Clarkson's Farm
Jeremy Clarkson
Wayfarism arrived uninvited — and was accepted anyway.
This is perhaps the most surprising entry on the list, and possibly the most genuinely useful. Jeremy Clarkson — the loud, opinionated, frequently insufferable presenter of Top Gear — turns out to be an accidental Wayfarer, and watching his conversion is unexpectedly instructive.
He arrives at Motion involuntarily. He bought the farm as a kind of retirement project, knowing nothing about farming, and the work immediately and comprehensively defeats him. He cannot drive the tractor. He does not understand the subsidies. His crops fail. His sheep escape. His planning applications are rejected. Everything he attempts goes wrong in ways he did not anticipate.
What makes it Wayfarist is that he stays. He submits to the resistance of the work in a way he never had to in his previous career. Cars did not talk back to him like this; they did what he wanted, and if they didn't, there was another car. The farm is different. The land does not care about his opinions. The weather does not negotiate. The lambing happens whether he is ready or not.
His mastery develops painfully and visibly. By the third series, he is not the same man who started. He knows things. He can do things. The knowledge came at the cost of repeated failure, and he paid the cost.
His levity is intact throughout — he is almost constitutionally incapable of melodrama — but it is paired with genuine respect for the difficulty of what he is doing. He mocks himself far more than he mocks the work. The humour is not defensive; it is how he processes what he is learning.
And unexpectedly, transmission emerges. The farm, Kaleb, the village, the farm shop, the restaurant, the advocacy for small farmers — he did not plan to care. He ended up caring enormously. His platform, which used to be about cars and shouting, is now partly about the crisis in British agriculture and the people who work the land.
This is Wayfarism arriving uninvited and being accepted anyway. He did not choose the bearing; the bearing chose him. And he was honest enough, eventually, to walk it.
"I genuinely love it here. I'm not sure I expected that."