As my walking feet slowly rotate treadmill Earth, I start to reflect on why I am here on these windswept and, today, rainy, moors. Is this simply the point to which my life has been leading? It is true that all the previous events in my life have, somehow, conspired to culminate in this odyssey. But was it inevitable? I defer to my friend Richard for a properly informed philosophical analysis of that question and ponder instead how my experiences might have shaped me to this destiny. But I attempt even this modest account conscious of the lessons of Julian Barnes' elegaic novel The Sense of an Ending, which explores the limitations of memories and their faultlines with history.
When I learned, after his death, that my father had enjoyed walking in the Lake District, I recalled finding his old rucksack many years earlier in the loft of our family house. A thing of stiff canvas and metal buckles, its empty weight alone would have exceeded the cabin baggage allowance of a budget airline. Tramping the Lakes in nailed boots and woollen clothes while burdened by this behemoth must have required dedication much exceeding my Gortex-pampered efforts. The pincer movement of career and marriage ended his serious expeditions but he continued to be a dogged urban walker into old age. A dedicated Londoner, after retirement a favourite occupation was to take the Tube to an unknown destination and walk, more or less at random, in fresh territory. I can relate to that.
My own formative walking was the result of necessity not choice. I walked to and from bus stops and train stations as unavoidable components of the journey to various schools. Even kindergarten involved walking with my mother half a mile each way across Blackheath, which is almost as windswept as the Yorkshire moors. The notion of walking for its own sake did not arise until teenage years. My best friend had enjoyed activity holidays with an organisation called Forest School Camps and I eventually persuaded my parents to entrust me to their tender care. FSC was essentially a variant of the Scouts where religious zealotry and patriotic fervour were replaced by a hippyish, soft-left ideology. Also they admitted girls. It attracted a relentlessly middle-class clientele, including the daughter of a cabinet minister towards whom I developed fervent but unconsummated desires. FSC holidays always included several days of trekking, complete with camping gear, up to 20 miles a day and I can date my embryonic obsession with walking from the satisfaction that achievement produced. Competitive sports were never my strong suit but school visits to a Welsh outdoor pursuit centre where trekking also featured enabled me to accrue some of the status foregone through lack of sporting prowess. As a diversion from A-level studies, I took to evening wanders in the distant reaches of Blackheath and gazed into lamplit windows wondering and speculating about the lives contained within. Later this dubious activity transmogrified into the game of cosiness rating, the rules of which, like Mornington Crescent, were never entirely clear but which entertained my children as we paced the streets of Moseley. During my working life, lone evening walks helped me to organise my thoughts and devise increasingly fiendish schemes to inflict on my clients.
Nowadays walking offers the perfect combination of exercise and, crucially, mental relaxation. While I can't claim to achieve total mindfulness through walking, it's probably as close as I can manage, and is certainly more effective than yoga. So while many people regard leisure walking as a means to achieve another object - time with friends, opportunities for photography, uplifting scenery - for me the primary attraction is simply the rhythm of walking. But wait, if this is true, why not walk in the comfort and security of the gym? No need for rain gear, hot showers on hand and home for dinner. Perhaps there lurks within even the least competitive of us a desire to prove ourselves. For me to be able to justify the label "walker" I need to namedrop routes I have conquered, and none is more iconic than the Pennine Way. So for the moment that serves as the explanation for haunting the moors. But Barnes' protagonist goes further and speculates on the challenge of imagining how he will perceive the present from the vantage point of some future date. That requires mental agility which is beyond me, so discovering how I view today and its precursors from the perspective of the end of the PW will need to wait until I reach Kirk Yetholm.
© David Thompson 2012
When I learned, after his death, that my father had enjoyed walking in the Lake District, I recalled finding his old rucksack many years earlier in the loft of our family house. A thing of stiff canvas and metal buckles, its empty weight alone would have exceeded the cabin baggage allowance of a budget airline. Tramping the Lakes in nailed boots and woollen clothes while burdened by this behemoth must have required dedication much exceeding my Gortex-pampered efforts. The pincer movement of career and marriage ended his serious expeditions but he continued to be a dogged urban walker into old age. A dedicated Londoner, after retirement a favourite occupation was to take the Tube to an unknown destination and walk, more or less at random, in fresh territory. I can relate to that.
My own formative walking was the result of necessity not choice. I walked to and from bus stops and train stations as unavoidable components of the journey to various schools. Even kindergarten involved walking with my mother half a mile each way across Blackheath, which is almost as windswept as the Yorkshire moors. The notion of walking for its own sake did not arise until teenage years. My best friend had enjoyed activity holidays with an organisation called Forest School Camps and I eventually persuaded my parents to entrust me to their tender care. FSC was essentially a variant of the Scouts where religious zealotry and patriotic fervour were replaced by a hippyish, soft-left ideology. Also they admitted girls. It attracted a relentlessly middle-class clientele, including the daughter of a cabinet minister towards whom I developed fervent but unconsummated desires. FSC holidays always included several days of trekking, complete with camping gear, up to 20 miles a day and I can date my embryonic obsession with walking from the satisfaction that achievement produced. Competitive sports were never my strong suit but school visits to a Welsh outdoor pursuit centre where trekking also featured enabled me to accrue some of the status foregone through lack of sporting prowess. As a diversion from A-level studies, I took to evening wanders in the distant reaches of Blackheath and gazed into lamplit windows wondering and speculating about the lives contained within. Later this dubious activity transmogrified into the game of cosiness rating, the rules of which, like Mornington Crescent, were never entirely clear but which entertained my children as we paced the streets of Moseley. During my working life, lone evening walks helped me to organise my thoughts and devise increasingly fiendish schemes to inflict on my clients.
Nowadays walking offers the perfect combination of exercise and, crucially, mental relaxation. While I can't claim to achieve total mindfulness through walking, it's probably as close as I can manage, and is certainly more effective than yoga. So while many people regard leisure walking as a means to achieve another object - time with friends, opportunities for photography, uplifting scenery - for me the primary attraction is simply the rhythm of walking. But wait, if this is true, why not walk in the comfort and security of the gym? No need for rain gear, hot showers on hand and home for dinner. Perhaps there lurks within even the least competitive of us a desire to prove ourselves. For me to be able to justify the label "walker" I need to namedrop routes I have conquered, and none is more iconic than the Pennine Way. So for the moment that serves as the explanation for haunting the moors. But Barnes' protagonist goes further and speculates on the challenge of imagining how he will perceive the present from the vantage point of some future date. That requires mental agility which is beyond me, so discovering how I view today and its precursors from the perspective of the end of the PW will need to wait until I reach Kirk Yetholm.
© David Thompson 2012
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