Walking Commentary
Manchester to Rome 2022
‘Follow the cartouche!’ is not what you’d expect native American trackers to say but it’s one trick that The Shadow Wolves can use to find people who have crossed into Arizona from Mexico. It seems that our shoe brands in soft soils or sands are as useful as a wall for immigration control.
I just found a note, sent by young man who could not have known it would be a much older man who read it. Like a message in a bottle, it was just a scrap in a box that has floated around the world, following me since I wrote it in 1987.
You might collect stones that caught your eye. I do and have brought many pebbles home to our garden. My favourite is from Milford Sound, favoured for its exotic nature and the likelihood that I’ll never visit New Zealand again. The 200 million year old pebble I took from Milford was likely first shaped by passing glaciers 20,000 years ago. Then again, more local beach pebbles can be interesting too. Can you imagine what they’ve experienced in 100 million year lifetimes?
Hanlon’s razor suggests that we ‘never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity’.
I am pleased that some of my correspondents suggest I read articles like this one by John Crace in the Guardian. I am even more pleased to be have been able to live in societies where such truths can be published. Reading words such as ‘lies’ and ‘lying’ in the media reminds me of the privilege I enjoy living in progressive societies that can rely on the protection of punitive defamation laws.
Today, August 10th was supposed to be the day we walked into Rome. Two of us, hopefully still friends after a very long talk. 2700 km of talk.
The pre-pandemic plan was to walk from Manchester to Rome. Our departure date was going to be April Fools Day. The idea was to walk an average of 25 km, six days per week. We’d have made 114 hikes over 131 days. We still don’t know where we’d have washed, slept or eaten but we’re pretty sure we would have done quite a lot of each.
Richard Brautigan once misled me back in 1974. I enjoyed Trout Fishing in America so much that I read everything he wrote. At one point, he wrote that he didn’t write. His mental blocks were such that he typed, stopped, scrunched up the paper and threw it into the wastebasket. There, in the basket, the words reassembled themselves into a story he never wrote. I put many words in a bag and despite nearly thirty years of incubation, nothing much has hatched.
