The 13-mile journey from Kirkby Stephen to Keld was an exciting one. It took us from the town up to the Nine Standards, a line of tall cairns; from there we crossed a boggy area before descending to Ravenseat Farm, and onward to Keld.
The guidebook made the marshy section sound imposing, describing it as looking like “a scene from the Somme, circa 1916”. It went on to talk about people getting swallowed by the murk, and someone who broke a wrist when their walking pole was taken by the bogs. It didn’t sound all that much fun. There is a choice of three routes on this section, dividing the path up by the time of year, and it was hard to get a grasp of which one was best.
But, before setting off, we visited the church in Kirkby Stephen, where there was an excellent 8th-century carving of Loki (disappointingly labelled as a devil by the superstitious peasants who ran that church). Kirkby Stephen also apparently has a flock of parrots but we didn’t see them.
The climb up to the Nine Standards was fairly easy, and the views from the top were epic. I’d seen them from a distance on the Pennine Way a few years ago, and it was good to be standing there.
The bogs were just tricky enough to be fun, forcing Dave and I to look for crossing points and occasionally leap over the mud. We mostly got through OK, although I managed to go in up to my shin. I could see how these might be tricky, and we met one person who’d had to quit the C2C the year before after pulling a muscle escaping the muck.
“a scene from the Somme, circa 1916”
From there we descended to a river that was followed to Ravenseat Farm. Not watching TV meant I missed the excitement of being at the Yorkshire Shepherdess‘s farm, although a selection of books and jigsaw puzzles were available at the drinks van. Sadly, vegan cream teas were not on offer.
Isn’t this a great view?
The day’s stage was relatively short, finishing at the Keld Lodge, where people were sat outside. Everyone who passed was encouraged to join for a drink and we all swapped stories about crossing the bogs. Dave and I stayed at Greenlands B&B, a little way out of town, where we were well looked after. The views from the patio across the valley were absolutely stunning, and the food was excellent.
One way I evaluate a day’s hiking is by seeing how many photos I took. Stage 6 of the Coast-to-Coast produced relatively few. According to the book, the hike was 20.5 miles, although I think that was a slight over-estimate. Despite the distance, the book described this as a ‘recovery day’, given the flatness and soft ground. Dave was convinced it was going to rain, but I insisted it wouldn’t. Fortunately I was correct.
The route included a number of historical sites – a couple of stone circles, and ‘Robin Hood’s Grave’, all of which we managed to miss. Otherwise, it was a fairly standard countryside hike – better than a day indoors, but suffering in comparison to the stunning views the day before.
Personally, I struggled with the day. I was wearing the wrong socks and had still not adjusted my new rucksack correctly. The walking was a slog and it was probably a good thing we didn’t have any hills. It was only the last mile or two when I finally felt comfortable.
At various points along the path we saw signs asking people not to pee along the route. And I can understand the sentiment here – nobody wants to be confronted by other people using the great outdoors as a toilet. But, at the same time, I’m not sure what the alternative is here. The route is a 7-10 hour hike with no facilities. Any adequate hydration is going to mean people need to stop at some point. I’m really not sure what the signs are meant to achieve.
I was relieved to arrive at Kirkby Stephen, and in time to buy some bath salts at the chemist. I spent an hour soaking in the bath, reading No Country For Old Men, and trying to soothe my aches. We ate in the local curry house. I was excited to see a Scotch Bonnet curry on the menu, and a little disappointed that they seemed to have used Encona sauce rather than fresh chillis.
After a year’s break, my brother-in-law Dave and I continued our walk on the Coast-to-Coast trail earlier this month. We’d finished last year’s leg in Patterdale, which meant starting again with a massive hill.
The walk from Patterdale to Shap was 15 miles or so, and the last section of the walk based in the Lake District. The walk to Angle Tarn was worth the effort, with some stunning scenery. I was definitely fitter than the year before, but I compensated for that by poor packing, carrying too much in a badly-adjusted brand-new rucksack.
Kidsty Pike was the high point of the day, with a wonderful panoramic view.
From there we made a steep descent to Haweswater Reservoir. It was striking how close the reservoir was to running dry. The guidebook cautioned us that the waterside path was not gentle, rather it would have us “panting like a hippo on a treadmill”. We did see a red squirrel in the woods though.
After that, some pleasant woodland walking followed until we reached the ruins of Shap Abbey. The village was only a short way beyond that, and it was good to be able to take off the rucksack and rest.
At the start of August I finally moved into my new house in Hebden Bridge. Even now, four weeks later, I’m still overjoyed to be waking up here. It’s been a particularly idyllic time to arrive with the good weather, and I’ve reminded myself not to get too used to Hebden Bridge being dry. The move itself was shoddy, with no attempt to prepare bedding, or keep things tidy enough that I could find my chargers. I’ve now moved all the boxes to one room and am working to make each of the rooms cosy. It’s going to take some time, but I’m looking forward to it.
The day before I moved in, Tom messaged to say “Now you can start getting stressed about maintenance”. And yes, I am discovering that an old house will require a fair bit of work. To start with, I have a whole host of trailing plants that need to be brought under control. I’ve bought a ladder and garden tools and am slowly dealing with the creepers. I’m enjoying the prospect of this new workload. Reading Four Thousand Weeks last month made it clear that there is never enough time, and we just have to choose how to spend it.
The other exciting news is that I have accepted an offer for a new job, starting in October. The interviews for the new job took place either side of the move, which in retrospect was crazy. I’ve loved working at Mindera, and would recommend it to anyone looking for a new type of company. In the end, it comes down to geography – as much as I love remote working, I want to move to a one-day-a-week hybrid model. I went to Leeds for the company barbecue and met some of my new colleagues and am incredibly excited about working with them.
Despite the move, I’ve been getting on with regular things. Kit had been booked to come visit weeks ago, in what turned out to be a couple of days after the move, but it was good to have him help me settle. I went to an excellent talk on Coin Trees with Wil, one of the Cerne2CERN pilgrims. I also attended a one-day Arvon workshop at Hebden Town Hall with Amy Liptrot and Will Self. Amy was particularly inspiring, filling me with ideas about place writing. On Bank Holiday Monday, I had a visit from another pilgrim, Dan, and his sheepdog Molly. Other than that I’ve been trying to discover all the little paths in the woodland behind my house.
Walking continues to be little more than a maintenance dose, with a total of 339,822 steps for August. An average of 10,962 and the highest 20,734 when I was moving house – more activity than distance that day. My weight has continued to float downwards, but slightly more slowly than last month, with another 2.2 pounds disappearing without effort. As the house purchase became stressful last month, I started drinking coffee again. Even just having one or two coffees a day was affecting my concentration and sleep patterns, so I needed to stop. I lost a Saturday to caffeine withdrawal, which felt like an awful hangover. Hopefully I won’t need to do that again.
I wrote two new stories in August (Little Piggies and The Leech Catchers) and sent six submissions, with my stats for the year standing at 35 submitted, 6 accepted, 21 rejected. That means I had 9 rejections in August, which I feel pretty OK about. Three stories are due to be published in September.
I’m picking up the pace of the pace of the submissions now, which is good. Submissions are hard work and involve a spreadsheet, but Chuck Palahniuk recently wrote about how you need to love all parts of the writing process. I sometimes feel anxious about running out of places to send stories – there are markets closing all the time. But Dave Farley’s Modern Software Engineering has been a good reassurance about the importance of making small bets and learning from those. The more I submit, the more clearly I can see which elements of my writing are working for other people. For example, I’m focussing more on characters than concepts, which is producing better stories.
Out of the books I’ve read this month, the highlights were Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nannette, which provides an interesting glimpse into how her austistic mind works. Chuck Wendig’s The Book of Accidents was an interesting novel that felt very much influenced by Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, and one I wished had been a little less cosmic. Dave Farley’s Modern Software Engineering was a good guide to the state of the art in the discipline. Sally Coulthard’s A Short History of the World According to Sheep was very much in the quirk-non-fiction genre kicked off by Longitude, covering a broad swathe of history including some interesting details about Halifax’s history.
Despite how much was going on in August, I managed to watch a fair amount of TV. Netflix’s Trainwreck: Woodstock 99 was a good documentary, although showing the footage of sexual assaults seemed unnecessary and violating. I tried The Sandman but gave up after a few minutes – I love the comics, but the adaptation felt twee and overly faithful. I’m glad other people are enjoying it so much. Westworld season 4 managed brief moments of genius but was, overall, tired and confused. I’ve also been catching up with Better Call Saul. I’m not sure why I’d stopped, particularly in the middle of a pandemic with so little else going on. Kate had been hyping it, and I’ve been enjoying watching remotely with her. Just a few episodes to go!
When Kit came up we watched Nicholas Cage metafiction The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent which was both fun and about twenty minutes too long. I also went on my first trip to the Picturehouse in Hebden Bridge to see Alex Garland’s Men. While I have quibbles with the movie, it was a great one to see in the cinema, with some amazing visuals.
Politically, Britain continues to feel like it’s in decline, with nothing good coming down the road. The energy price increases are shocking, given that they make it impossible for so many people to make ends meet. It seems incredible that a government would put a large proportion of the country in a position where rent, food and energy have risen to the point they simply cannot afford them. And that’s to say nothing of the costs to business, schools, and nurseries, which threaten a horrifying economic contagion. It’s terrifying, particularly given the lack of engagement by the Conservative party, who are distracted by their leadership campaign. I’m expecting Truss to take action once she is in power, but even so, putting people into a position like this is unacceptable. Nobody should be made anxious about how to heat their homes. The job of a government is to look after its people.
A coin tree is one that has had coins hammered into it. It usually happens with fallen trees, and while the tradition can be documented back to Victorian times, it seems to have taken off in the 21st century. Dr Houlbrook ascribes this to change in forestry practises since 2000, when fallen trees were moved off paths but otherwise left to rot in place.
The first coin tree I encountered was one in Malham, while walking the Pennine Way:
I also encountered something similar in Kathamandu, where a large block of wood has had nails hammered into it. This is said to ward off toothache, and the site is detailed in Atlas Obscura. It was interesting to hear that the earliest British coin trees were also used as a means of dealing with toothache.
Dr Houlbrook’s research has explored various forms of what she describes as “unofficial embellishments to landscapes”, particularly where this has become problematic, or is likely to. The earliest example she discussed with relation to coin trees was a site on Isle Maree, which began as a rag tree, before people took to nailing the rags to the trunk, before directly hammering in coins.
I attended the session with Will, one of the CERN pilgrims, so we were obviously considering coin trees in relation to money burning. At one point, the use of coins in wishing fountains and coin trees was described as ‘sacrifice’. There was also a mention of how coin trees produce sacred zones in secular areas – “turning a space into a place”. This can be seen in how queues develop at coin trees, with people taking their turn and approaching the act with a certain severance. We also learned about coin-folding to cure disease, which sounds like an interesting approach to currency destruction.
Rag tree at Avebury
One of the most interesting aspects of traditions like coin trees is how people explain it. Dr Houlbrook interviewed a number of people who had placed coins in trees and many could not clearly explain what the tradition was and why they had done it – participation went before explanation. Dr Houbrook went on to talk about how she had begun considering folklore as improvised in response to children’s questions rather than the model of it being taught by the old to the young. It’s fascinating to see the growth in coin trees, and how the retrospective explanations of these things generate references to traditions that do not truly exist.
Earlier this year, Dr Houlbrook released a book ‘Ritual Litter’ Redressed which I’ve ordered from Amazon to learn more about this subject.
In just a couple of day’s time, I’m moving to Hebden Bridge! This has been in the works since mid-March, and the purchase has been a long and difficult process. But it all worked out in the end. There’s a huge amount to do, both before and after the move, but I am very excited.
Throughout much of July, it looked like the house purchase would not go through, so I tried to keep busy. I caught up with my old friend Liz in Leeds; Jen and Dave from Liverpool Arts Lab came by to pick up the Bodge back issues (it was a little emotional to say farewell to them). I also had visits from Naomi and Kate Shields. I went out with my niece to celebrate Mum’s birthday (everyone else had the rona), and got to see the pigs. A trip to sign paperwork also meant dropping by the Mindera offices in Leicester. I even tried to distract myself from house woes by attending a vogue class – ouch! My poor toes! Everyone was very friendly, but it felt weird to be the only man in the class, particularly when I had 20 years on everyone else.
I went to visit Muffy in Blackpool, and we watched Thor: Love and Thunder. In theory, Muffy lives a short hop down the train line, but returning from Blackpool on the Sunday took over 10 hours. It really does feel like this country is falling apart. Among my misadventures were a ride with a racist taxi driver. In my haste to exit his cab, I left my Kindle behind. Further problems in July came from an incompetent hosting company causing DNS issues and knocking out my email out for a few days.
I’ve not been doing much walking recently, and a planned hike along the Pennine Way was cancelled due to the mid-July heatwave. My step total for the month was 352,571, with an average of 11,373 steps, and the highest total being 27,341 on the day I was trapped in Blackpool. I also missed my daily target for the first day since probably 2019 – only by 32 steps, but that gives you an idea how stressful everything has been. I’m not sure if it’s been better eating habits, stress or the heat, but I lost 4.9 pounds over the month with very little effort. I’ve not been drinking since May and feel much better for that, although I am having a daily coffee again which I need to stop. I’m also benefitting from Sooxanne’s recommendation of Floradix, which seems to be reducing my tiredness.
I wrote one new story this month (The Appalling Fate of Henry Fluffstock) and sent 4 out. My stats for 2022 so far are 29 submitted, 5 accepted, 12 rejected. Two of July’s acceptances were for long horror stories, which is great. I also launched a new South Downs Way zine and didn’t really tell anyone – although I did get a very positive review from ZeenScene. I also read at the Todmorden open mic, which was great fun.
My reading in July has not really flowed, and I’ve found it hard to concentrate, despite reading some excellent books. One of the best things I’ve read in some time is Oliver Burkeman’s 4,000 Weeks. This turns the usual productivity advice on its head by starting with the fact that there will never be enough time, and we will never feel on top of our workloads. “Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster”. Burkeman uses this as a basis for liberation. Highly recommended, and something that deserves its own blog post at some point.
Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl was an excellent novel about racism, which sometimes felt like eavesdropping. Danny Goldberg’s Serving the Servant was a biography of Cobain by his manager, and an interesting angle on a singer who claimed to shun success. Bodies by Ian Winwood was a good book on mental health and addiction in the music industry, which I read following an brilliant excerpt in the Quietus. The awful journey from Blackpool was eased somewhat by standing in a crowded train next to someone reading Tabitha Lasley’s Sea State and getting to talk about what an excellent book that is.
Thor: Love and Thunder was everything a Marvel movie ought to be (including being a little disposable). I also watched Jennifer’s Body and Netflix Internet-horror Cam.We’re All Going to the World’s Fair was an interesting and moody film about the Internet and isolation. Everything Everywhere All at Once was as crazy and creative as people had promised. Sadly, I only got to watch the first half, as my friend wasn’t into it, but it’s definitely a film that demands to be rented again.
The TV highlight for July was Atlanta season 3, which was both flawed and one of the most interesting shows I’ve seen in years. Westworld continues its recovery – while not reaching the first season’s standard, the show is a massive improvement on seasons 2 and 3. One of my favourite things about ‘prestige TV’ is the discussion around it, and The Prestige TV Podcast has been excellent on Westworld and very, very good on Atlanta. I didn’t end up continuing with The Lazarus Project – there was just too much going on for me to follow much TV.
Stray on the PS4 is a short video game where you play a cat. The puzzles were perfectly pitched, with just a little struggle needed, and being a cat was fun. I also started replaying The Last of Us Part 2 on a permadeath mode.
When driving I listen to one of the two CDs in my car (Philip Glass’s Metamorphosis or Lana Del Rey’s Blue Banisters), or Radio 4. Travelling back from my Mum’s birthday, I listened to a radio 4 documentary Children’s Homes: Profits Before Care? The report was shocking, laying out how much the country pays for private children’s homes, how profitable they are for international players such as the Abu Dhabi Sovereign Wealth Fund, and how much worse the outcomes are for children in such homes. It was a shocking explication of how poorly we are being served by privatisation. The show is still available to listen to online.
British politics has continued to be a car-crash, with the Johnson government collapsing quickly – surprisingly due to someone else’s sex scandal. I was appalled that his ministers quit due to him being unsuitable for office and then left him in place. The Conservative leadership election is being played out against a background of a record-breaking heatwave and increasing energy prices. Both of these are terrifying, in the long-term and short-term respectively. For the energy cap, the government is faced with a choice between supporting energy company profits or people being able to heat their homes. It looks like we are choosing the profits, which makes plain the implications of years of privatisation. I don’t see this ending well.
artwork by Heather Peak and Ivan Morison
In a milestone of aging, during July I was asked by a teenager whether I “knew what hip-hop was”.
June has been a slow blur. The days are getting longer, and a dense heat is settling into my valley, more muggy than hot. The month started with the four-day Jubilee weekend, which seemed like a lot of fuss over nothing. I had my friends Sophie and Katharine both visiting and, with Katharine, walked a section of the Pennine Way, south from Ponden reservoir to Hebden Bridge. On the Saturday, I drove all the way to Brighton for one evening so that I could attend Rosy’s birthday party. It’s a long journey, and not one I’m likely to make often, but it was good to see everyone. The journey was made easier by stopping off at my sister’s both ways, where I got to see my parents, and of course, my niece’s pigs.
The following weekend was another celebration of Rosy’s birthday, with a boat journey on the river Thames. It’s been a long time since I went on a boating holiday. I loved it – the slow pace, red kites gliding above us, and finding good places to moor. The following week, I had my own birthday which was a little muted, before doing the Yorkshire Three Peaks with work (I’ve blogged about this in detail). June’s final weekend was spent in Blackpool. It’s been good to get out and about but I do wonder if I should have spent more time locally. Maybe soon. At the end of the month I had a visit from my old housemate Sooxanne, who came up for a little co-working.
My Yorkshire Three Peaks walk was the longest day’s hiking I’ve done, with a total of 66,178 steps. I managed a total of 367,125 steps for the month, which is an average of 12,237 a day. My weight was exactly the same at the end of the month as it was at the start, despite trying to eat a little better. I guess I need to put more effort in.
I’ve somehow managed to read 50 books so far this year, and most of them have been pretty good. I started June with Tender is the Flesh by Argentinian writer Agustina Bazterrica, one of the darkest things I’ve read. The book describes a world where, due to a virus, animals can no longer be eaten. Instead, humans are farmed and slaughtered for meat. The book was pitiless and uncomfortable. Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark described the author’s experiences with larping. This was entertaining, particularly when she described the world of Nordic larp.
I’d expected Andrew Allen’s Dictionary of Sussex Folk Medicene to be dry and obscure. Instead it’s one of the most vivid local histories that I’ve read. After finishing it I had a much clearer idea of life in mediaeval Sussex, and learned about oddities such as toad-eaters, leech catchers, and the use of walnut leaves to induce dwarfism – a historical precendent for the characters in Geek Love. I enjoyed Ben Myers’ new novel The Perfect Golden Circle, a strange and vivid book about crop circles. I also read Lucy Easthope’s When the Dust Settles, an account of her career in disaster preparation. It is terrifying in places, and scathing about how the Tory austerity has hollowed out disaster planning. A deeply worrying and unsettling book.
I’ve not watched a lot of TV this month. While Katharine was visiting we watched The Pennine Journey, an 80s documentary following a group of teenagers walking the trail. It was fascinating to see how different documentaries were back then. I also finished watching Dispatches from Elsewhere. The show was uneven, going from a stunning opening episode to a slightly flabby middle section, but the series was open-hearted and daring. Dispatches from Elsewhere was based on a documentary called The Institute and it was interesting to watch the source material for that. I tried watching Happy Valley, a police drama set around this area, but it was too grim for me. Is watching people being sexually assaulted really mainstream TV? I started a few new series at the end of the month that will take me into July: Atlanta Season 3, Westworld Season 4 and Sky’s The Lazarus Project.
I watched some movies this month (as well as The Institute). The Batman was yet another grimdark Batman story, making me long for the fun Adam West version. Sunshine felt like a bland cover version of Event Horizon, and I’m not sure why they made it. Being Frank; The Chris Sievey Story was a fascinating documentary about the man behind Frank Sidebottom.
After clearing my backlog in last month’s deluge of submissions, my pace this month was slower with only 3 things going out. My piece Holiday Wardrobe was read at Liars League by Jennifer Aries. I also wrote two new stories, a flash fiction called Glitch and a micro fiction about a bath haunted by John Lennon’s ghost. The next South Downs Way zine went off to the printers, and will be out next month. In July I’m going to focus on writing a batch of flash fictions about technology. And maybe work on the long-delayed book of clown stories.
I’ve also been doing a little blogging. Mostly things I didn’t want to let pass without mentioning, such as the return of Buck 65 and a ritual I was involved with back in March. I’ve finally got my programming blog running again, and had a piece on Test-Driven Development published on the Mindera blog. I also started a new website, which I’m adding content to but not announcing just yet. The only visitor so far was a bot in the early part of the month, but I’m enjoying working on it, slowly building to the point where it’s found or it’s detailed enough to announce.
It’s been another dramatic and chaotic month in politics, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. Covid is still in the background, despite the government actively ignoring in the hope it goes away. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been dreading my parents catching coronavirus. Finally, after two years, my Dad caught covid – at the Download festival, no less. It was soon passed on to my Mum. We’ve been fortunate that the NHS has provided excellent treatment, reducing the virus to little more than an irritation, but it’s a reminder that the pandemic has not gone away. After growing lax about mask-wearing for a time, I am not back to wearing one more regularly, particularly in trains and shops. I’ve still not caught a symptomatic infection, and I’m not enthusiastic about the idea of coming down with it.
The South Downs Way is a series of zines containing short stories that I’ve been publishing since March 2020. The individual stories combine into longer narratives about the lives of their characters. I released the fourth volume in January 2022, Weird Tales of the South Downs Way, and the fifth (A Foolish Journey) comes out in July.
I always loved the idea of telling a huge story from a set of smaller stories. One of the inspirations for this is Geoff Ryman’s 1998 novel 253 which is made up of the interconnected stories of passengers on a tube train. Another inspiration is comic books, and the way that huge stories might be hinted at in brief references.
The South Downs Way contains a load of different characters who sometimes encounter each other including a tarot reader, a physicist, and a guidebook writer with a broken leg. There are also ghosts, giants, and the Devil himself, who tangles himself in the lives of the people he encounters on the Downs.
For some reason I had the figure of 200 short stories in my head, of which I’ve published 56, with the fifth volume just about to be published. I’m over a quarter of the way through my arbitrary target, and I recently stopped to take stock and see where I am going.
Things have definitely sprawled a bit with the writing I did in 2021. When I counted things up early in 2022, I had sketches for 146 stories and about 23 different booklets. Not all of these will be viable, but I easily have enough material to produce my 200 stories. In fact, it looked as if I might produce something longer than I had planned.
All these stories need to combine with the other pieces to produce a coherent whole. I’ve been doing a lot of work since on shaping and linking the sketches I have – and I’ve already introduced a lot of elements and characters that need resolving. I also decided to make the upcoming zines more clearly themed so they stand more independently.
The biggest change to the project since starting was selling issues on etsy. I was excited by the fact people were buying copies, and it got me thinking about how to make the future volumes work better. How do I make the stories easier to sell/promote? (Which is not to say I’m changing anything about how I write, more thinking about how I make what I do as appealing as possible).
This project will continue over some years – I don’t want to focus solely on this. . I’ve got one volume with the printers (A Foolish Journey) and two more nearly finished (Stories of Sussex Folklore and Once Upon a Time in Brighton and Hove) so I can take a more leisurely pace for a time. I’m going to try to get one more volume out this year, with the others coming out every six months after that.
One of the books I love most is Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. I read it when I was 24, on the plane home after eight months working a dull contract in America. This was probably the perfect time to read that book.
It wasn’t just the story of Fight Club that I found inspiring. Palahniuk’s writing was sharper and more vivid than anything I’d encountered before. His uses of rhythm, repetition and set-piece scenes were incredibly well-crafted.
Palahniuk has described his writing style at length in his writer’s biography Consider This, outlining a whole toolbox of techniques. Recently, he’s been running a Substack newsletter where he often builds on the lessons in Consider This, and I’ve found myself working more on including some of them in my work.
One example is the use of clear physical actions for the characters. Palahniuk explains that a well-crafted gesture embeds the reader within the story. Their brains will consider the action, activitating the mirror neurones, and Palahniuk sees characters in motion as performing a sort of hypnosis on the reader. Using gestures in my work has also given me a clearer idea of the scenes that I write. I’ve also become more aware of this in my reading. Novels that seem flimsy are often that way because the characterisation comes from dialogue rather than action. Characters need a physical existence.
The other idea is that any piece of prose should include a clock or a gun. There should either be something dangerous that threatens the characters; or there should be some sort of timer counting down, limited the possible length of the story. Both of these add a tension, as well as making the stakes clear.
I’ve been using both of these techniques in my recent writing. At first, this was consciously, asking myself explicitly where these things were in a piece. Now, I can see them emerging as I plan a story. I think my writing is better for it.
I walked the Yorkshire Three Peaks trail last Saturday with a group of colleagues. The entire route took 14 hours and it was one of the most enjoyable hikes I’ve taken.
My employer organises annual trips, either skiing, a city break or, this year, a hike. We picked the Yorkshire Three Peaks as it’s a circular trail and therefore easy to plan. In retrospect, a twenty-four mile hike was quite ambitious. We all gathered on a campsite near Whernside the night before and set off a little after half six the following morning. Out of thirteen walkers, ten finished the trail.
The Yorkshire Three Peaks is a popular route. Most people walk clockwise from Horton-on-Ribblesdale, but the route proposed for our group was anti-clockwise from our campsite, starting with an ascent of Ingleborough. This was actually a great decision, as we didn’t find ourselves part of a long procession around the peaks, but rather passed most of the other people walking that day.
I had a terrible night’s sleep the night before (which was also my birthday). One of the other campers on the site was a belligerent drunk, who spent the night shouting and swearing. I can’t have managed much more than three or four hours sleep. I was up about half four, having given up on rest, and slowly prepared my kit.
Normally, I do my long hikes solo, and at a slightly faster pace than is wise. Walking with other people slowed me down, which made the day more pleasant than I’d expected. Walking twenty-four miles was still hard work, but my feet certainly finished in better shape than they do after my solo hikes.
The climb up Ingleborough (723m) was busy, as we encountered a large number of charity walkers who had set off from the other side of the peak. Everyone was friendly, and the queue for photos at the trig point was brisk. We then made a slow descent to the town where Sally waited for us with a supply point. We were also bolstered by Alex’s huge bag of Kendal Mint cake.
Hill two was Pen-y-ghent (694m), which loomed as we approached. The climb up here is steep, requiring a little scrambling. I was nearly brained by a rock at this point, as one of our group had taken a higher path and dislodged some loose rocks. They clattered down without hitting anyone, but it was a shocking moment, as I’d not considered the ascent particularly dangerous.
Last time I climbed Pen-y-ghent it had been raining and the summit was cloaked in mist. This time the views were much better. On the way down we found ourselves battered by incredible winds. Pen-y-ghent means ‘hill of winds’ and it earned its name in our descent. We rested at the bottom of the hill where were saw skylarks who managed to hover completely still in the driving wind.
We passed the second supply point about three, but couldn’t find it despite mobile phones and walkie-talkies. Fortunately we had enough food and water to take us onto the next meeting point.
The walk from Pen-y-ghent to the base of Ingleborough (736m), the third hill, was the longest stretch of the journey. It took hours to cross the valley to Ribblehead with its famous viaduct. A couple of people dropped out of this stage, but the remaining ten went on to the final peak.
The walk from Ribblehead to the base of Whernside was further than I expected. Most walkers set off from specific points and were finishing elsewhere on the trail, so this stretch was now quiet, with a very different feel to the rest of the day. We passed the noisy drunk from the night before. Finally, we started the slow ascent up Whernside. On top of the ridge we could see the shadows stretching across the valley as the sun fell lower.
After twelve hours, we were about a kilometre short of Whernside, and it took another couple of hours to get down off that mountain. Still, peaking late is pretty much how I’m living my life. The whole group gathered near the trig point for a final photo, then hurried downhill as we were very late for dinner. As we descended, we passed one last group of walkers who were running even later than us.
One of the things I liked most about the 3 Peaks was it was a communal experience. Everyone you passed was going through similar things. I’m looking forward to doing it again.
