STRAIGHT WALKING

Richard Long's "A Line Made by Walking"

Did you hear about these guys: Robin Heath, Peter Forrester, Jamie Dakota, and Max Barnes?  Last month hey decided to walk ‘the longest straight-line walk without a road’ in Great Britain, and it ended not in disaster but in slightly predictable disarray.

         It all started with a question asked of the good men and women at Ordnance Survey (lots of background can be found on the OS website) by one Roger Dalton who wrote,

‘Hello! An enquiry if I may.....what (and where) is the longest distance you can walk in a straight line in England/Wales/Scotland without crossing a road (defined as a paved surface for vehicular use)?? Planning a potential expedition. Ta!’

         The reply came back, ‘So for Great Britain, the longest straight line that you can walk without having to stop, look and listen is 71.5km or 44.43 miles (71500.817767m) and is unsurprisingly in Scotland. Crossing the Cairngorms, the distance goes from 262540, 778255 on the A9 and ends at 328042, 806921 south of the hamlet of Corgarff. The high point is on the summit of Beinn a’Bhuird at 1,179m (3,870ft).

They quote Cairngorms expert Eddie Bulpitt who said ‘I wouldn’t recommend anyone do it unless they are very conversant with a map and compass. It is not following known tracks or paths, and it looks like there may well be several scrambles along the way too.’ 

OS adds some relevant maps, that's one of them above, pretty low def, but I think the OS understandably don’t want to give their maps away.  I think there’s an issue here.  I know the OS are mapmakers, but being able to draw a straight line on a map, isn’t quite the same as having a straight walking route, is it?  And does ‘without roads’ really matter?  You can walk straight across a road, you walk straight along a road.

Anyway the four merry lads read about this in the papers, mounted an expedition, and were defeated, largely by the weather – rain, cold, boggy ground – and perhaps by their own natures.  Some of us know, without putting it to the test, that we’re not up to walking across a bleak stretch of Scotland in mid-October, but evidently some don’t know it.

And here’s a map published in the Times showing their route. Maybe I’m mistaken but that really doesn’t look very straight at all.

And of course, you might in any case ask what’s so great about walking in a straight line anyway.  Allow me to quote Richmal Crompton in Sweet William.

‘William walked down the road, whistling his loud, untuneful whistle and kicking a suitably-sized stone from side to side. He wasn’t going anywhere in particular, so it didn’t matter when he got there.  Even if he had been going anywhere in particular it wouldn’t have made any difference.  William considered it a waste of time to walk straight along the road.  If there weren’t stones to kick, there were ditches and hedges to investigate, trees to climb … '

SEVEN HILL ARMY

I was walking in Sheffield again. It’s a good place to walk.  It has seven hills (no, not much like Rome), but they do keep you fit, if they don’t kill you.

That isn’t me in the photograph above, in fact I don’t know who it is.  I took the picture years ago while leaning out of the window of one of these towers, where a friend lived at the time.

Sheffield has always had ‘interesting’ architecture, little of it truly great, and very little of it genuinely Brutalist. There’s Park Hill of course, now desired by hipsters, 

and there used to be the terrifying, now demolished, Kelvin flats, 

But those towers always had a certain brut charm about them. I know they weren’t very popular in their day, and my friend was only living there because she was working for the council and they gave her the flat because it was hard to let.  But times change.

Today there’s all kinds of zesty new architecture all over the city, a great many towers, and as far as I can tell as an outsider, these aren’t very well loved either.

So I was wandering around looking at all the new, computer-generated, Lego buildings, and suddenly there they were – those very towers – which have been given cladding to hide their brutish exteriors.  

Purists would have sneered at this under any circumstances but I don’t think we quite feel the same way about cladding as we used to.

I also went to look at my parents’ old house: they died a long time ago. It didn’t appear to have changed a bit, which was in some ways the most surprising thing of all.

AND DID THOSE FEET?

‘Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld

The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah’

Well, it could happen to anybody, couldn’t it?

Yes, I went to the blockbuster William Blake show at Tate Britain – that quotation from ‘Milton a Poem’ can be found on a wall of the exhibition.  

As I staggered out after 90 minutes or so, I’m pretty sure I was displaying marks of weakness, marks of woe. It seems I have a bit of blind spot for Blake.  I mean, yes some of the paintings and engravings are OK, some of the poetry is fine, it’s just is his personal mythology that really gets me down.  I mean I have enough trouble with the convolutions of basic Christian mythology, but when I’m confronted with Orc and Los and Urizen and Nobodaddy and indeed the Daughters of Beulah, and all the other stuff he just you know made up, I want to say enough already.

Clearly this is a minority view, my own failing no doubt, and one not shared by the throng packing into the Tate.

But really, did Albion have to be quite so effete?

And in the illustration below from ‘Paradise Lost,’ what exactly is Adam doing? Saying ‘Hello clouds, hello trees’? And what's with the jazz hands? One thing he’s not doing is paying attention:

And as for what Eve has in her mouth – well I think we know what it’s supposed to be, but I think we also know what it very much looks like.

Incidentally, should you ever find yourself in Manningtree, in Essex and you feel the need for the lineaments of gratified desire, you can always to walk up to Blake close: the walk will do you good.

STROLLING AROUND THE GROUND, FEELING AT HOME IS OPTIONAL

As you know, I like looking at the ground when I walk.  I also like looking at the sky – I’m versatile that way – but I’m working on a probably doomed project to be called Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground, and so the ground often takes precedence.

A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.

They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock.  Perhaps they had to.  Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.

They’d done this.  

I was disappointed.  I’d wanted more.

Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste. 

SORDID, DOMESTIC WALKING

S.J. Perelman was walking home one night in New York, and when he got to Washington Square Park he ran into poet E.E. Cummings, whom he knew a little.  

They walked along together and came to an apartment building on the edge of the square.  Cummings suddenly stopped and stared up at the building and said, ‘What scenes of sordid domesticity do you think are being played out behind those lighted windows?”

 Perelman protested, ‘Why, that’s my apartment.”

And Cummings said, “I know.’