It seems that days all too often require one to get in a car or on the bus to go and spend time doing something useful and productive. Now it’s lovely to spend a day being usefully busy. To lose yourself in the flow of activity and enjoy a glow of satisfaction at day’s end. Travelling by bus allows time for reading and people watching. It’s fun to drive a car and visit locations familiar and not so familiar.
However the days I like best are the ones where walking is the main mode of transport. Walking as a source of pleasurable amusement, as opposed to being a way of getting from A to B is a fairly recent thing. Martin Palmer suggests in Sacred Land that it developed as a result of increasingly urban environments and an urge to see some countryside.
Think about where you go
What I am thinking about urban walking and of the getting from A to B. The routes you take regularly in the area where you live or work. The one that goes to the corner shop, or the pub, or the place you buy a sandwich. Maybe it’s the way you get to a workplace or a school or where you exercise.
There’s an urge to rush through this type of walking. You’re in a hurry. You’ve got things to do. You know what it looks like so you don’t bother browsing your surrounding.
But for letter writers, diarists and those who enjoy small pleasures it’s this looking around and reconnecting that makes those journeys so worthwhile. It’s a slower thing than watching the landscape disappear from the window of a car, bus or train. It has possibilities to go and investigate further anything interesting. And it does change.
Nothing stays the same
It’s fantastic to observe the change in seasons on a route you know well. To watch spring slowly arriving or noting the suddenness that autumn arrives with. It’s seeing that the house on the corner which has been on the market for ages has sold. Or turning your head and realising that there is a pattern in bricks on the side of a building that you’ve never seen before. Or walking on the opposite side of the road and discovering a new world view. Of working out where side streets and alleyways lead to. Seeing the same people walk past, wondering about their lives, and maybe saying hello. And of celebrating the ritual of things that do stay the same. The post box on the corner, the car that never moves, the house with the green front door.
I can still recall a walk to the row of shops near where I grew up. It was just a 2-minute walk but in my mind, it went past Sleeping Beauty’s castle (a wire fence covered in climbing plants), a secret letterbox (a brick wall with a hole worn in one brick that you could maybe have fitted a tiny note into) and ‘the beach’ (a bucket, and therefore sandcastle, shaped mound of dried cement). When I last checked on ‘the beach’ it no longer remained except in my memories.
Surely when we write we are trying to capture a bit of the world around us and it’s the small things that make up an awful lot of our world and create the memories.