"WALK TALL, KICK ASS, LEARN TO SPEAK ARABIC"

 It was the 3rd of June, a not especially sleepy dusty delta day.  All over Britain people were 

celebrating the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee, and I was participating in a project titled A-10 

Live presented by the Stoke Newington Literary Festival.

 

The plan was that in crew of artists (of all kinds) and indeed flaneurs, covered the territory from London to Cambridge via the A10, which the Website says, describes as 'a 110 mile celebration of the UK's most multicultural road.' My section was from the M25 to Hoddesdon, much of it along the New River Path.

 

In preparation I’d been rereading parts of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and my eye had 

fallen, hardly for the first time, on the section that reads, 'Every now and then when your 

life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on 

heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas’

 

Substitute walking for driving, substitute M25 for Hollywood and Hoddeson for Las Vegas, define ‘heinous chemicals’ as Ibuprofen and Buscopan, and you can see how this might work.

 

It was a grand day out in the company of Dr. Pete Gomes, Simon Poulter and Caroline Gannon.

 

Nicholson-Gomes-Poulter

Parts of the walk were intensely bucolic with ducks and trees and water and sky but I must say I enjoyed it best when these elements rubbed up against other more inscrutable features:

 

Waterside structures that looked like sculpture:

Improbably-placed no trespassing signs

 

Suburban exuberance, including Cheshunt, where Cliff Richard once lived (though not in this bungalow).

And of course there was the M25. This was where the walk started, under a concrete flyover, with the traffic yowling by just a few feet away. This was a liminal space or an edgeland or absolutely nowhere, depending on your point of view.

 

And, damn it, I made some ecological “wild” art.

 

I noticed were snail trails under the bridge – the gardeners’ nightmare - and I discovered a surprising number of snails, small but very varied in colour – and all of them dead as far as I could see.  This seemed a sad thing.

 

I didn’t give them a decent burial but I arranged them on a bit of rusted metal pipe.  I think the queen would have approved.

He’s some footage of what we did:

https://www.a10-live.co.uk/day-five.html

 

Incidentally I'm not quite sure who was responsible for which of the above images.  Most are by Caroline Gannon who was generally too busy taking photographs to be photographed herself.  But here she is on a different walk: