Author: orbific

This last week has been a mess of tiredness, hard work and melancholy, so I needed a good walk to blow the cobwebs away. I didn’t want to be out too long but I wasn’t in the mood for walking near home; my regular routes feel a little overworn from grinding out steps for the fitbit.

It was an extravagance, but I took an Uber to Saltdean and walked back from there. It was raining lightly as I set off, but that was all the better to clear my head.

Just outside Rottingdean, someone had erected a crude wooden cross on the shoreline:

The undercliff was quiet. I watched the effortless flight of the gulls and was  transfixed by odd birdcalls from the shore (I need Shazam for birdsong!). The sky like a Constable painting.

In the Marina boatyard, a painted rudder reminded me of a Mark Doty poem from a recent workshop (‘that green is what I’ve wanted all my life‘). The water in the harbour was calm, and I was fascinated by the complication of the sails on one of the boats. It was for sale, and I briefly considered a pirate’s life, remembering William Burroughs’ Cities of the Red Night. I’ve forgotten most of that novel, but I love the idea of the Pirate Articles as a founding document for a better America.

I had breakfast at Mac’s near the Marina, which is probably my favourite cafe. They do chips that are crisp and hot, and I’ve found nowhere else that does them so well. Then back onto the seafront, striding west.

Closer in, the town looked grubby. There is a perfect distance to see the i360 from: on the Downs, it’s like a huge flagpole, declaring ‘Brighton is here’. Closer up, it looks like a big chimney. The terraces on Marina Drive are pretty much derelict, but there are plans afoot to renovate, the sort of development scheme that makes you wonder if the neglect was intentional.

At the end of the walk, the sun was fighting through the clouds. I walked home through empty shopping streets, wondering if it was the early hour or the pandemic keeping people home.

The best thing about the walk was the little bits of graffiti, the messages that people had felt driven to leave along the way, like secret codes.

I’ve been enjoying Craig Mod’s Ridgeline newsletters, which cover various topics but particularly Japan and walking. There has also been some fascinating discussion of process – Craig is working within a young medium and leaving a clear trail for other people who want to follow. While I can’t justify the expense of the Explorer’s Club Membership, the free and paid access seem incredibly well-balanced.

There’s a real joy to reading these mini-essays, and seeing how they expand into larger pieces, such as a recent article on Pizza Toast in Japan. But, for me, the best bit is the insights into walking, such as Craig’s discussion of the difference between walking and hiking:

I suppose technical definition separates the two. Walks are what you might do in your average suburban neighborhood. Hikes, in the mountains. But “walk” is chosen deliberately, meant to be inclusive. By even just using the word “hike,” folks drop off: Not young enough, not strong enough, not ready for the bugs. You can trick a person into hiking by calling it a walk. I’ve done so many times. And “walk” denotes a thing to be easily grabbed. A walk is there to be taken.

Also, there is the contract. I would describe the contract of a “walk” as relatively clear. One foot after another. You leave your home, you walk along the Brooklyn Bridge, you eat some pizza; a walk thus completed. “Hike” is perhaps more fuzzy, the breadth of potential much wider — embark on a hike without double checking and you may end up on the summit of Kilimanjaro or in Berkeley Hills or eating apple pie on Pike’s Peak. On my long walk a man gave me frozen bacon on a mountain pass. But even there, even then, it never felt like a hike. I was walking, the day was bounded, a few more steps and I’d be heading down the other side, and few more steps after that, would be at my inn for the night. The contracts were clear, the bacon cool against my knee.

I’m adding these references to the blog because I can never find them when I want them; they relate to the horrific frozen journey’s taken by Ernest Shackleton. When researching my MA dissertation, I did a lot of research into Antarctic exploration. It comprised a single page in the final draft – which should have taught me a valuable lesson about researching without doing any writing during that process.

What stuck with me was a line in a diary written by one of Shackleton’s team. Stranded and bored in a tent, he noted that the men had engaged in “more trips around London this evening” (quoted in Sara Wheeler’s Terra Incognito, p183). I love the idea of such imaginary journeys.

Shackleton’s team “never forgot what they had endured… Joyce said that when they got home they were frequently invited to festivities in London that went on to the early hours, and afterwards they would find destitute people on the embankment ‘and line [them] up at the coffee stalls’. When he was ninety, Dick Richards said that he hadn’t yet recovered.” (Terra Incognito p98).

Shackleton’s expedition is also referred to in TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. To quote wikipedia’s article on the Third Man Factor, “Shackleton wrote, ‘during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.’ His admission resulted in other survivors of extreme hardship coming forward and sharing similar experiences.”

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
— But who is that on the other side of you?

I’ve just added Shackleton’s South to my Kindle. It’s a book I really should have read by now.

A week or so back, the Guardian had another article about the ongoing campaign to save Britain’s historic footpaths. The government has set a 2026 deadline for these paths to be registered; after that, the rights-of-way will be lost. The Ramblers are stepping up their campaign to save these routes, with a new mapping site. Some of these routes, particularly urban alleyways, are taken for granted by locals but not recognised on official maps.

There have been some fantastic articles on the campaign, including ones in the Guardian, Ramble On: The Fight to Save Forgotten Footpaths, and New Yorker, The Search For England’s Forgotten Footpath.

In a 2017 interview with Guernica Magazine, Walking is a Democracy, Iain Sinclair spoke about how important walking is to freedom, and how walking is becoming constrained in cities:

Walking is increasingly a sort of final democracy. The weight of what’s being [politically] imposed is very much anti-walking, and has to do with control of space, creating public areas you can’t walk in—which are completely covered by surveillance, policing, private spaces, gated communities, and unexplained entities at the edge of things. So walking around becomes actually difficult. But the walking process is the oldest natural form of movement. It puts you literally in touch with the earth and the weather around you and allows you to get into conversation with people as you move, which seldom happens in the other ways we move.

I was recently reading up on an access dispute near Uckfield, where the landowner was outraged at the idea that walkers’ access rights were ‘the law of the land’:

Where does this law come from? Because these so-called public footpaths in inverted commas were for the serfs to walk from A to B. They weren’t for the public. The public have never walked anywhere – they’ve had horses and cars and things. You don’t think the lord of the manor walked along a footpath do you? Course not. They were just for the serfs. Remember that prior to 1700 and something, nobody had any rights here anyway, they were all slaves… Why do people have to trespass on not just my land, but any private land? And what kind of people go rambling? Perverts.

Which makes a direct connection between the rights-of-access and more profound freedoms. There may be more urgent battles over rights and freedom than the one over English footpaths, but this small debate quickly reaches towards fundamental questions.