Walking the M62

Sympathy and complexity

Good philosophy supporting my planned walk, this. The M62 is 105 miles long. I'm taking two months to walk it. That averages at 1.7 miles per day.

Hurst's epic 1909 walk - to plant acorns all the way from Manchester to the East Midlands - taught him a thing or two. Today Phil is starting out from Piccadilly to follow on Hurst's trail. He will be looking for Hurst’s oaks, planting some acorns himself, and revisiting the scenes of the various adventures and setbacks which Hurst described so vividly in his book. All of this research for a one-person show Phil's developing with New Perspectives Theatre Company, about oak trees, about England, about time and change, about walking and cars, about property and landscape, about attitudes and relationships to the natural world and to each other, about a search for how things are today through the binocular lenses of the past and the future.

I'm going to join Phil for a day after Easter, by which time he'll be somewhere outside Nottingham. And I'm sure it'll teach me a thing or two.

Roads go on

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth ‘tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure

- Edward Thomas

Good to meet up yesterday with Joe Moran, whose current project is the soon-to-be-published Queuing for Beginners; The Story of Daily Life from Breakfast to Bedtime and who is then going to be turning his attention to the minutae of life on the roads. He tipped me off about Thomas, who wrote a lot about roads and who (according to Lucy Newlyn) "saw the world as a walker sees". Fertile ground, all of this.

Walk / not walk

Time for some more walking. Reasons:
1. A commission to create and then write-up a local 'pilgrimage' for Coracle;
2. An invite to join Phil on his 150 mile walk following in the footsteps of the acorn-planting engineer Charles Hurst;
3. Watching John's films of Nick Papadimitriou who I really can't like because he's one of those people who annoyingly chews as he talks, but is nevertheless a compelling psychogeographer;
4. Enjoying Jeremy Deller's Folk Archive, a lovely photographic collection of the sort of contemporary English eccentricity which can be freely witnessed on any road;
5. Discovering This is 'Ull, that city's lively people's website, with refeshingly not a mention of (yawn) Willy Wilberforce... which makes me want to get out there soon...

Time to hold the walking. Reason:
1. Just looked out of the window. It's snowing again.