It has been some time since I took a local map square and went walking. It was time to do that again. Actually, this was again in another sense…because I had already walked this square…I just hadn’t gotten around to writing about it. I know I have pictures of that previous wander, but I have not retained the impressions so I walked it again. And again struggled to find anything to say.
It’s a city centre map-square. It’s a tangle of streets that I am so familiar with that I probably don’t look at them very closely any more. Plus, it’s a tangle of streets teeming with life on a week-day. I didn’t take time to be grateful for that. It is a good sign. Quiet city streets in the middle of the day in the middle of the week are ominous, ghostly, sad.
There is enough that is spectral and sad about our city centre these days, without adding an absence of people into the mix. There are large once-were-shops that stand empty and abandoned. I would like to walk around inside them, see what has been left behind in the vacating. I want to know if there are ghosts.
I work better with ghosts, than with the bustle and busy-ness of the living. I spent a long time thinking that I’m not a people person, before realising that the truth is I am a person person. I want to connect with individuals, I don’t deal well with crowds, or even groups. I can’t think in noise and I’m not brilliant at filtering it out. I know that so many places can only continue to exist if they are busy-busy, selling, making a profit etc – but at the same time, I want them not to be, I want to step out of all of that. Perhaps, I want to be a ghost?
On the day, I walked down towards the square from home, and that walk into town held my attention more than anything I found once I got there. Journey before destination. So, with nothing much to say right now about Chapelfield Gardens (other than what I've already shared elsewhere) or the market, or the Lanes, and still never having been into the Guildhall, and resenting the fact that City Hall is no longer open to the public, except by appointment, and not yet having been into the Forum – though it is decades since that morning when we all woke up to the smell of burning books and the old library fell – so given all that, I will turn my attention back to the walk in…
…most of which is through the cemetery.
I wonder what that word conjures for you: cemetery.
Do you see a churchyard, with leaning old stones and creeping ivy? Do you see manicured lawns, and green-glass chippings held within low concrete walls?
Ours is a mix of things…some tended, some forgotten, some deliberately unkempt. It is consciously (and conscientiously) managed for wildlife as much as for a place of remembrance and respect. Trees are allowed to grow. Flowers flourish. Mowing is sensitively managed. The most recent graves are kept by families, a reverence that I know will fade as the generations pass. The older ones fall into the ground; nature takes back her own. There is romance in that.
I walk through the modern enclave without thinking very much. Into the older sections. The stones are less shiny, more stonelike, uneven, worn, lichen-sculpted…feeling their age and wanting to rest.
But it is still early Summer and it is the trees that demand my attention. I focus on leaves and looking upwards. On the colours: copper beech against lime. The fractal shapes of sky. The vibrancy of young leaves on a London Plane sapling. The haemoglobin hue of the Japanese maple. The twin-trunks of the tree I cannot identify. I have come late in life to this naming of things and have much catching up to do.
On the day though, it doesn’t matter quite so much that I don’t know their name. I can witness their dance. I can go back some other time and spend more time getting to know this neighbourhood tree, who may have something to tell me. On the day, I simply admire the structure of those conjoined trunks, and twisting branches. A teenager in tree years, I’d guess.
But really, how do you age a tree? A little way along the path, a long dead relic of the saw or the storm, has suddenly had enough of doing silent watch and is springing back into life. Spindle branches soar from the roots and from the truncated ‘crown’ and put forth leaves. It is old stock, but young growth. How do we put an age to this? And then again – why would we want to? The thing to be learned is to let old stock stand, it may still be grounded and rooted and just biding its time.
The thing to be learned is that maybe there are points in our lives when we need to do the same. Accept the blows that have fallen, re-root, take our time, and then send out our new growth.
I walk the mown paths through the cow parsley, among the swarms of flies and tiny moths on the wing. At one point I have the esoteric thought: tell me what I need to know.
And then I promptly trip over a tree root. A simple lesson. Sometimes all I need to know is to pay attention.
The near-fall slows my walking. A moving shadow catches my eye, and I stop. In a thicket, a muntjac has stopped to watch me, watching it. It moves. I do not. We both breathe. It moves another step or two. I step to the further edge of the path. I have my camera in my hand but the sound of the motor opening the lens would be enough to shoo the animal away, so I don’t bother. I simply tread gently on my way giving her a wide berth. She does not bolt, and I move on.
By the gate back to the road, I find a felled giant. Felled, not fallen. Sawn through and abandoned. I can only speculate on reasons for this. I can only hope that they let it lie where it is, food for the tiniest of creatures. I can only hope that the massive root is not dug out but is allowed the
possibility of regeneration.
I continue my walk into town. Along main roads, mindless, until I reach the river. Water levels are low. Weed surfaces. I focus on wayside planting and reflections until I meet the barge trying to take a crane to the pumping station as it runs up against too shallow a bed. All the river in its wake is churned chocolate brown.
As I leave the river behind, I have reached my destination map square – but somehow, I feel that I have already refilled the well. I put the camera away, wander the streets, window shopping for things I’ll never buy, looking at the history markers beneath my feet – where pubs used to be, old place names, – and I go back to thinking about ghosts.
But that’s a whole other story for a whole other day. For today, the journey has been enough. The destination is already irrelevant.
The title of this piece comes from one of the “ideals” in Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive series. Just a quick plug before I come back into my real world: I LOVE these books. I am entranced by them. I am capable of believing this world, these worlds.
I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. Very little of it has me wanting it to be real in the way Sanderson does. It’s not that I want all those wars and conflicts and deaths of gods and all the rest to be real: more that I want the magic to be real, and more even than that, I want some of those characters to exist. I want Shallan and Lift and Rlain and Dabbid to be real.
Ok, maybe I also want Kaladin and the whole Bridge Four thing to be true as well. I want there to be such a thing as Honor. Even if I’d rather spell it the old way: honour. Honour. Loyalty. Trust. Something to believe in, that is worth believing in.
Don’t we all?
