I’ve found a new way to tell whether someone was born in Wiltshire: it’s not their accent, their physical shape, their clothing or anything as easily identifiable.

It’s their attitude to the distance you have to travel to get anywhere.

Twice in the last week we’ve headed off around the country to attend events and, when the trips have been mentioned in conversation, reactions inevitably include something along the lines of, “What a long way/That’ll take a long time/Won’t that mean you’ll be home very late?”

All expressed in tones that imply we’re somehow being foolhardy and going to extraordinary lengths to follow a hobby or a sport.

It’s that attitude, more than the slow broadband speed, rumbly road surface and pathetic public transport, which marks out Wiltshire people as, well, Wiltshire.

It’s as if some take a perverse pride in the fact that, being a rural county, one of the ways we pay for the privilege of living in a particularly green bit of England is that we have to leave it to benefit from metropolitan facilities like concert halls and football stadia. A move they refuse to make. I know people who didn’t bid for Olympics tickets not on cost grounds, but because of the difficulty of getting to London.

Surely not all the 7,000 people who used Trowbridge’s new cinema in its first week have local postcodes (I’m sure the Odeon management are carefully collating this information).

If we can get used to travelling just a little bit, to make use of the cinema or one of the new restaurants due to open soon, maybe we might extend our horizons, both physical and mental, a little bit further in other areas, too.