I’ve been reading GK Chesterton’s English Journey, ‘being a rambling but truthful account of what one man saw and heard and felt and thought during a journey through England during the autumn of the year 1933,’ published a year later.
Chesterton doesn’t look like much of a walker from the photographs I’ve seen of him:
Nevertheless, the book has him doing a fair bit of walking. He finds himself in Liverpool and is given a walking tour by a local vicar.
‘We set out to explore this queer parish of his, which was in the very middle of Liverpool’s more picturesque and exotic slums, populated by the human flotsam and jetsam of a great seaport. We had not gone twenty yards when he pointed his stick at some figures mooching in the square. “I call that the fo’c’sle walk,” he remarked. “Old sailors. Just watch them. You see? A few short paces one way, then the same number back again. They do it all day. It’s the result of spending years in ships. Yes, that’s the fo’c’sle walk.” We passed near the men and he waved a greeting with his stick.’
I had never heard of the fo’c’sle walk before.
Later Chesterton is in Blackpool, about which he has ambivalent feelings (as do most of us). ‘If you do not like industrial democracy, you will not like Blackpool,’ he writes, and although he does like industrial democracy (as do most of us) he doesn’t find Blackpool a very joyous place. He goes for a ‘sharp walk’ along the prom in bad weather. ‘I trudged on like some purposeful little insect moving along a dark wet shelf.’
This sounds very, very familiar from my boyhood visits to Blackpool. My memories have not been colorized, unlike this postcard:
And some other wise words from Mr C:
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