Wensum

September. Back to school. Which in this case means trying to pick up on the most important of my many projects, trying to timetable them all in, so each gets at least some of my time every week.

I have immediate empathy for Wilkie, our old maths teacher who was in charge of timetabling for the whole comprehensive school of about 1500 pupils, from 11-18, with ability streams in years 1 to 3 (although they disclaimed that) and options streams for O-level and A-level years. Compulsory P.E. up to fifth form. Field trips for history and geography. Teachers. Classrooms. Science labs. Gyms. Pitches. Pool. Classes. All in the days before even personal computers were a thing, let alone spreadsheets and databases – this was a time when a city council had a computer that took up an enormous room, and had a nightwatchman, just in case it should stop or make strange noises or blink its lights in the wrong sequence.

I often think about Wilkie when I’m getting my personal diary muddled. I often wonder if he’d have shifted from Maths to Computer Sciences.

Mr Wilkinson. I should give him his proper name. He was one of my favourite teachers. He was forever trying to teach me the short-cut methods, and having to exasperatingly admit that there was actually nothing flawed about my reasoning from first principles, especially when I got the right the answer. "Yes, but you don’t have to go via China to get to Darlington," he would tell me. If I knew then, what I know now, I might have responded that maybe I might want to do exactly that. Instead, I would just naïvely ask: "so is this wrong?"

Interestingly enough, it’s a question I still find myself asking of my teachers.

I generally get the same answer: "No, but…"

I ignore the ‘but’. If it’s not wrong, and it works, why do I need to find another way?

I should probably also admit that I have long since forgotten most of what the man taught me in those dull classrooms where even scrolling green-boards were the height of modernity, but mostly we were still with chalk on black.

Differentiation made sense at the time; I’ve never needed it since, more interested now in the nature of curving things, hills, rivers, fallen tree branches, than in any need to measure the space beneath them.

Vector geometry I never did understand.

Trigonometry falls into the use-it-or-lose-it category. I 'got' it for a while. I did not use it. I lost it.

I do, however, still use the basic algebraic concepts when trying to find the 'unknown' - and the plane geometry rules come in useful now and then.

Such are the rambles of no consequence that take up my head-space when I go walking.

Returning to my Home Ground after too long an absence, the next map square gifts me another stretch of river footpath that I did not know existed.

I’ve worn distance-vision glasses since my late teens. Now, with age, I also need a different sight adjustment to deal with close-work like reading. Having to swap glasses every time I want to look at a map is a real pain in the patience, so I’m slowly resorting to better prep in the form of route cards of the kind that both Dad & Clive did whenever we were going somewhere new. The map would be studied and the preferred route plotted and listed. No satnav or google ‘directions’ required - just as well, as they did not exist. What was required were the maps and the plotting.

Maybe writing it down road by road, path by path, turn by turn, landmark by landmark, helped to plant the visualisation of the map in the mind. I suspect it wasn't just compiling a list of instructions. It was something more like learning by rote and by visualisation.

It was reflected in the way they gave directoins to others.

It was never this many miles and then turn left. More a case of look out for the market cross and then take the fourth right. Or, after the hump-backed bridge, there’s a hard left.

Sometimes navigation was by small things close at hand: a postbox, a public house, a village green, a bridge.

Sometimes it was by large things in the distance: when the pepper-pots of the power station come into view way over on your right, you’re about half an hour from…whatever the next way mark might be.

We navigated by time as much as by distance.

I’m making a return to that: to actually deciding where I’m going to go and writing out the directions the way I used to do decades ago, back in the days when I was so nervous of getting totally lost that I used to leave a copy on the kitchen worktop. In the event I didn’t make it back home by my guestimated hour, someone would know where to start looking.

Nowadays (a) no-one is going to notice I’m not back for quite some long while after I planned to be, and (b) when eventually concerns are raised, they’ll no-doubt track my phone. So I’m not leaving clues anymore. The detailed planning is for my own benefit. It means I’m less likely to have to peer myopically at a wind-blown / rain-dappled piece of paper. Learning the route by rote.

Ah yes. By map, I do mean concertina, OS, fold it up, paper versions. I always feel that logging into google maps is like admitting defeat. Not saying I don’t do it. Just saying there’s a sense of shame when I do.

So. The next map square on this spiral out from my front door.

I’m still ‘just about’ within walk-out-the-door territory, so I begin by striding down my local roads, and the roads where I used to live, until I find the link to the river path. The temperature has dropped eight degrees or so from yesterday. It is spitty-spotty rain that can’t really be bothered to get going. The sun comes and goes, equally unable to make up its mind as to whether its worth the effort of burning off this cloud. We’ve had two days of a return to Summer, now we’re back into something much more like Autumn.

I should be glad.

As I reach the path, I’m met by a cat. Black and white. Presumably meaning my luck will be a little bit good, a little bit not. She’s not exactly crossing my path, more defying me to cross hers. She’s claimed the sun-spot centre for herself. I slow my pace. Curiosity getting the better of instinct she opts not to run off, and chooses to stalk towards me. Maybe I have treats. Maybe I have cuddles. Maybe she thinks I’m a friend. Actually, the look in the eyes says something more approximate to: get orf my land. The purposeful stride feels like it should be accompanied by more bulk and sharper teeth but, in the end, discretion plays the better part and she scuttles off into the undergrowth towards the fence and home, or maybe just a better vantage point to await my passing, so she can pretend to have seen me off.

Another riverside walk that is so close to the various places I have lived during my forty-odd years in the city that it staggers me that I have not stumbled onto it before now. The first stretch is not well-stepped. It is overgrown and I’m immediately bramble-scratched and nettle-stung and worrying that the whole way might be like this.

But then it opens up and there are the usual signs of how well-used it is. Rusting metal, plastic bottles, some of them still full of insipid saccharine red liquid, beer cans, dead fires, packaged dog poo in day-glo blue plastic bags. Why do people come to beautiful places and immediately set about making them less beautiful? Do they not react as I do to finding other people’s crap in the undergrowth? Do they have some kind of filter that means that they do not see it? Or is it the beauty that they don’t see…in which case why even come?

I’m not so much angry as uncomprehending. I’m also wishing I’d brought gloves and a rubbish bag. I haven’t. I walk on.

There’s a tree with a split personality. One half grows tall and straight. The other has taken a fall at some point, lain prone for a long time before gathering the strength to stand again and head skywards. I’m guessing it’s a grey willow. There’s a man-width between the two portions. Both are clothed in ivy. I can’t help gendering the pair: the exultant male, the initially supplicant and then rebellious female, the equality, eventually...

...or otherwise, being frozen in a moment of their ages-long dance, her sinuous ‘fall’, his leaning in to carry her back up.

I wonder only briefly about lightning strikes, but I’m in no mood to be prosaic about it. I will leave that to the people who can read such things better than I can. I’ll just keep making up stories.

I’m closer to the river now. A solitary swan is defiantly swimming upstream.

An unexpected bridge yields a poem. A line on each of the shallow risers of a spiral staircase:

knowledge of structure
structure of meaning
meaning of strength
strength of symmetry
symmetry of thought
thought of rhythm
rhythm of desire
desire of attraction
attraction of stability
stability of pattern
pattern of knowledge

I’m intrigued as to whether it’s a single person’s offering, or a collaborative round. I suspect the former but would love it to have been the latter. I want to imagine the Planning Committee sitting over tea and biscuits writing poetry.¹

I walk past anglers. One is set up for the night, keeping out of sight, keeping quiet, pretending not to be there. Another is talking on the phone and interrupts the conversation to say hello. I can’t help feeling neither of them are really there for the fish.

Are there fish? Amongst all this detritus. I pass more rubbish, cans and bottles and wrappers. Road barriers. Traffic cones. Things that are litter and things that are more like anger. All of them obscene. Ob caenum. Towards filth. Boding ill.

This unseen little path needs some friends, some love.

Regaining the road, and with time to spare, I loop back round into the park I’d seen from amongst the trees. I’ve been here before. I’ve written about this place before. Here too there is too much litter, too little care. The Italianate pavilion is now graffitied and unsightly. It is sad. This park could be restored to its Victorian glory, with a little bit of money and a lot of love and a team of litter pickers. Would people respect it more if it were more loved, or does that work the other way around?

It is one of the Sandys-Winch parks, a cousin to Chapelfield Gardens and Eaton Park, job-creation schemes between the wars, designed both to give necessary outdoor spaces to the working masses and work for the unemployed de-mobbed returnees from the First World War.

In this one the following war took out some of their work. The centrepiece fountain took a direct hit in an air raid, the pond had to be reshaped and the planned swimming pool was never completed. It seems that the park itself never fully recovered from the Second War. But it struggles on.

An old man sits on a bench, talking into a mobile phone.

A toddler finds more interest in the squeaking of a gate than in all the shiny new play equipment on the other side of it.

A young girl throws oats for the ducks and geese and gulls, seeming to take more pleasure from the arc of the falling food, than from the birds coming in to eat it. Her guardians – father? brother? – are talking to each other and paying no attention to either her or her feathered customers.

Where the fountain used to be, they laid a labyrinth as part of the millennial celebrations. I love that we celebrated two thousand years since the alleged birth of a prophet by creating a symbolic pilgrimage or processional route that dates back much earlier. Connections. Co-responding to something deeper. There is a tree at the centre. I am sure that was not there the last time I walked this one. I could be wrong.

Changes. Memory lapses.

I walk the labyrinth. Of course I do. I resist the temptation on this occasion to do so barefoot. The grass is worn, the path is all spiky stones, damp mud, broken glass. Otherwise I do it the way I always do these things.

I walk in, lightly holding the question: what is it I need to know at this point in my life?

I pause at the centre, touching the tree on this occasion, giving thanks for all trees and saying hello to one I do not remember meeting before, and then I walk out listening for answers.

A white feather tells me I am watched over by angels. I pick it up, and it is wet, and oily, grubby in my fingers. A reminder that I may not always recognise the angels that walk with me.

The path tells me what it always does: that there are no short cuts, and the view keeps changing, and I need to watch my footsteps, and that there will always be unexpected flowers along the way, however late the year or unpredictable the weather.

The path asks me in return, what do I want from this stage of my life? Sometimes, it says, the answers are simply more questions.

I am vaguely aware of the old man on the bench. He is watching me walk this walk.

A young man, talking on his phone, hurrying through his life, tramps roughshod over the laying out of stones and turf. I flinch. The spiritual circle feels broken.

People do that. They stomp through our lives. Break our connections.

I take a deep breath and complete the pathway, but it it feels less than it had been to begin with.

I walk home again. Familiar streets. A detour through the cemetery just to get away from the main road. I notice where the community hospital is being demolished, and part of it transformed into something else, whose purpose seems to be deliberately obscure.

I started this Home Ground series of walks and written meanderings on the back of Alastair Humphreys’ book “Local”. I’m now reading Robert MacFarlane’s "The Old Ways". Both lead me to thinking about walking and pilgrimage.

In preparation for a journalling retreat, I’ve been asked to bring a photograph of myself as a child
or a young person. One that I like. I’ve long held the view that I don’t like any of the photographs of my younger self. This requirement to trawl back through what I have of them has changed my mind.

Wandering through old albums, and loose prints, and the few that my brother thought worth keeping of Dad’s many boxfuls of slides, that I didn’t get to choose from for myself, there are many things that surprise me about my younger self: how much of a poser I was, for one thing. How much confidence I seemed to have had, before I lost it. Perhaps I was prettier than I ever knew. But there are also the clues to who I am at heart, no matter how long it took me to get here. The number of shots in which I am holding a map or a camera or a walking stick. How many of them show me in the water or on a beach or up a hill or out in the wild wet weather. How many of are blurred because they’re trying to catch me motion. Later…how thoughtful I seem to be…even as child…when I’m not posing for the camera, I seem to be deep in thought about who knows what it might have been.

It makes me wonder if all our paths are labyrinths, if maybe they all serve merely to take us back to where we began, if maybe the point of pilgrimage isn’t to get to the destination, but in doing so to better understand the one person we have travelled the whole route with: our own self.

Even if that is true, I suspect we still have to walk the path.

The labyrinth is an inward journey that leads to an outward return. It occurs to me that perhaps, then, I am doing this entirely the wrong way in spiralling out from the centre of my Home Ground. Or perhaps not. Perhaps this aspect of my labyrinthine meandering is to go outwards in order to return home.

In any event, there’s a long way to go yet.

¹ (My later enquiry of the City Council tells me that the poem is usually attributed to the American Author Caroline Myss)