I was recently asked to review Alastair Humphreys’ latest book “Local”. Not only was it a joy to read, but it also inspired me to respond to his challenge that we emulate his adventure on his local patch, find our own local map and get exploring.
Given that I’d already set my focus parameters for the year, it did feel a bit early to be adding yet one more thing into the mix, but I have managed to convince myself that I’m not doing anything of the kind. Among my already stated intentions was “get physical” – doing lots of walking simply feeds into that. One of my writing commitments was to continue getting the blog out on a weekly basis, and this local adventuring simply brings a bit more focus to this. And this might be the project that brings the idea of buying an e-bike back into the realms of ‘worth doing’. I’d given up that idea when they banned them from trains…but now…hmmm…it’s back on the ‘maybe’ list.
For those who don’t yet know the book, the premise is to take a 1:25,000 OS map (or whatever your local equivalent is), ideally one centred near-enough on where you live. If you’re in the UK the Ordnance Survey will do one especially for you! How cool is that? And then you explore within the confines of that map, one square at a time. Humphreys’ experience was that “confines” becomes an increasingly inappropriate word.
When we can’t go ‘wider’, we can go deeper.
In the UK, a standard 1:25,000 map is divided into 400 squares, each measuring (on the ground) 1km x 1km. Humphreys decided to give his project a year and take squares in a random order, at roughly one a week. I have decided to start in the middle (i.e. right at home) and spiral outwards, and to set no end-date.
I would love to give you a ‘wise words’ explanation for that. The truth is more mundane. I’m starting in the depths of winter. It makes more sense to start closer to home. I’m conscious of how difficult it will be to reach some of the more remote (?!) points on the map, I need time to figure out how I’m going to do that.
Also: why shouldn’t an adventure – an unplanned adventure that by its very nature is going to take
years (400 squares at roughly one a week is about seven and a half years) – why shouldn’t such an enterprise start by just walking out your own front door?
Why should an adventure require us to travel to the other side of the planet before we begin? That’s part of what Humphreys has been saying for a while, with his concept of the micro-adventure.
It comes down to how we each choose to define the word adventure. For me, it is anything which takes me into unpredictability. Learning something new, going somewhere new, anything where I have to surrender a degree of control and trust the process. I'm not great at trusting. Writing is an adventure. Walking is an adventure, even if it is an English country lane, rather than a Himalayan trek. We get to choose our perspective.
I remember something Mam used to say about our annual summer holidays when I was a child: the holiday starts the moment we close the front door. So, likewise this new endeavour spirals out from my front door.
Humphreys subtitled his book “a search for nearby nature and wildness”. I have no such subtitle because I’m not searching for anything in particular. Some of this patch I know very well, tracts of it I have almost certainly never set foot upon, including some of those closest to me. Some of it I know from personal experience, some from reading about it.
I have lived here (and by “here” I mean on this one map, rather than in this one house) for over 40 years, virtually all of my adult life, bar one or two extended trips elsewhere.
I’ve spent some of that time wandering about different bits of the map. I know what exists upon some of it and have no idea about other bits. And much has changed on some of the parts I used to know – some of the places I used to live. Going back to see it now will be part of the adventure.
I refuse state what I am looking for, because I know that would prejudice what I pay attention to, and therefore what I find.
I believe in the old saying seek and thou shalt find. To me that doesn’t just mean that we will find what we go looking for (for good or ill), but also that we will miss everything else.
To seek the specific is to narrow the focus. I want to be open to whatever there is on any particular day, in the full knowledge that another day would have had me looking at other things.
Likewise, I have no plan as to how I will write about what I find. I can tell you that there will be no routes. There may be descriptions. More likely there will be just my musings, because ‘Reflections from an ordinary life” is still what this site is all about. I am still ordinary. I am still just sharing what surfaces week-in, week-out.
So, on a cold dry January Saturday, I set out to walk around my own neighbourhood. I walk for about three hours or so. Later when I sit down to write about it, I look at that little square of map again and realise that there is a whole quarter of it that I did not touch.
My instinctive reaction is to want to head out again tomorrow and make good the shortfall. I have to remind myself this is an exploration, not a survey. I do not need to walk every street, cover every inch of ground. I told myself the walking will evolve its own pattern; I need to step aside and
let that happen.
The first thing I note before even leaving my doorstep is that the beech tree across the road has kept its leaves and I wonder why. I guess it is simply because it could. The weather has been wet and warm for so long that maybe the tree is not as stressed as it ought to be at this time of year,
so the imperative to let go of the leaves has not been as strong. But I also wonder what that means for the new year’s growth. Will it be hampered?
In the meantime, one of the local jays takes refuge in the shadows of its branches.
Birds: the ones I notice today: that jay, a crow hopping about on the vision splay as I round the corner, blue tits are very active hereabouts right now, searching out their nest sites, and the mates to occupy them with. Robins are singing their hearts out.
Plants: the chaos that nature is in right now shows itself in the way flowers and berries are competing with each other. There are fallen leaves, and unfallen ones. I need to learn more about what I am looking at. I started to do this during lockdown, and then somehow let it slip.
As I walk out today, I remember the lockdown days – when all of these roads were silent.
Now there is a different kind of silence about them. The main roads are busy with traffic, but in suburbia nothing is moving. All of the cars are sitting silent on driveways that might once have been gardens, or grass verges, and all of the people are hidden behind veiled windows. It seems that there is now the requirement to have a dog if you need an excuse to walk the streets. I don’t. Unless we count my spirit wolf, but that’s a story for another day.
I walk for hours around my local streets and only two people acknowledge my existence. And that isn’t because many others ignored me…it’s because I saw so few who were not encased in their motor vehicles.
In the suburbs if you read the street patterns and the house types you can see the progression of development. There’s nothing really old around here. Nothing Victorian or older – except in the cemetery, which is where I end up. And maybe in the routes of some of the roads, whose nature has no doubt changed beyond recognition since then.
The early construction dates from between the wars until the1950s / early 60s. The dream years of council house building, decent dwellings for ordinary people, and bigger private ones for those with the money. Then there is the much more recent build of the 1990s and early 2000’s – newbuild and regeneration build. I recognise this. I was involved in some of it.
As I walk past redevelopments that I contract-administered, I am pleased that those wide streets hold largely to their former incarnation. There is breathing space here, open space, trees. The front gardens that would once have been proud lawns and showy flower beds are now largely laid to shingle and paved driveways, but that means the grass verges remain and the houses have space enough between them, enough to see more than a slither of sky, enough to watch cloud patters and bird flights. There’s the occasional patch of green, like a miniature village green, where - I suspect - no-one actually meets these days.
The even more recent construction comes from the other end of the spectrum. Rather than giving people space, it’s all about maximising the space. The by-word has become “density” – how many properties can we cram onto this tiny bit of land. I recognise a full circle. The whole ethos during the 1930s and just after the Second World War, was about ‘breathing space’. It was slum clearance and trying to give people a bit more privacy, and a bit more connection to actual land, rather than tenement hallways and claustrophobic back alleys. It started going awry in the late sixties into the seventies with the failed experiments in high-rise living, and a half-hearted return was made to ‘building communities’ – but it too failed and although the standard is well above slum, I can’t help but see the slum-potential in these shining new properties, all hemmed in close, and no private 'land' to speak of.
I have been aware of the relatively new development behind my home street, but had never had cause to venture into it. It is what we would have called an in-fill site. It was part of the field that my street is named for. No longer visible from my kitchen window… the window where Joyce once stood and remarked on the runny barrits bunning arout. The only rabbits down that drive now are plastic toys abandoned next to front doors, doors that have only two strides of defensible space before they hit road. Paved, rather than tarmacked, but intended to be driven over. There is no distinguishable sidewalk.
I walk the circuit and amble up a Close (a cul-de-sac marked with a ‘no through road’ sign,
because no-one teaches their children the French-derived expressions anymore).
I’m pleased to find that there are link-ways onto what remains of the field that somehow I never discovered during lockdown.
I say somehow. I know how. I spent those months heading to the river, not walking around the houses. Now my favourite river route has been shut down. That’s another story for another day. Meanwhile, what’s left of this field, it tempts me around its edges until I realise I’m straying off-grid. I wonder how strict I should be with myself on that score. We’ll see.
For today, I turn back towards one of those back-road, half-terrace, links that are survivors of pre-existing road systems and today are more use to cyclists and walkers than road users.
I’m pleased to walk beneath an avenue of trees surely older than the path between them, and less so when I see the sign forbidding the climbing of them. When we have an actual symbol that means (without words) Do Not Climb Trees, I worry. I worry that we are telling our children – or rather YOUR children, I don’t have any – Do not take risks, do not reach for the heights, do not test yourself. We are telling them Be afraid – you might fall and it will hurt – and we do not want to be responsible for you. What kind of future will it be, where everyone is afraid to reach, to climb, to fall? And no-one is willing to accept the result of misadventure?
I remember the trees we climbed fifty years ago. Not just the abstract of climbing trees, the actual trees. I could still take you to them. One in particular, which is no doubt much smaller than I remember it, or maybe it thrived and is now much larger. I do not know what kind of tree it was (is?). I do remember the technique required to get up into the first level branches. The jump required to grasp with hands, and the swing of the body to bring the feet up, to hook and hoist. And, Oh! I remember the thrill of the first time I managed it. I hope it is still there. If it is, I could take you to it, and tell you of the games we played around it.
The children allowed to play on this bald expanse of grass will not have that kind of memory.
Back in the moment, I walk on and I’m into familiar territory. Roads that I walk to the shops. To collect parcels that UPS can’t be bothered to try more than once to deliver. To the library.
The library. I pass my local branch library…and want to sing its praises. Of all the many things I am grateful for in my life, “the Library” must rank high. It is another expression that opens a doorway into my childhood. The children’s section with cushioned benches and wide windows. The adults section that was floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The magazine racks where I first discovered Punch. Having Dad check out books I wanted to read on my Mam’s tickets, because I wasn’t old enough to check them out on my own.
When I moved into this house, my library membership had lapsed. Rejoining was one of my first ‘staking my claim to the neighbourhood’ acts. I’m not an engaged citizen, far from it, but I want that library, proudly built in 1929, to stay open and lending books. There are fewer books than there might have been, and yes there are computer desks and videos and music to hire and tots groups and craft groups. But there are still books, and with the merging of technology I can, for 60p, reserve any book that the County Library holds anywhere and have it delivered for me to pick up
there. I love that little branch library. I borrow from it, not because I need to, but because it needs me to. If you have a local library – go use it. Borrow books regularly and return them promptly. If you love them, you can still go out and buy your own copy – or one for someone else. In the meantime, by borrowing you are keeping alive a critical part of the fabric of our society – the right to learning, the right to reading. We need to make it easy for our children –YOUR children – to access books.
Because who knows where that will take them? And what they might remember 50 years from now. But I believe it will be somewhere they could not have otherwise imagined, and it will be something important.
I walk down a wide avenue, lined with pollarded trees and posh houses. I admire stained glass windows and note, that unlike the council estates, everyone here has taken down their decorations. No leftover mock spider web from Halloween still draped in high branches, or Christmas lights waiting for someone to get a ladder out again. There are no electronics littering driveways. I know that in a few weeks there will be drifts of crocuses under these trees, rather than squashed cans and discarded face masks and windblown sweet papers.
I find another in-fill estate that turns out to be bigger than I expected...but much the same. No-one about. Tidy. Clean. Sanitised. I do find a tiny patch of grass where someone has set up small football goals, and someone else has hung a pair of abandoned boots. A black and white cat watches me from a window sill. I do not see any people.
Eventually I find myself in the cemetery. This is a place I walked a lot during lockdown, and continue to do so. I love the peace of it. I have a morbid fascination with funerary art – the carvings and statues. It’s also an old place, allowed in sections to run wild. It’s a brilliant space for butterflies in summer and blackberries in autumn. There are deer and foxes that live here, or at least regularly pass through. The predominant wildlife today is squirrel. They are scampering everywhere. I know what the wildlife purists would say about these greys being invaders that have driven out the reds, but I think it’s not as simple as that, and they’re welcome on my patch regardless. I love their exuberance.
I love the way they will pause and size you up before deciding whether to pose for the camera or hell-for-leather-it up the nearest birch. There were weeks during 2020 when I spoke to more squirrels than I did people.
As always, I wander around aimlessly in what is one of my favourite local spaces. Today I find myself thinking about the individual people and wondering about their actual lives. So little information is given. Often only names and dates, and people described in their relation to someone else: brother, sister, beloved wife, husband, mother, father, grandmother…as if they had no personal identity, no self, other than what they were to someone else.
I pause by the Edwards’ grave, husband and wife, and wonder how they feel about the mighty birch that has arisen from the foot of their resting place. I wonder how it would be to wake from their ‘sleeping’ and see this beautiful tree towering above them. Perhaps they welcome the summer shade of it, and don’t know that one good storm could up-root it and turn them out of their bed.
The Mainwarings next door only have a juvenile holly bush to contend with.
I wonder about the Pooleys. Robert died in 1924 at the age of 80, his wife only two months later at the age of 93. I wonder about their age difference and how long they might have been married, and whether the neighbours gossiped. I think of her love that might have kept her alive that long, but no more than two months after he had gone.
By contrast, Florence Galey lived for forty years after her Samuel passed away.
There are hidden stories, only hinted at. What about those stones where space was left for the second inscription and the “reunited” tagline, which never happened? Did the surviving partner have another life, a later happiness that meant a different ritual and resting place? Or did they move so far away, or become so isolated, that no-one knew to bring them home?
As I often do, I spent some time among the soldiers and wonder how they came to rest here: the Australians and Canadians, a single New Zealander. I wonder what the Australian Light Railway Company had to do with the war effort in Norfolk, England. I like how the nationalities are grouped together, that in some way they might still be among folk who understood them.
As a solitary magpie shouts from the top of the victory sword I pick up the wreath of plastic poppies that has been blown (or fox-carried) across the ground and take it back to the central memorial. And wish I had matches to light the candles that have no doubt remained there since the middle
of November.
As I wend my way back out of the burial ground, back towards home, I’m still thinking about all the lost stories, leaving only the slenderest of hints. Hints in pictures and engravings on the newer stones: a horse, a motorcycle, rackets and bats (tennis, badminton, table tennis), a Manchester
United FC coat of arms, religious symbols, prosaic ones, flowers, candles, a ship, a star. There are stones giving places of birth, underlining a heritage that mattered: Egypty, Leixlip Co. Kildare, Eire. I find a stone in loving memory of Anastasia that tells us nothing more about her than her name. But a name is enough to say: I was here. I existed. Someone cared. I think of the people I have not raised stones for, and how that doesn't mean I cared any the less. Only that there will be a time, when no-one will know that.
And finally I stray into a corner I have somehow missed before, where all the graves are oriented to the East, and have messages in scripts (more than one to my eye) that I could not begin to decipher. Where there are Roman alphabet inscriptions in addition, there are Arabic-sounding names, and Indian-sounding ones, and others that are plainly as English as my own. I wonder about the precise terminology that describes someone as “A slave to Allah” – perhaps that has a gentler meaning in the culture it comes from that it does to my eyes and ears.
As I walk back, bluetits almost mob me, a bunch of them flying low, and they lead me to the first few snowdrops on this patch. Signs of hope, of a spring to come.
You can read what I made of the book here: Local byAlastair Humphreys - TheBookbag.co.uk book review
