On the Run for Thirty Years

It’s 1984. A school-skipping, Nike-sponsored-breakdancing, minor-law-bending fourteen year old is sitting in a classroom when the bearded teacher announces that they are going to be doing ‘a criticism’ of ‘The Lake Isle Innesfree’.  He (for it was a ‘he’) hands round some first-generation photocopies; they are the sticky purple ones that turned my stomach because they smelt just like the dentists’.  There it is; a short poem.  Now I must do my ‘criticism’ of it.  I wonder what that might be?

Silence falls; they are all so busy ‘criticizing’.  Nobody talks, flicks wet snot from their ruler onto the teacher’s back, kicks over their neighbour’s desk, or dances around the classroom like a chimp in the throes of a caffeine-fuelled frenzy.  What am I doing here?  What has any of this got to do with me?  If only some angel could have whispered in my ear ‘Er, the poem’s about the desperate need to escape.  I would have thought you might be quite be interested in that, Vybarr. Your middle name is ‘Innes’ after all.’  The silence, though, endures and it is painful.  What I write is painful, wrung hard from what little resources I have.  A slow forty minutes passes.  The books, collected.  The lesson over. The classroom empties.  I have been asked to stay behind.  The bearded teacher hands me a book with a bright orange spine.  It has a golden cover with some sheep on it.  It looks shit.

Holding out the book he tells me, ‘This is what we’re doing.’

I think he wants me to read it.  But it’s massive. ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’? What does that mean?

I had washed up at a private school, where I was to discover that all of the teachers had beards, including our aged and chronically-asthmatic history teacher.  In assemblies she pounded her piano in the style of Les Dawson, always sternly immune to the forest-fire of suppressed hilarity this caused.  Still today, it brings me a flicker of laughter to think of the majestic crescendo of ‘And… Was…Jerrrroosulemmm…’ only to topple down in ruins, destroyed by the hammered accompaniment of those bum-chords. 

My mother, in a bold attempt to try and help me through my exams, had whipped me out of the comprehensive and threw what little money she struggled to earn at the last eighteen months of my education.  To my shame, I detested it.  My fellow pupils had been together since they joined the school’s nursery; they had known one another for about three-quarters of their lives.  But it was not that they were unwelcoming or unkind, just that I was a stranger and I did not belong.  They knew it; I knew it – my mother didn’t.  I went on to skip at least one day a week – and out of boredom I would go shoplifting. 

I sat my exams and in my O’ levels (I think it was the last year that they had them) I scored a ‘U’ in everything except Maths (E).  A ‘U’ for those interested is ‘unclassified’.  This meant that I scored between 0-14%.  As far as the Joint Matriculation Board were concerned I need not have bothered turning up for the exam, my grade would still have been the same. 

This is what my mother had struggled for.  Her disappointment on results day compounded by my insistence that we give one of my schoolmates a lift – he got ten As.

Our set text of Far From the Madding Crowd was never read in preparation for my classes, or indeed my final exam.

I am now forty-two and it is still unread – for a lecturer in nineteenth-century literature this is like never having seen Star Wars.

I have been on the run from Hardy for nearly thirty years.

The comprehensive was not great.  I had a lot of friends and was comfortable there, but I knew that I was not going to do well.  I put up no resistance to moving school.  As my mother likes to remind me, I was rather keen on the idea.

The one great thing about the private school was the sports.  Everything was done on such a small scale (I think there were only twelve in the class) that it was much more personable than the casual debilitating brutality of the larger school.

Earlier that year, one of the last things I did at the comprehensive school was compete in sports’ day.  I was to run ‘the mile’ in the House match. There were six competitors; one for each of the school’s houses: Hadrian, Marlborough, Tudor, Warwick, (X?), and mine, Elizabethan.  I was not a particularly talented little runner.  In fact, I was hopelessly naïve about my abilities.  There was a photograph on the dining room wall at home, there so long that it was part of the furniture.  It was a black and white eight by ten of a man stepping over a finish line, pain written deep on his face and body, looking like he had been shot in the back.  No shoes, and blisters the size of walnuts ballooned from beneath his feet.  This was my uncle (my mother’s big brother) getting a gold in the 1966 World Championships.  He had run the marathon.  Running, then, I believed was my genetic inheritance.  I was wrong.

One of my competitors that day belonged to Hadrian and he was a terrible runner – he was that common blend of extreme arrogance and incompetence.  I was no sports whiz, but I could have beaten him at anything.  The gun fired and after about 100 yards I was already in trouble.  Hadrian boy was well in front of me and the rest of the pack  were already away.  My chest burned from the inside like flames were licking up at my throat.  It is a very particular pain, like the air has become almost too hot for you to breathe.  The diaphragm pulls downwards to make space for the rush of gas, but nothing comes in.  Numerous times throughout my childhood I had witnessed the effects of asthma. Two people in my school had died of it. My sister, Erika, had also struggled with it and I envied the attention she got, and even more so the wonderful whistling Intal Spinhalers that she was provided with.  Little capsules, half clear, half orange, filled with white powder had to be loaded, then popped and spun to deliver their charge with a comic whirring whistle that sounded a little like they were ridiculing the wheeze of the sufferer.  We played with her nebuliser that she had brought back from the hospital on one of her trips there.  It could be an instrument of torture for the spies that you had captured.  It was a great prop to play hospitals with.  You could be a fighter pilot, an astronaut, or an alien just landed. 

But the asthma began to spread.  I started to show symptoms of it just before my teens, and my brother was later hospitalized with it.  Unlike my sister, I was not having to regularly medicate against it, not yet, but it did still take me by surprise.

My body was not going to let me compete that day, but determined, with most of the school watching, I struggled against it.  This makes it worse.  I knew from the many cross-countries I had run that the best thing to do was to relax and try to forget about it.  Not run harder because people are watching.  I fell farther and farther behind.  On one of the corners I heard somebody shout ‘Drop out. Why don’t you drop out?’  On the next lap, the same – this time I realised that the calling from the crowd was my brother ashamed to share blood with this pathetic show.  I was determined to finish, proving what, and to whom, I was and still am unaware. 

By the time I crossed the line the race was long over.  There was no attention on me.  Passing the post, I fell to my knees and grasped at the air for breath.

I was in contravention of the single and only fact that I had been taught about running at school – when you get to the end, don’t sit or lie down, stay standing.

There is quite a lot to learn about running, but I did not learn any of it at school.   Like most, I had to do it for myself.

At some point between ’84 and ’85 I did actually give Hardy a go.  On one day, in our lounge, in a comfy chair, I sat down in silence to read.  This was something I never did.  The act of reading had become associated with me with schoolwork, with something that you ought to do.  Not counting the books that we read in class at school, up to the age of twenty I can think of two novels that I read.  Both were film tie-ins for movies that I was too young to see.  Nobody I knew read.  My sister, Erika, was highly intelligent, studious, but not bookish.  There were books around us, but nobody seemed to sit still with one.

On that morning, when I could have been spinning on my head, in my Nike gear, on some lino outside Tesco with my friends, I decided instead to read Far from the Madding Crowd.  There I was, alone in the house, in my tracksuit, poised in the traps of ‘playing out’, and I was going to read about some milkmaid in Victorian Dorset fretting endlessly over which sheepshagger she should or should not marry.

Hours passed.  I was very impressed with my performance.  I did eighty pages.  I had read about a fifth of the novel.  The thing is, I had no experience of reading novels.  And it soon transpired that I didn’t know how to do it at all. Not the least idea. 

Like running, reading was something that you did in school, but technical competence was all that mattered.  As long as you could run, it didn’t matter how you did it.  As long as you could read, it didn’t matter how you did it.

I remember this feeling well.  I got up from my hours in the chair and I couldn’t recall anything that I had just read.  The words, sentences, pages, chapters, all had passed before my eyes.  They had been visually ‘read’.  But there was nothing.  My mind had wandered, not in the Dorset countryside, but everywhere, anywhere else.

I never went back to the beginning.  So disgusted with how that novel had sapped my titanic effort to read it, I never went back to it again. And so I got a ‘U’.

School, or rather my experience of it, all but destroyed two of the finest and most important things there are in life: running and literature. 

Who could have made sense of Hardy for me at that age?

Who could have made sense of cross-country for me at that age?

No amount of explaining, arguing, demonstrating or showing could have made either of these things appeal to me.  They had nothing to do with my life.  And I desperately needed something that was to save me from hanging around in shopping centres, robbing records and fucking up my life by flirting with petty crime and dropping out of school.

Cross-country is now practically a thing of the past.  It belongs to days when schools owned acres of land that its pupils could trample over before the local education authorities sold off the lot to housing developers in the late 80s and 90s.  The one good thing about posh-school was that it had no money, so had very little land, so no cross-country.  At the comp., the school would annually organize a cross-country that all ages could run together.  The last thing that anyone wants is for 1,600 Manchester kids doing something ‘all together’, unattended.  Gangs of older children would charge first years, stripping them, throwing them in thigh-deep pools of glutinous mud, shoving them into barbed-wire fences, flinging mud in their faces.  If you were lucky you might skip all this, but you’re running kit would still be three-times the weight it was when you brought it in that morning.  All that filth has to be worth it.  If you played football the mud was worth it.  For those that liked rugby, the filth was worth it.  Nobody enjoyed cross-country running except for mean-spirited Neanderthals that didn’t enjoy it either for the ‘running’ or the ‘cross-country’.  Brutal, stupid and pointless.

School made it impossible to fall in love with running or literature.  I was too young and naïve to make sense of them, and there was nobody that could explain them to me.  So I shoplifted a bit more till I got caught.  I stopped breakdancing because it was ridiculous. I failed my exams for a second time.  I suddenly found, at the age of eighteen, that I had nothing. 

Wormholes - Running Through Space-Time

One of the greatest pleasures of being able to run is your ability to experience space.  Space in motion, shifting perspective, the same, but always different.  If you are going to do 11 miles on a particular day, the limitations or the entrapment of having-to-do-11-miles enacts for you a kind of wonderful freedom.  At mile three today, I turned a corner and right by me was a passageway that I had never seen before.  A wormhole.  I still had 8 miles to do.  I could turn in any direction I liked.  The new pathway could take me anywhere.  It would not matter where.  I could run it for 4 miles and if I was lost, easily retrace my steps back.  I had strayed a couple of metres past it, but I was already within the event horizon, so turned sharply and entered the passage.  In my head was John Barry’s haunting waltz, the soaring and tumbling score to The Black Hole (listen to it here – and turn it up as loud as you dare).  This little turn took me to the thirteenth century, to hanged highwaymen, to the French Revolution, and to another kind of bustling vortex, and all because I decided to go right, instead of straight on. 

Wormholes are are a kind of speculative or hypothetical offspring from the coupling of topology (the metaphysical study of place) and astrophysics.  Much like the inability of the inhabitants of Abbott’s Lineland to conceive of two- or three-dimensionsonal space, so with wormholes.  We are stranded in our four dimensions, with its superstructure of metaphors and syntaxes built entirely to make sense of those parameters, not to describe what may lie beyond them.   In its simplest terms, we might think of them as two black holes joined by a spinning blend of the laws of physics that as yet are not understood.  Think of water swirling down a plughole, now imagine that at the other end of that pipe is not an outlet but another swirling plughole that seems to be sending water back up towards you.  What happens between the vortices? 

Strange things.

I have done this before, seen a passageway, turned and explored it.  The effect is uncanny, much more so than one might imagine.  You leave one part of London, follow a trail and find yourself in quite another.  The feeling is certainly accentuated by the act of running because one’s experience of space happens, well, faster.  A few miles into a run you are also more susceptible to any form of hypnotic ecstasy, or psycho-spatial displacement.  The slow parabolas of London’s miniature avenues and passageways, and the fact that they are housed and tree-lined, make it difficult for the runner to keep a firm sense of direction.  Moreover, when the visual clues of sunlight, or exposed trees that bend towards the north-east (trampled upon by the prevailing wind), without puddles (which sometimes help to reveal north), or the lopsided foliage-growth of a tree (which sometimes helps to reveal south), when these things are gone, and you have been running the passage for a mile or so, you could be anywhere.  ‘Anywhere within a mile’ you might reasonably argue.  Well, no actually.  There is a corner that I turn on a quiet road in south-east Blackheath.  On a satellite map I am a couple of hundred foot away from Kidbrooke (what a beautiful name for a place).  I could vault a few fences, dodge some guard dogs, climb a tree or two and I would be there.  I am not going to do this.  If I wanted to get to Kidbrooke it would be at least a two mile walk between those two practically adjacent points on the map.  Our experience of the space around us is not purely two-dimensional because all sorts of legal boundaries circumscribe it.  In such circumstances, it is much closer to one-dimensional travel, a maze of interconnected tubes.  So if you find a wormhole, it could take you somewhere you did not imagine possible.  I do not mean Costa Rica, more like a completely different part of Southwark you could not have believed was so close. 

It has happened to me before.  A run from Lewisham, through Ladywell (a terrible name, but still not as bad as Mudchute), I took a turn, headed into some streets - pop, Catford Gyratory.   

What about that fourth dimension? ‘That which hath been is now;‘ (Ecclesiastes 3:15).  My wormhole today brought me out in a suburban sprawl.   Once out of the passage, the sun in the sky was clear and I could easily read my heading if I needed to turn back. I still had a couple of miles to borrow from the bank so I persevered.  Masses of twentieth-century housing, bright red brick, white panelling, tower blocks, scruffy veterinary practices, and ‘that roar’.  That roar could only be the A2, the main road between Kent and London (the one that Bond chases Auric Goldfinger on in Fleming’s 1958 novel, Goldfinger), and it was getting louder.  I couldn’t see it but it was close.  The few children I had passed had all disappeared here.  All was still, forced indoors by rage and carbon monoxide.  Then, escape.  There is a footbridge.  I drive on this stretch of road a hundred times a year, or more, and I have seen it from two vantage points: heading east, heading west.  Today from on high I get to see it stretch for miles in either direction.  The Shard, still unfinished, is evidence of London’s creep ever higher to dominate the view for miles around.

The sound is astonishing.  How and why do people live here.  The houses are in good condition.  This is no suburban shanty-town (like where I live), and this road out to Kent has been here long before any of these houses.  I am not thinking this, of course, as I trample along, trapped into having to run parallel to the road, but I know that escape is coming soon.  To get back on to ‘my‘ land I need to cross a roundabout.  It is a roundabout that has interested me ever since the first time that I used it.  It is a big roundabout with a circumference of several hundred metres, and I have never been anywhere near it on foot before so I am surprised to see that there is a pedestrian subway.  

This is Shooter’s Hill.   

I first heard of it many years ago when I was reading A Tale of Two Cities.  The dramatic beginning of the novel, set in the eighteenth-century, has a mail coach lumbering up Shooter’s Hill on a dark and stormy night, and it is being chased by a man horseback.  The passengers well know why it is called ‘Shooter’s Hill’, because it belongs to the highwaymen.  But it was already called Shooter’s Hill, long before the daring Turpins of the eighteenth century.  The name is first recorded in 1226, having acquired it at some point before then - so presumably roadside robberies have been a tradition here for over a millennium.  

I run down the ramp and find myself at the still centre of a roaring vortex of traffic travelling north, south, east and west.  Any direction and any destination is possible from here.  It is a concrete crucible with beds of flowering lavender, but who could possibly come here to piss?  Many it seems, for it crowds out everything else.

Time folds here, slowly, like layers of chalk.  Some tagster has sprayed ‘PEST’ on a wall so clean and white that it must hide numerous strata of these urban signatures.  For me, there is the memory of irony; of being stuck here in a traffic jam for nearly three hours, late for my very first lecture of the previous year.  A lecture on time, history and A Tale of Two Cities.  The confluence of geography and circumstance few would sanely believe: jammed at precisely the spot where the novel begins. 

Time folds again and it takes us from Dickens’s writing of the novel in 1859, to its setting in the 1790s.  This was the Dover Road - the mainline in and out of revolutionary France.  

Again the strata of memory folds backwards and the hanged highwaymen are here.  Strung up in the eighteenth century and before to deter robberies, when surely the effect must have been to terrify the passengers on the mail coach.

Deeper and we can see the marauders hidden amongst the trees of the dark ages that must first have given this place such a name.

It folds forwards, too, to the very beginnings of the internal combustion engine.  The earliest cars were tried out here.  Alexander Gordon in A Treatise Upon Elemental Locomotion and Interior Communication (1834) recalls, ‘In 1826, Mr Samuel Brown applied his gas-vacuum engine to a carriage, and ascended Shooter’s-hill to the satisfaction of numerous spectators.  The great expense, however, which attended the working of a gas-vacuum engine, prevented its adoption.’

Oh no it didn’t, Mr Gordon - the internal combustion engine had to wait for the right time, but being here, there is a great deal of growling sensory evidence of its world domination.

Leaving via the opposite ramp, still on the A2, being out of the engine tunnel it already seemed quieter.

In a title to one of his best books, Stephen Jay Gould drew on a metaphor of time that he saw employed and deployed repeatedly in science for the last few hundred years.  The metaphors are Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle.   These places, wormholes, are imbued with stratigraphic layers of history and meaning.  The places are still there and so are the traces of what they have witnessed.  Our experience of space is circumscribed by social forces beyond our immediate control; they prevent our free movement within and around the landscape.  But if you look down through time, you will find that you are quite free, there.  Nothing prevents you from feeling the presence and weight of the past and the future.  All of it is there, and it is for all of us, all of the time. 

Time is not an arrow.  It is not a circle.  It does not loop neatly back like an oxbow and continue.  It is a corolla, endlessly looping away from the moment, thrown out of its trajectory, and endlessly, endlessly returning.  

Within a hundred metres I was back on ‘my own’ ground.  The place I had orbitted perhaps a thousand times in my car was now permanently defamiliarized by the memory of the few seconds I spent running through it.

Reading Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge later that day, I was struck by one of his narratorial comments. ‘Time, the magician, had wrought much change, here.’

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened

(‘Burnt Norton’ - T. S. Eliot)

Please feel free to ‘share’ if you like it.

The Birds

"What's on the wireless?" he said.

"About the birds," she said.  "It's not only here, it's everywhere. In London, all over the country. Something has happened to the birds." 

     When Daphne Du Maurier’s short story was first sent to her publisher to read, he told her it was ‘a masterpiece’ (Victor Gollancz was not often forthcoming with praise).  I am ashamed to say that I have not seen the Hitchcock film. The story is set in Cornwall, after the Second World War, a small family is trying to make its way working the land, and working for local landowners.  The tension in the story builds slowly from one that tells of freak encounters with nature to becoming one about the terrible dread of an all-out apocalypse. The birds – every one of them, gulls, wrens, sparrows, hawks – attack the countryside’s inhabitants.   Flailing arms, fires, shotguns and cars are useless against their sheer numbers.     Radio broadcasts from London cease.  Flocks bring down aeroplanes.  They smash through windows and kill householders.  Neighbours are found dead.  And we never get to find out why.
     Their behaviour is inexplicable.
     They are birds.
     When I used to run along the seafront in Brighton there was a sight, familiar to us all no doubt, that I tried countless times to photograph but it was uncaptureable.  Waves of starlings would tidally swoop and swirl, sometimes for hours, around the bombed-out remains of the West Pier.

     You cannot grasp in a frame the soaring and stunning four-dimensionality of this dance of clouds. As Ruskin said of water, 'It is like trying to paint a soul'.  The sight is an overwhelming one: centrifugal spinning and turning like ink in water.  This movement cannot be reduced to the stiff and flattened dimensions of a photograph.
   We look up and witness that.  I wonder what they see when they look down at a crowded mass of 35,000 people in their two-dimensional world? Do they watch them shuffle through the funnel of the marathon startline like shapes on a piece of paper?  We share much experience with birds: we eat, we sing, we shit, we live, we die, but there is no language that can describe the wonderful fluidity of this sight. They are just so different from us.
      Taking 'time' out of the equation, we pretend that we live in three-dimensions, but we don’t – not really.  We do occupy the third dimension (of course we do), but we don’t regularly take advantage, or make much use, of it.   I was lucky enough to go to New York a few years ago, and there it struck me for the first time how very flat our lives can be.  Being shown to my hotel room I had to equalize in the lift, and then decompress on my flight back down to the lobby. Throughout the few days of the stay we were always moving across, along, high-up and all-the-way back.   It is the only place that I ever really noticed this; elsewhere we just seem to exploit two dimensions.  Edwin A. Abbott’s satirical Flatland of 1884 is a gem.  It is a post-Euclidian fantasy of inter-dimensional travel where beings (shapes) who live in the two dimensions of Flatland struggle to understand the possibility of a third.  The polygonal hero meets the Sphere who tries to explain the third dimension.  To do so, they travel to one-dimensional Lineland, and no-dimensional Pointland, where they appear as an idea in the head of its only inhabitant. It is like Plato’s Cave in The Republic where the ‘truth’ teller is ultimately punished for possessing dangerous and fantastical ideas.  But Flatland is also about our inability to see beyond the dimensions of our own comprehension.  The 2D and 3D dimensional-tourists do actually appear to the inhabitants of Lineland, for example, but only as one-dimensional lines (not the squares and spheres of their ‘real’ bodies).  Ultimately, the novel is a satire that exposes our inability to perceive that which we are not programmed to see.    Hardy also tries to make us aware of such perspectival partiality in The Mayor of Casterbridge in describing the eponymous city: ‘To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green. To the level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund down and concave field.’ Hardy does his best to subsume the mysteries of brickwork, roads, roof slates, and the windows of the townscape into a kind of avian cognitive representation. The brevity of the language may appear half-hearted but the simplicity and directness of it is its strength.  The bird’s eye description uses only visually-descriptive abstract nouns, for humanity the trees’ proper names are reinstated - correct taxonomy is a human endeavour, not a natural one.
     Much later, in his notes that would become the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein, always a savant philosopher riveted by the powers and peculiarities of language, wondered

25. It is sometimes said: animals do not talk because they lack the mental abilities. And this means: “They do not think, and that is why they do not talk.” But – they simply do not talk. Or better: they do not use language – if we disregard the most primitive forms of language. – Giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.

                                                                              Wittgenstein – Philosophical Investigations

     They do not talk means only that they do not talk.  Did Wittgenstein really believe that they did not use language, that they did not communicate?  If like me you have run in a field of crows and met their stare – and I am sure you have – you could not even consider that they do not think.  The stare is not unidirectional, it is returned.  We may see ourselves in it, but there is something else there too.
     In 2008 an ongoing study was first reported that had been conducted at the Washington School of Forest Resources in which crows were trapped, banded and released by mask-wearing staff. They discovered two surprising things. First, that after five years and counting, banded crows still remembered the masks and would hound and dive at the staff. Second, that crows that were not involved in the experiment in any way also joined in the angry mob that jeered the mask-wearing staff over a mile away from the original incident.
     John Marzluff went so far as to assert that some of the crows were able to ‘make and use tools, forecast future events, understand what other animals know, and — in our [experiment] — learn from individual experience as well as by observing parents and peers’.   The birds were capable of ‘advanced cognitive tasks shown by only a few animals’.
     So they do not use ‘language’ professor Wittgenstein, really?
     Hardy again dramatizes the complexity of our anthro/avian relationship simply and effectively in the opening pages to Jude the Obscure.  The young Jude is employed by the farmer as a living scarecrow – they had gotten used to the static and silent kind.  The young Jude, though, empathizes with the birds

"Poor little dears!" said Jude, aloud. "You SHALL have some dinner - you shall. There is enough for us all. Farmer Troutham can afford to let you have some. Eat, then my dear little birdies, and make a good meal!"    They stayed and ate, inky spots on the nut-brown soil and Jude enjoyed their appetite. A magic thread of fellow-feeling united his own life with theirs. Puny and sorry as those lives were, they much resembled his own.

     No reader of Jude the Obscure forgets reading it.  The punishment meted out to Jude in the novel is so unrelenting that Claire Tomalin recently described the experience of reading it to being continually slapped in the face. In chapter two of the novel, Jude’s empathy with the birds reveals him as one not fit for the battle of modern life upon which he is about to engage. Civilization requires disconnection from nature, and this is Jude’s tragic flaw: he is of the earth, yet he seeks out the city and society of Christminster.  The city, just like Farmer Troutham, does not care for this ill-adapted and unfit specimen.
     When nature meets culture they do not speak in the same language.
     For me, one of the harder things about living in London is the litter. Litter is such a strange word. It sounds clean, like someone has crumpled up a blank piece of paper and tossed it aside to become a tumbleweed snowflake. When I say litter, I mean the mysterious and variegated palimpsest of stains that tattoo the pavement like some antique map, liquids that had flowed-across or impact-splattered onto the concrete; or Big Mac boxes and Red Bull cans, flattened and tyre-tracked; a laceless shoe; jewels of broken glass; a Capri-Sun sachet with a pink straw extruding from it; blackened chewing gum; broken elastic bands; mouldy trays of tomatoes; even a bed – it was a double.   All of these have featured in the ‘still life of modernity’ at the bottom of my road. The worst of these, though, is one of the most regular offenders: chicken bones.  Stepping on one is utterly gruesome. It was once a body, now here is a single piece of it. It has been held in someone's hand - traces of the grease are probably still on their fingers.   It has been in someone's mouth. And now it is tossed aside. Under your shoe, it crunches to the marrow in that flint-sharp way that only chicken does and you are now carrying a little piece of this confluence of biological history with you.  The interconnection is complex, intimate, somehow wrong.
     There is a convergence of chicken opportunities at the turn of our road.  There is a KFC (which as Jonathan Safran Foer has recently noted, now stands not for Kentucky Fried Chicken, but for nothing - it is just K.F.C.). There is also a Chicken ‘heaven’, ‘paradise’ or ‘cottage’ - I could check the name by walking a 100 yards down my street, then write pages on the trickeries and nuances of their shudderingly awful and misleading brand name and happy-chick logo, but they just don’t deserve the effort. In a moment of weakness – I think it might have been my birthday – I called in there for a veggie burger and chips.  It wasn’t very nice.  At 4am I was feverishly vomiting the lot back up.
     On another morning I woke up to find a rib on my balcony. I did not check but I don’t think it was a human rib.  It was cut cleanly and there was nothing on it.  A machine could not have removed the meat from this bone more efficiently.  I live several floors up so I don’t think a drunken (or sober) passer-by could have managed the throw.  It must have come from the sky.  But from where?  How far had it travelled?  Where was the rest of its body?  Dispersed throughout the take-aways of Europe?  In a freezer somewhere?  Buried and forgotten by some dog in a suburban garden?  Eaten?
     In his essay ‘Why Look at Animals’ John Berger sets out to explore the peculiarity of our relationship with animals and the way it has changed so much.

What were the secrets of the animals likeness with, and unlikeness from man? […] the secrets were about the animals as an intercession between man and his origin. Darwin’s evolutionary theory, indelibly stamped as it is with the marks of the European 19th century, nevertheless belongs to a tradition, almost as old as man himself. Animals interceded between man and their origin because they were both like and unlike man.

     In them, in their gaze, in their stare, we can see ourselves and we are both comforted and troubled by what we see. Whatever, that is, that we think we see.
     John Clare was fluent in the exploration and the sinewy complexities of our relationship with the natural world. This is from ‘The Badger’

The dogs are clapped and urged to join the fray'
The badger turns and drives them all away.
Though scarcely half as big, demure and small,
He fights with dogs for hours and beats them all.
[…]
He tries to reach the woods, and awkward race,
But sticks and cudgels quickly stop the chase.
He turns again and drives the noisy crowd
And beats the many dogs in noises loud.
He drives away and beats them every one,
And then they loose them all and set them on.
He falls as dead and kicked by boys and men,
Then starts and grins and drives the crowd again;
Till kicked and torn and beaten out he lies
And leaves his hold and crackles, groans, and dies.

     There are numerous ways that this poem may be read: as a metaphor for man’s troubled relationship with Christ, as metonym for Clare himself and his treatment by society or even in the lunatic asylum that he spent much of his later life, or is the badger a synecdoche for nature itself?  All of these readings are productive, but the final one is a brutally pessimistic vision of what happens when civilization and nature meet. In this reading the choice of the badger is an apt one because its suffering is of no use.  Foxes kill chickens.  Wolves kill sheep.  The powers of nature (dogs, sticks and foxes) are rallied against the badger but for no reason beyond that of the baiters’ savage fun.   The poem holds up a mirror to sanity and civilization and in any of the readings I have suggested, we are always the baiters.
     For John Berger, the companionship that we once had with animals is quickly being lost. Mechanization, profit, and interference in the food chain have all become a normal part of what we understand as industrialized animal agriculture. We pay for it with health scares and pandemics like BSE and H1N1, among others.   Each exposes the tenderness of what to me at least – and to many others I’m sure – is a clear dividing line of opposition. Nature surely should support civilization, not be plundered, consumed and destroyed by it.   If the foundations are destroyed what chance is there for the structures it supports?
     In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs suggested that nature ‘acknowledges the meaning of what has grown organically, […] in contrast to the artificial structures of human civilization. At the same time, it can be understood as that aspect of human inwardness which has remained natural, or at least tends or longs to become natural once more.’  For Berger, here, ‘the life of a wild animal becomes an ideal, an ideal internalised as a feeling surrounding a repressed desire.’   But this desire does not need to be either repressed or a hopeless ideal.  In Berger’s terms it is unattainable, but there is more than the either/or option than he suggests.  The desire to return to nature is knowingly unattainable and fleeting, just as the blissful satisfaction of a drink of chilled water after a long run is also only a fleeting pleasure, but the pleasure brings with it real and necessary benefits to the body that have a far greater longevity than the few moments of satiation that they delivered.
   The desire to return to nature may be a hopeless ideal, but it is still one that we can turn to.
    For me, Du Maurier's birds are a fervid and omnipresent reminder of our uncanny relationship with modernity, we are not at home in its skin - we should be in ours.  They are a reminder too of our inability to leave behind the natural world, and perhaps the story is an exercise in our guilt at taking possession of it so fiercely.  These are after all, as Marzluff suspects, things able to ‘make and use tools', forecast the future, understand other animals and learn from them.  They are capable of ‘advanced cognitive tasks’.
      Today, slowing for the last hundred yards before home, I readied myself to negotiate whatever ‘litter’ might be waiting for me.   Turning the corner I saw two pigeons fight as they pecked and tossed a dirty, gnawed chicken bone.
      The birds!

Gounod and the Death Star

      The sky was cool glass. A giant cloche had been placed over the world and only sunlight breathed into it, at least that was until I stepped onto Blackheath. There is always a breeze on Blackheath, no matter how hot or still the day the world never stands still up there. The roar of the pulmonary A2 is never far away, but it loses the fight for dominance amongst all this grass and sky. Caught at the right moment, you can get nearly all of it to yourself.
      I had set out that morning with a thin desire to go past Gounod’s house. ‘Go past’ is incorrect. I have been past it many times, this morning I intended to notice it for the first time. It is a Georgian villa tucked away in a suburb southeast of the heath. I run through the area quite frequently. It sits between the A2 and the South Circular and once you are there, you would never know that either road existed, or even that you were in the twenty-first century, barring a runes-throw of cars and streetlights. You can run in the centre of the road where there is no camber, do a mile and a half, snaking one’s way up to the heath and you will be disturbed by perhaps only one car. It will be so polite and quiet that you probably won’t need to move aside to let it pass. It is the interloper here, not you, for we are no longer in the twenty-first century.

Prince's Dock - Hull

      The houses! There is little or no uniformity. Bomb damage from the war probably accounts for a number of the newer builds but altogether these houses look like they have mad wives locked up in them, or jewel thieves disguised as Lady’s maids awaiting the right moment to swipe, or illegitimate daughters planning to marry back their stolen inheritances. These houses belong to Wilkie Collins, Mary Braddon, Charles Reade, Dickens even, and they always remind me of Atkinson-Grimshaw paintings - perhaps because his work is so often used on their covers as classic editions. The paintings (and the houses) have a sub-Turneresque quality, with a clearer and more distinct line, and they are nonetheless decidedly odd. Turner could turn his hand to almost any visual language. He was a stylistic polyglot.   The Turner that we talk of when we say ‘Turner’ tends to be late Turner, the one that depicted snowstorms, hostile rainclouds, steam trains crashing through dense landscapes like raging bulls, all in barometric vortices of light, paint and colour. Atkinson-Grimshaw’s paintings are less emotionally ambitious but what is queer about them is their light and setting. The streetscapes that he would become well known for are always defamiliarized through colour. Docks, roadways, houses take on the hues of pond-slime brown, nicotine yellow, or that dirty emerald that became the pallette for Tretchikoff’s retro-trendy green lady that disturbed me from many a wall as a child. The paint always looks dirty. Horse and carriage tracks in which water has collected reflect the deadening glare and suggest life long gone. In the paintings there are always houses from which light spills from the windows onto a rain-soaked street. There is no life, though. The figures, sometimes none, often one, and occasionally many, have their backs turned to us or hide their faces. The houses are closed to them and us. The paintings tell us that we are merely the houses' observers. The lights are on, somebody is home, but not to us. Real life is elsewhere.
       There are greater parallels between Atkinson-Grimshaw and eastern Blackheath than you might imagine. Re-read the last couple of hundred words and they describe, with surprisingly few adjustments, what it is like to walk or run through this area at dusk. There are so many striking houses, windows so large they would not fit on any fascia of my flat. All that glass and no one to look out of it. No one ever tends a garden, washes their car, chats to a neighbour, hunches up their drive with a brace of Sainsbury’s bags. I have seen security that guard the entrances and exits to the road from undesired traffic, but never who or what it is that they are securing. I have run these streets probably over a hundred times, and never have I seen someone looking out of these windows. I wonder how different these houses are to the bourgeois fortresses in Victorian sensation fiction, places of confinement, where, like Laura Fairlie in The Woman in White, or Madame Bovary, one might find themselves suddenly and quietly buried alive.
In his day, Atkinson Grimshaw was criticised for endlessly recycling the same image, sometimes to order. Exercises in light and colour, his painting thrummed always in the same minor key. But for me it seems that his work represents something else altogether about bourgeois communities. In the paintings, the houses are always walled off from their onlookers. They seem to fight so fiercely for isolation and disconnection; to make-believe that they are not where they are, in central London, but elsewhere. Today we have alarms and fences keep the world out so that their owners can deny their place in the earth, so that they can pretend that their roots reach into some different ground?
       As Carlyle said, "Courage, dear reader, I see Land!"

Charles Gounod

       Towards the northern end of this area is where Gounod stayed when he first came to London. Like the bourgeois characters in Maupassant's 'Boile de Suif' (which we will pop back to on our return – we’ll see how we are for time), Gounod came to London to flee the Franco-Prussian War, and found himself embroiled in a wicked plot that Collins or Braddon would have been embarrassed to use. For those interested, it is on Morden Road (it was '8', but is now '15') and it is the house that he stayed in after arriving here, before he and his wife moved in with Georgina Weldon at Tavistock House (demolished) in Bloomsbury Square. Their relationship was probably a platonic one. They knew each other through the opera (Weldon was a celebrated soprano). A decade previously she had married William Henry Weldon and was consequently disinherited by her father. Her husband, though – like her father, refused to allow her to follow a career on stage and she was limited to amateur theatricals and charity concerts. The couple had no children, and by the time she met Gounod, the marriage was failing. Bored and frustrated Weldon (Georgina) set up a school for orphans and the children of the ‘deserving’ poor. After she persuaded Gounod to move in with her and her husband the two became very close. He was impressed with her vocal talent and he promised her the title role in his opera Polyeucte which he was writing during his stay with them. No one knows why Gounod left Tavistock House when he did, but when he returned to Paris Weldon refused to send on his belongings – including the first draft of Polyeucte.

Georgina Weldon

       The Weldons’ marriage continued to limp onwards. In 1875 they separated but after only 3 years Harry tired of the annual £1000 that he had agreed to settle on her, so he tried to use her interest in spiritualism to prove her insane. If proven, she would have been locked away in an asylum. She was duped into being assessed, forms were signed and they came to take her away. Realising, at last, what her husband’s plan was she escaped and went on the run. The state of Victorian civil law meant that she was unable to bring a case against her husband so she decided instead to publicise her story. She could get into court if her husband tried to sue her for libel. They didn’t. The law eventually caught up with her. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 permitted her the freedom to bring a case against her husband. She won. For the next six years she was in and out of court constantly bringing all of those involved in the Weldon Affair to justice. At one point, she had 17 cases going at once and in all of these refused counsel. Her character as a wronged woman, so clean that she was used in a Pears Soap advertisement.
       One of the major attacks on the sensation fiction of the nineteenth century, the ones that use the Atkinson-Grimshaw images as covers, was that they were too far-fetched. In the Weldon Affair, via The Woman in White, art had become life.
       Blackheath at last – where a man scowled at me for looking at his kite.
I had another 5 or so miles to do of the run so headed across the heath to the park. Making my way down towards Greenwich I was struck by another view, and the first thought that sprung to my mind was 'How nice to be here and not there, today.'

From the exact point in the Park

       From the fortresses of the past, to one of the future. As you approach from south, the ground falls away from you quite suddenly and there is a view so specific that it looks to have been carved out of the park. It is One Canada Square, or Canary Wharf as it is more commonly known. It is one of those views that appears as if through a magnifying lens. It looks much closer than it is, than it can possibly be. The whole scene is like some anachronistic vision of Humphrey Repton. A carefully organized park and woodland from which to view...? Canary Whart. At the Greenwich Observatory tourists crowd around to photograph and record this vision of mediocrity. Steel and concrete blocks built to house London's manufacturing (sorry, I couldn't resist) nothingness industry that the country pays billions and billions to preserve. Most of these buildings are characterless, but Canary Whart definitely does belong here. Just like Henrietta Stackpole in James' The Portrait of a Lady, it has the stench of the future. From a distance it looks like a prison from science fiction. There ought to be guards hovering ouside the tower wearing jet packs. If London were in Star Wars this would be the Death Star.
       It is not from the future, though - if only it was. Instead, it hails from the 80s; it is firm, robust, solid, shiny. If architecture could be haute-couture this would be its shoulder-pads. True to its toughened pretensions, it thinks rather highly of itself.  It wears a little pointy that looks like it was made from card and tin foil on Blue Peter.  It is this little hat that inches it above the other 'towers' that neighbour it.  The Whart's point has a blinking searchlight, either keeping an eye on us mere mortals who dare to look upon it, or ensuring that it can announce its mediocre height in the dark, too.  It is not the tallest building in the world, it is not the tallest building in Europe, it is not the tallest building in the UK, it is not even the tallest building in London. Yet it still had the temerity to evacuate on September 11th, like this steely Whart could see itself as a target in the same league as the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. Such a move committed a self-aggrandizing disservice to the memory of hundreds that died. The evacuation of the building shuffled for elbowroom that it did not deserve on that day’s overcrowded newsreels.
       My run was nearly done. I was in the final mile (of 9, I think it was). By the duck pond in Manor Park (shhh... it's a secret) there is a sturdy iron fence, with a small gate, about shoulder high. As I approached children, fathers, mothers, and their fathers and mothers, all simultaneously appeared, like traffic in The Truman Show, from both sides wanting in- and egress. They were pigeons having eyed a discarded bread roll. I had come too far; I wasn't going to stop and patiently wait my turn. Without breaking pace, and well out of the way, I leapt and levered myself over the railings, barely touching them. A kid said 'cool!' Was that pride I felt, just briefly, to be told 'cool' by such a little stranger as I ran off.
       Vanitas vanitatum.
       I wonder if it was at that moment, landing too hard on my ankle, that I gave myself the minor sprain which I have been tending to ever since.

(Sorry, Maupassant’s Lard Ball will have to wait for another time.)

Going Back - with Mr Carlyle and Mr Lawrence

Going back is amongst the most difficult things for a runner to do.  The momentum that they build up over their weeks, months, or years of training is their greatest weakness.  Ignoring obstacles, or even the possibility of their existence, the runner's propulsion drives them onwards towards a real or imagined finish line.  Once fixated upon it, it may as well have been engraved in the granite in their minds if you try to convince them to cut back or be more realistic with their expectations.  You roll the dice; you get injured and find that you have not landed on a ladder, but a long and slithering snake. You can slide down back to the shallows, or in anger you can toss the board aside and forget your disappointment with some other, less fulfilling, activity.

Recovering ground is difficult on so many levels. You are not only forced to acknowledge that you are suffering the indignity of sliding down a snake, there is also the promised boredom of revisiting the same milestones during your training on the slow climb back up.  This second, third, or eighth journey shows you a familiar, but there is a shadow upon it.  This time round you feel fear.  You know that as you crawl back (months later) to where you were, that this was your limit - your absolute limit.  This is the point where the whole miserable fucking process is likely to begin again.  You set out in trepidation and await the verdict.

On the 6th March 1835, the philosopher, John Stuart Mill with some trepidation knocked at the door of his friend Thomas Carlyle.  The door opened to reveal an agitated and distraught Mill.  He had with him four charred pages. This was all that was left of Carlyle’s first handwritten manuscript of the epic and poetic history of The French Revolution that he had lent to Mill to read - although it was only the first volume this still amounted to about 100,000 words.  The maid had mistaken the pages for waste paper and thrown the lot on the fire. Both Thomas and his wife Jane peered over the brink of nervous collapse.  Mill was forgiven even though the loss was seemingly irrecoverable and Carlyle set to work on the second volume of the history.  He completed it a year later in March 1836, going back to the first volume anew.  He finished at 10pm on 12th January 1837, he wrote ‘ready both to weep and to pray’. The French Revolution was an enduring success, loved and loathed by many to date.  Carlyle’s career continued apace.

Despite his reputation today, D. H. Lawrence was not particularly well known or widely respected in his own lifetime, not that is until the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1928.  Up until then, novels like Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow and Women in Love were read by relatively few (very few in the case of The Rainbow).  Despite continuous and pressing financial worries that plagued him, Lawrence never published anything until he was satisfied with it.  This is not a writer who wants to check for typos and plot points – not an easily distracted worker, like Shakespeare.  Throughout his career Lawrence always demonstrated an astonishing determination not to let go of a novel until he was sure that it was right.  No, not 'right', perfect.  Lady Chatterley’s Lover exists in three separate and complete versions (all quite different), but it was the third that Lawrence published in Florence to avoid the insulting strictures of censorship that his earlier work had encountered in Britain (his publisher's offices had been raided for copies of The Rainbow).  Sons and Lovers was written no less than four times, originally entitled Paul Morel.  The stamina, determination and commitment to an artistic vision that we see in Lawrence are things witnessed surely less than once in any generation.

Both men, in their different ways, demonstrate a kind of doggedness in their ability to go back to the beginning and start again.  This ability amazes me.  I will let you into a secret, I am here, and I am doing this.  You know I am; look, you can see me doing it.  I should actually be working on a 100,000-word manuscript that I have already written.  All I need to do is to get my head down and correct it, titivate it, rewrite a few bits of it so it can go back to the academic press so they might publish it.  I can apply for promotion, I can move on to another project.  I would never have to think about, or explain, The Epic of Gilgamesh ever again.  What I should actually be doing right now is going back. I just can't.

Have you heard of the 1867 novel The Poor Man and the Lady?  It is a ‘striking socialist novel’; at least that is what Hardy called it in his self-penned biography (not autobiography, it is published under his second wife’s name). That is almost all we know about it.  Only a handful of people have read it: Hardy’s friend and mentor, Horace Moule (who thought it rather coarse), and a handful of publishers all of whom rejected it.  The book was put away, forgotten about, eventually to be burned. But out of the ashes of The Poor Man and the Lady an entire career was born.  Once the novel was put aside, Hardy set to work on a much more market-friendly sensation novel begun in 1869, published two years later (Desperate Remedies).  This was not the right kind of work for Hardy; he had not yet worked out how to knit melodrama and realism in the subtle manner that he would in novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Tess of the D'Urbevilles.  Next to be published was Under the Greenwood Tree (1872).  This is a slender and lightly comic novel with a rural setting that shows Hardy’s roots as a novelist reaching deep into the earth of his upbringing in the West Country.  The first paragraph is instantly recognisable as a mature Hardy's first steps.

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.

A phoenix did not rise from the ashes of The Poor Man and the Lady; it was an entire writer’s career.  His life as a novelist was begun.  The Poor Man and the Lady reached forward in time, remnants of it are found in Hardy’s poetry, and it was worked into a novella ‘An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress’; it also became the source for his most infamous novel, Jude the Obscure.  This fact is not to be underestimated in the context of his career as a writer.  It is often heard around people that do not know much about Hardy that Jude was his last novel, and he was so incensed by the critical response to it that out of pique he refused to write another.  Neither assumption is true. The Well-Beloved, which had started its life as a short serial in 1892 was completely reworked and published as a novel two years after Jude in 1897. Also, Jude was, by far, Hardy’s greatest financial success. He became a monied and a lettered man and for the first time in his life was free to choose what he might do.  He had always wanted to be a poet, and that is just what he became.  The Poor Man and the Lady became Jude, and Jude was what enabled Hardy the novelist to become Hardy the poet.  In refusing to go back, Hardy's career drew its structure from his 'failure'.  Had his first novel not been consumed by the flames, then he may not have felt the need to revisit the themes of injustice and class inequality that became the mainstay of his long and productive writing life.

Going back, turning back and admitting defeat, that you cannot finish your planned route, that you have to stop your training, retrace your footsteps home, to Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation – surely the four ugliest and least-poetic words in any language - you feel like Sisyphus letting go of the boulder at the top of the hill only to watch it tumble all the way back down.

You could just do it all again, like Carlyle, and you may find that next time you make it, but to what?  That mileage that you did not achieve last time?  Then what?  More mileage until you injure yourself?  Your injury emerged out of your behaviour and your physiology, if neither of these things change, why would you believe that the outcome would be significantly different to the first time round?  If you are like Lawrence, you will do it again and again until you get it right.  I tried this for most of my adult life, though I found that I do not have an ounce of the stamina that he did.

Scar tissue heals most weakly.  It repairs quickly, like physiological superglue, and it lies brittly in wait for the next strains of tension so that they can tear. (That sentence works just as well with 'psychological' in the middle of it).  Dogged determination is all very well if you have both superhuman stamina and strength to keep you going.  Few do.

Hesitating to use the metaphor in a blog so clearly about the love of the natural world, you could instead recycle the experience.  Like Hardy, you could put away that particular game and do something else.  Same genre, different form.

If running that way has not worked for you then do not stop.  Recycle your knowledge and experience and use that momentum to prepare yourself for something new.  Just try doing it a little differently. Who knows, you may even try taking your shoes off...