Neither the crucial role walking has had in my adult life, nor my acute psychogeographical knowledge of a certain clump of land in Northern England are things I instantly associate with pride and personal qualities.
None of my walking has ever required metal sticks, flasks or waterproofs, the kind of walking you organise beforehand, nor has it assumed the look of a more fashionable idea of a metropolitan pyschogeographer, pleasurably assuming a role of a wanderer.
Mostly, I’ve craved anomnyous, often impossibly so.
My walking is intrinsically bound up with the reasons I spend way too much time trying to remain anonymous in town centre cafes, spend way too much time making short distance train journeys, and have spent a regrettable amount of time staring at LED railway notice boards, quasi-religiously praying for a clue about a destination where I may find some kind inner resolve.
These writings in this book are about both landscape and mental illness in equal measure.
admittedly self-indulgent,
I’m talking about walking as an affirmation of the will to keep going…
…that wherever these forward footsteps lead must surely be better than where I am walking from.
In our contemporary lives, the pressure to ‘be something’, whatever that may be is airborne, and indeed experienced as a physical force.
Anorexia, as a state of being, is a meeting place of many felt-pressures, indeed, one could morbidly call it an artistic expression; a body twisted into poetry by many invisible violent hands.
Anorexia is an extreme expression of an age of extreme demands.
It is a state of flight from the very demand to make something and do something with one’s flesh. It staves it off as long as possible.
It is the flagship reaction to not knowing any live in this world, whilst remaining alive.
But there are numerous expressions of this reaction. Many that provoke far less sympathy.
Why did I act in ways to avoid becoming? Because I couldn’t see myself becoming in any form I could find bearable.
I ‘couldn’t do a normal job’, I told myself, as much as I secretly craved a normality that seemed to be so comfortably tolerated by so many, all I foresaw was a life bent into misery by a force far greater than myself.
I saw my future: an ugly useless bloated body, slipping into a hole where comfort eating was my only pleasure in a meaningless life.
I saw myself reduced to beast form, like Saddam Hussein, reduced to cave life, captured eating the comfort snacks of his captors.
I saw a horrible shape of a person, but I saw nothing that gave me any idea of anyway i could live with dignity, in a world that understood bodying only as a performative ritual to either attain or retain a decent income.
My walking began as a way of keeping this dread at bay.
But slowly, the act of walking began to define me.
I also ran, and along with walking, I began to be pointed out by random drinkers on nights out, some more friendly than others, in their exclamatory remark of “I see you everywhere!”.
As much as I tried to hide it, and make it look ‘normal’, I was everywhere.
Everywhere in a 1-10 mile radius of my home.
Anywhere but static, anywhere but sat with myself, a self that felt the pressure to do something in order to ‘be’ something!
I still experience the tight chested-ness, the icy breaths that inhale dread when I even imagine it.
Anywhere but here….
In some ways, nothing has happened in the 20 plus years of my adult life because I have been walking.
Walking around nearby cities, in all weathers. Increasingly caught in a blank space between the haves and the totally-have nots, as a more aggressively dissociative strain of Thatcherite individualism began to spread in the years following the Tory austerity program.
Like many who old deep regrets about wasted life, I often wish I could sit with my 20 year old self, and tell him not to panic. That what he is feeling right now, as he sits with himself after a drunken lapse into binge-eating, will pass.
But, here I am, more or less 40, and still panicking. Do I really want to rely on my 60 year old self to come and rescue me?
Like anorexia, walking has been a form of managing time and managing a body, but it has been so much more.
When I do my silly little 3 mile walk into my town centre, regardless of the same disheartened outcomes, long unfulfilled desires, the walk takes me forwards in my heart.
And every time I have done this walk for the last 20 years I see a better place infront of me than the one I am walking from.
John B Ledger 