Walking
We have been walking for hours it seems. But where? I cannot remember.” ― Virginia Woolf
“Freedom - to walk free and own no superior.” ― Walt Whitman
KATY
In March 1860, when London was starting to sprawl and the Thames was fetid, Charles Dickens - on account of his insomnia - set out on a series of night walks. He wanted to ‘get through the night’ as he puts it. The result was an abatement of the disease of sleeplessness and for us a series of essays chronicling London between daylight hours. Walking is often, in my experience, a way to get through. I will walk for no reason and no goal, but I am aware that walking will often produce a great deal of things when I emerge from it. I have walked away in anger and to confront wild feelings from a safer distance. I will walk to lose myself and I will walk in order to find something. I am not always honest or clear with myself what I am hoping to find or lose. I will walk as though the activity of not walking is impossible.
I consider myself as someone who is a walker. I can see the role it plays in my life and the continuity of it, I walk often and routinely. My desire to walk is often driven by an inclination to explore and also to shake off (or embrace) solitude. I realise in saying this I am admitting that for me walking is often by myself. Walking provides the company that isn’t there. I am not always alone though, and the walks that make up my hinterland have often been with one or more people.
Walking, like other things, is a hereditary predicament and I think I picked it up off my Dad. He is the man who in my child sized eyes would march around our village. He seemed to know places by the paces he had made through them before. I understood that maps are not as useful as the memory that resides in us from a walk you have previously taken, sometimes decades before. My father was able, once a walk had taken hold, to talk to me and I enjoyed being able to listen to him. He described places from the point of view of someone walking in it, he explained that London is smaller than the Tube maps images it to be. And certainly I remember a lot of our walks - the one that comes to mind straight away are the walks across Solsbury Hill that we obsessively took over a series of a few months during a forgotten teenage year. I also, again in Dad’s footsteps, used to take extended walks around Exeter with my friend Jason. We would find a pace and then during the course of an hour we would fall into the gentle quiet that friendship affords you. This would be broken by half formed conversations and the honesty that comes with being young, rudderless and half-certain of your convictions.
Conversely, I have roamed Paris, Melbourne, Shanghai, Bangkok, Seoul and many other cities by myself. My memories of these cities and the corresponding units of time growing up are linked by my desire to roam, to walk. In my last year of university I was given, by way of a film module, a word for all of my aimless city walking. In truth, I was given a compendium of ideas that have also stayed with me. At the front of these ideas was the idea of the flaneur, who I reckoned was a looser form of the idealised version I had of myself. The flaneur is an idler whereas I thought of myself as sincere and utmost in my walking. In truth, I was also an idler seeking to use the city as a canvas for my churning brain. The rules I set myself - always look up, avoid dull corners, get a view in, walk in all weathers, look at the people and pause to remember this - were only in lieu of the company I didn’t have and a distraction from a feeling that was presently unresolved. It is only as the metres, the miles, the hours have gradually built up that I have come to see that walking is the thing itself. Often the desired resolution, the primary aim of the walk, will appear only later.
There have been a few walks that I recall with particular warmth. One is the walk across the back and side streets of Bangkok that I took with Pete. We accepted the damp heat of the city and explored the wet markets hugging the canals that thread the edge of the Chao Phraya. We ventured into dark corners and looped through markets littered both with people and unwanted goods. There was also the meandering that we undertook in Paris when I seconded there under the guise of a masters degree. I was living in Le Marais and I often found myself getting wilfully lost in stone lined roads, small parks & crowds of attractive Parisians. I wanted to convey to Pete, that warm Spring, that I had found some roots in this city I was transiting through. I wanted to show him that I know something about it. I also, looking back, enjoyed seeing the city afresh through his eyes. There is also the walk I used to make in Oxford back when I was 18 and hopelessly in love with being young and free and capable of making every mistake because I knew none of it was truly real. I would wind around the middle bit of Oxford, not quite the faceless commercial city nor the imagined citadel that is only made real for students of Oxford University. I found my own Oxford, one that was partially borrowed from years of Morse and one also built from the ground up by my nascent desire to cement my identity and claim territory. It was the first tentative steps into falling in love with cities and the freedom I still feel they give me. At the end of this well rehearsed walk - passing through the hidden pathway behind Queen’s College - I stopped on Magdalen Bridge as the sun gently fell into darkness and I imagined that this might be everything that I had waited for. I can still remember the clarity that I felt in that moment of near adultness, of knowing that I could bear my own weight and be something in the world.
