent about wider Britain and the World.

As Parliament starts back for what may well be one of the most turbulent of sessions, that may well be a good lodestar for the wandering and wondering local MP like me.