Looking out of the country at the burgeoning country I can't help but slip out of London-centric mindset for a second as it seems no peace was ever had that was not felt here first. I was leaving the city different to how I once came into it at the start of things. At the start of a great wanderlust when in reverse the trees gave way to the gloomy grey towers that were the set of those first timid steps. They must have embossed themselves in my mind with their glinting, endless windows as I could not help but return to them years later when the lust was satisfied. A restless mind ever reaches though for what it doesn't have and ensconced in the metropolis the towers oppress me. I seek unbroken stillness, green and leafy silence, an unfettered wind to lift the soul. But the train hadn't even crossed London's great moat yet. A strange building rises like a wave from beneath the trees, a brutalist redo in brick of a Jodhpur palace. The train burrows through a cutting in the earth and when we leave it countryside unfolds on either side sending hills rolling into the distance, dense trees mark the horizon. The country! Or the commuter land version of it, my adventure and their daily grind. Just 30 minutes from the Bladerunner-esque hellscape of zone 3. The financial efficacy of moving out of London is indisputable but commuting back in leaves you in half of one world and half of another. I recall those trains hauling escapees from the suburbs as they passed through Brixton. The doors slid open at the station to reveal a contorted mass of limbs in conditions long banned in football stadiums, a terrine of humanity, a movable Guernica. All off to grease the wheels of the country's great engine of commerce. When I leave will it be for good? If I leave where would I go? London may be best as an experience with a start and an end, much as its easier to not pine for the object of your affection if you don't live next door.
The campsite was unsurprisingly quiet for late october and I had my pick of soggy ground to pitch my tent on. Few others wanted to spend a night under nylon so my only company were caravans and campervans. My nearest neighbours were huddled inside their concertina-roof camper playing a steamy game of cards. With my accommodation thrown up I took a dinner of cheese, bread and pate and rapidly chilling wine. A spitfire spluttered slowly through the sky above me as light turned to dark with far greater speed. The world around me folded down into unavoidable solitude. The busy road nearby rumbled on through the night denying me the quiet where I hoped to think.
The campsite had an onsite coffee shop, rather glamp-ish but after a sleepless night mine was a double. I stood in awkward silence as he ground and tamped and brewed. Without the joys of spring or autumn or sleep I was without the power of small talk. Fucking camping. I returned to pack the tent and to my find my neighbours still in the same place huddled inside their campervan like they were trying to recreate that thing David Blaine did in a perspex box, but with a much smaller audience. My feet hit the trail proper and spider's silk drifted through the morning air as pheasants skittered away through the undergrowth. The bass notes of a shotgun orchestra opened up nearby which endorsed the bird's wariness. As I made my way through Kent to East Sussex and back into Kent (in the space of about 10 minutes) white teepees began to poke up through the trees. I'd never seen structures like them. Like assailed windmills but they stood alone or intersected houses to no clear purpose. And so soon into this walk I had again found the joy of the thing. Landscapes, locales, life changes slowly about you at the most basic pace of life. The figurative ahead becomes the literal beside you and again the figurative behind. When you walk like this the planet rotates purely by the power of your feet. The trees were burnishing themselves for winter. The vineyards I walked through were wilted back to their precious stumps, dead to the world until they explode back to life in the summer's heat. Well they do in Australia anyway. Great oaks bowed courteously to me as my trail crested the gentle undulation of the fields. Gentle reminders to mind my speed greeted me as I entered pretty half-timbered villages and so I did. If you were wondering where to move in Kent, well I've wandered and the correct answer is Benenden. A pub in one of the villages provided a rest pint and the opportunity to check how the distance to the next campsite. Three more hours. Fuck walking. There aren't any campsites on this section of the High Weald Trail so I'd planned a custom route with the aid of google maps and the thin white lines on it that are roads. To get from the trail to the campsite I had to walk along an unreasonably busy road unfurnished with pavement or street lights, for an hour, in the dark that had descended with still surprising speed. Spiky bushes grew vigorously on the verges but I was forced into intimacy with them as full beam headlights from the front or rear signalled imminent danger. Fuck planning. I caught the campsite owner as he was closing up the office and, signed in, I stumbled into the pitch black field and pitched again. A white 4x4 appeared through the darkness and deposited the primordial materials of civilisation. With kindling and logs (and fire lighters and a fire pit and a lighter, shh) I created fire to warm my weary feet and cook (heat) my dinner. There was a family next door to me and they came over to offer the last bits of their kindling as they were not going to use it and not because my fire was inexplicably dying. And then the campsite all around was quiet and the crackle of my renewed fire was all that broke the silence. Until a sound in the trees. Deep and unearthly every now and again there was a "harrrrrfffffff". And then another. And another until there is a guttural panting coming from the copse of trees 30 meters to my left, wisps of smoke crept from the undergrowth as some archaic beast crept along just beyond the limits of my recognition. With a brief "toot" it pulled into the station that I hadn't even noticed was next to the campsite. I could now make out the tungsten glow cast by the table lamps through a window into another time. There were no people but I imagined that they were there on the endless train journey I sometimes dream about. As the steam train pulled away fireworks popped in the distance. An early bonfire night perhaps or a significant birthday or just for the sheer delight of them.
A better sleep, the road I didn't escape for 20 miles the previous day was a little further away. Today is when my training regime is fully appreciated. Takeaway Sundays and no booze between Monday andFriday Tuesday had powered me through day 1 but my hidden muscles now roared at their awakening. I dawdled on deserted railway tracks and mused on my perception of life. I am distorted by media it occured to me. I once met a girl in São Paulo that didn't watch the TV. I wondered how before I wondered why. But I might understand now because I think I am distorted by it. I imagine my life is set to a soundtrack, that is is marked by comically disastrous events and sweetly serendipitous ones. It feels as though I see it from the third person, a voyeur, because I have seen so much from that perspective. But it makes me shun responsibility (that and a very durable parental safety net) and, despite my godlessness and my scorn for fate, have an absolute, passionate and unquestioning belief that somebody or something will look after me, that this story only has a happy ending. Did a turgid solution of middle class comfort, perverted, inverted inferiority, a not inconsiderable amount of upward failure produce this world view? An ego perched precariously atop high defensive walls surveys and sadly sneers. A wall that isn't easily climbed. I don't know how to break out of the squares of this storyboard. Maybe I need a war. Some great and noble struggle against an ephemeral evil. The mortal danger would pare me back to essential being with no time for frippery or pretence. The closer to death you are the closer you feel to life. There's the start of another clichéd script. Or having children perhaps. The subsuming of your needs and self-obsessions into an avatar, a version of you for the future. I'll start looking into current wars I think.
They looked like they would breach my defences any second. I was barricaded in but only flimsy, makeshift walls stood between me and the attackers. I could hear the creaking behind as they tested my shelter, in front many sets of eyes spied me between the narrow gap I'd squeezed through. All I had to defend myself with was a stick that I waved with no menace and to no reaction. I alternated between shouting at those who besieged me and talking to myself "plans, solutions, calm", "Google". I waited for them to crush me, they waited for....what? How long would this standoff last for? It was killing my average speed on Strava. Fuck cows. Stupid, benign, cowardly cows. Or so they should be. I had entered their field, seen my path cut right through their grazing spot and given them a more than respectable berth of at least 30 metres. They see me and turn and start to walk, the walk becomes a canter, the canter a charge? I wasn't going to wait to find out their intentions. Three wooden pallettes had been propped together to form a triangle in the middle of the field and it was into here that I had wedged myself as the herd surrounded it. YouTube was surprisingly uninstructive on what to do in my situation. The farmhouse was a distance away up a gentle hill. Google maps could probably give me the phone number but I decided that being rescued from this situation would be marginally worse than not being rescued. They'd get bored and piss off soon. No they wouldn't. One of the cows decided to pass the time by mounting another but as they were both female maybe the aforementioned boredom was actually setting in. Or they could have been LGBT cows 'cause that's fine too. I started an amiable dialog with the group and, clearly stating my intentions, edged slowly out of my refuge. The foremost cows gave me ground inch by inch until I had to turn my back on them and aim for the trail. Another few tonnes of stoic meat again blocked my path to salvation but I continued to de-escalate with soothing words. They parted like a sea that is black and white and parts very slowly. If they were red and I was Moses I think the Egyptians would have caught me. The herd regrouped and began to follow me again. A sudden charge and I was fodder for their hooves except that, as I now knew, cows don't charge. Except when they do, thanks again Google. Another 20 metres and the pursuit was over. It is hard not to feel ridiculous after an incident like that. Wolves, bears, lions, all were purged from the English countryside some time ago owing to their dangerous intentions. We've still got a poisonous snake but it's pretty rubbish and the next biggest threat after that is probably pollen. But watching Planet Earth 1 & 2 in stunning high definition didn't help, I'm still not from the 'country'.
Jean-jacques Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher, said this -
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor – you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.'”
Yet again someone expresses my beliefs in a more poetic yet piercingly succinct way and beats me to it by a mere 300 years. I love walking because as step follows step I sink deeper into the landscape. The earth absorbs the energy from my legs and the wind carries away my heavy breaths. The land sinks and I descend, rolls upwards and I climb and in every direction is my life. I've been in this field for 5 minutes and on this planet for 37 years and we as a species for 500,000 years. The earth is 4,500,000,000 years old, how can a speck of time like any of us claim to own a single bit of it? I truly believe the current land ownership can and will change. Unfortunately I think cataclysmic environmental collapse will be the cause. They're not making anymore land (except in the Netherlands, China, Dubai etc) as the saying goes, I hope there's enough to hold all the graves.
Afternoon inclined towards evening and the land inclined towards the sea as I descended low hills and Rye lay in the distance. Reaching the coast gave the whole endeavour an epic sort of feel, I could walk no further even if I wanted to. Rye is an agreeable coastal town and has the number of tourists those two aspects generally attract. I found a spot in a beer garden of one of the most ricketty looking pubs I passed. The Olde Bell is 650 years old and wears its age with dishevelled dignity. An 80 year old wisteria gave shade to its terrace even as autumn chased away its foliage. A stony face screamed silent murder at me from the brick wall. The amusingly named Choof Choof gang used the pub for smuggling in the 1730s via a tunnel behind a revolving cupboard that leads to another pub nearby called the Mermaid which is even older at 867. This country can be hard to love, especially in these times but I do love its history. I hope not in a toxic fairytale way of kings and castles and ships and commerce. Plucky underdog spirit to defeat evil empires by drawing on the resources of our not-the-most-evil empire. We are not exceptional just a group of people sat on top of a gigantic pile of history, the moments of great enlightenment and endeavour mixed in with dark avaricious wrong. It is all so diligently separated and recycled into snake oil these days. We make ourselves exceptional only when we so myopically assert our differences to 'foreign' peoples. Those ensnaring Europeans whose strange and distant land you can see on a clear day from Rye. Global warming will take care of that I suppose, leaving our withered union of one defiantly apart. It angers me this thing we've done, I still cannot, will not accept it. I cling to a hope as distant as Turkey that our path can change via some democratic concoction that doesn't leave the country on fire. An unrealistic hope as the substance of either standpoint dissolves into a simple factional faith. Red vs blue, left vs right, 1 vs 0, there is nothing else. It makes me want to walk away and leave this pestilent country to eat its own offspring. But that lingering nostalgic love holds me. We might not be so different, me and them.
The campsite was unsurprisingly quiet for late october and I had my pick of soggy ground to pitch my tent on. Few others wanted to spend a night under nylon so my only company were caravans and campervans. My nearest neighbours were huddled inside their concertina-roof camper playing a steamy game of cards. With my accommodation thrown up I took a dinner of cheese, bread and pate and rapidly chilling wine. A spitfire spluttered slowly through the sky above me as light turned to dark with far greater speed. The world around me folded down into unavoidable solitude. The busy road nearby rumbled on through the night denying me the quiet where I hoped to think.
The campsite had an onsite coffee shop, rather glamp-ish but after a sleepless night mine was a double. I stood in awkward silence as he ground and tamped and brewed. Without the joys of spring or autumn or sleep I was without the power of small talk. Fucking camping. I returned to pack the tent and to my find my neighbours still in the same place huddled inside their campervan like they were trying to recreate that thing David Blaine did in a perspex box, but with a much smaller audience. My feet hit the trail proper and spider's silk drifted through the morning air as pheasants skittered away through the undergrowth. The bass notes of a shotgun orchestra opened up nearby which endorsed the bird's wariness. As I made my way through Kent to East Sussex and back into Kent (in the space of about 10 minutes) white teepees began to poke up through the trees. I'd never seen structures like them. Like assailed windmills but they stood alone or intersected houses to no clear purpose. And so soon into this walk I had again found the joy of the thing. Landscapes, locales, life changes slowly about you at the most basic pace of life. The figurative ahead becomes the literal beside you and again the figurative behind. When you walk like this the planet rotates purely by the power of your feet. The trees were burnishing themselves for winter. The vineyards I walked through were wilted back to their precious stumps, dead to the world until they explode back to life in the summer's heat. Well they do in Australia anyway. Great oaks bowed courteously to me as my trail crested the gentle undulation of the fields. Gentle reminders to mind my speed greeted me as I entered pretty half-timbered villages and so I did. If you were wondering where to move in Kent, well I've wandered and the correct answer is Benenden. A pub in one of the villages provided a rest pint and the opportunity to check how the distance to the next campsite. Three more hours. Fuck walking. There aren't any campsites on this section of the High Weald Trail so I'd planned a custom route with the aid of google maps and the thin white lines on it that are roads. To get from the trail to the campsite I had to walk along an unreasonably busy road unfurnished with pavement or street lights, for an hour, in the dark that had descended with still surprising speed. Spiky bushes grew vigorously on the verges but I was forced into intimacy with them as full beam headlights from the front or rear signalled imminent danger. Fuck planning. I caught the campsite owner as he was closing up the office and, signed in, I stumbled into the pitch black field and pitched again. A white 4x4 appeared through the darkness and deposited the primordial materials of civilisation. With kindling and logs (and fire lighters and a fire pit and a lighter, shh) I created fire to warm my weary feet and cook (heat) my dinner. There was a family next door to me and they came over to offer the last bits of their kindling as they were not going to use it and not because my fire was inexplicably dying. And then the campsite all around was quiet and the crackle of my renewed fire was all that broke the silence. Until a sound in the trees. Deep and unearthly every now and again there was a "harrrrrfffffff". And then another. And another until there is a guttural panting coming from the copse of trees 30 meters to my left, wisps of smoke crept from the undergrowth as some archaic beast crept along just beyond the limits of my recognition. With a brief "toot" it pulled into the station that I hadn't even noticed was next to the campsite. I could now make out the tungsten glow cast by the table lamps through a window into another time. There were no people but I imagined that they were there on the endless train journey I sometimes dream about. As the steam train pulled away fireworks popped in the distance. An early bonfire night perhaps or a significant birthday or just for the sheer delight of them.
A better sleep, the road I didn't escape for 20 miles the previous day was a little further away. Today is when my training regime is fully appreciated. Takeaway Sundays and no booze between Monday and
They looked like they would breach my defences any second. I was barricaded in but only flimsy, makeshift walls stood between me and the attackers. I could hear the creaking behind as they tested my shelter, in front many sets of eyes spied me between the narrow gap I'd squeezed through. All I had to defend myself with was a stick that I waved with no menace and to no reaction. I alternated between shouting at those who besieged me and talking to myself "plans, solutions, calm", "Google". I waited for them to crush me, they waited for....what? How long would this standoff last for? It was killing my average speed on Strava. Fuck cows. Stupid, benign, cowardly cows. Or so they should be. I had entered their field, seen my path cut right through their grazing spot and given them a more than respectable berth of at least 30 metres. They see me and turn and start to walk, the walk becomes a canter, the canter a charge? I wasn't going to wait to find out their intentions. Three wooden pallettes had been propped together to form a triangle in the middle of the field and it was into here that I had wedged myself as the herd surrounded it. YouTube was surprisingly uninstructive on what to do in my situation. The farmhouse was a distance away up a gentle hill. Google maps could probably give me the phone number but I decided that being rescued from this situation would be marginally worse than not being rescued. They'd get bored and piss off soon. No they wouldn't. One of the cows decided to pass the time by mounting another but as they were both female maybe the aforementioned boredom was actually setting in. Or they could have been LGBT cows 'cause that's fine too. I started an amiable dialog with the group and, clearly stating my intentions, edged slowly out of my refuge. The foremost cows gave me ground inch by inch until I had to turn my back on them and aim for the trail. Another few tonnes of stoic meat again blocked my path to salvation but I continued to de-escalate with soothing words. They parted like a sea that is black and white and parts very slowly. If they were red and I was Moses I think the Egyptians would have caught me. The herd regrouped and began to follow me again. A sudden charge and I was fodder for their hooves except that, as I now knew, cows don't charge. Except when they do, thanks again Google. Another 20 metres and the pursuit was over. It is hard not to feel ridiculous after an incident like that. Wolves, bears, lions, all were purged from the English countryside some time ago owing to their dangerous intentions. We've still got a poisonous snake but it's pretty rubbish and the next biggest threat after that is probably pollen. But watching Planet Earth 1 & 2 in stunning high definition didn't help, I'm still not from the 'country'.
Jean-jacques Rousseau, a Swiss philosopher, said this -
“The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine’, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: ‘Beware of listening to this impostor – you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.'”
Yet again someone expresses my beliefs in a more poetic yet piercingly succinct way and beats me to it by a mere 300 years. I love walking because as step follows step I sink deeper into the landscape. The earth absorbs the energy from my legs and the wind carries away my heavy breaths. The land sinks and I descend, rolls upwards and I climb and in every direction is my life. I've been in this field for 5 minutes and on this planet for 37 years and we as a species for 500,000 years. The earth is 4,500,000,000 years old, how can a speck of time like any of us claim to own a single bit of it? I truly believe the current land ownership can and will change. Unfortunately I think cataclysmic environmental collapse will be the cause. They're not making anymore land (except in the Netherlands, China, Dubai etc) as the saying goes, I hope there's enough to hold all the graves.
Afternoon inclined towards evening and the land inclined towards the sea as I descended low hills and Rye lay in the distance. Reaching the coast gave the whole endeavour an epic sort of feel, I could walk no further even if I wanted to. Rye is an agreeable coastal town and has the number of tourists those two aspects generally attract. I found a spot in a beer garden of one of the most ricketty looking pubs I passed. The Olde Bell is 650 years old and wears its age with dishevelled dignity. An 80 year old wisteria gave shade to its terrace even as autumn chased away its foliage. A stony face screamed silent murder at me from the brick wall. The amusingly named Choof Choof gang used the pub for smuggling in the 1730s via a tunnel behind a revolving cupboard that leads to another pub nearby called the Mermaid which is even older at 867. This country can be hard to love, especially in these times but I do love its history. I hope not in a toxic fairytale way of kings and castles and ships and commerce. Plucky underdog spirit to defeat evil empires by drawing on the resources of our not-the-most-evil empire. We are not exceptional just a group of people sat on top of a gigantic pile of history, the moments of great enlightenment and endeavour mixed in with dark avaricious wrong. It is all so diligently separated and recycled into snake oil these days. We make ourselves exceptional only when we so myopically assert our differences to 'foreign' peoples. Those ensnaring Europeans whose strange and distant land you can see on a clear day from Rye. Global warming will take care of that I suppose, leaving our withered union of one defiantly apart. It angers me this thing we've done, I still cannot, will not accept it. I cling to a hope as distant as Turkey that our path can change via some democratic concoction that doesn't leave the country on fire. An unrealistic hope as the substance of either standpoint dissolves into a simple factional faith. Red vs blue, left vs right, 1 vs 0, there is nothing else. It makes me want to walk away and leave this pestilent country to eat its own offspring. But that lingering nostalgic love holds me. We might not be so different, me and them.
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