(An audio version of this piece, read by me, can be found here:)
How many walks do you remember, of all the walks you have done, as a walker? I like to think that in my case it’s the majority but recently I went on a walk - a long, moderately scenic walk - and it wasn’t until about four miles in that I thought to myself, “You know what, you absentminded fiasco of a human being? You already did this walk, two Novembers ago.” Yesterday while unwell and achey and dripping unexpected rain from all 41 of my limbs and worrying about my current novel not funding as quickly as its predecessors and that the reason it isn’t funding as quickly is that everyone has suddenly decided they hate me and my writing but then realising that the reason I was having those thoughts was perhaps because I was unwell but, despite that realisation, not being able to totally banish the thoughts, I did a walk where I met a huge obstinate ram and a man shouted at me for missing an indistinctly marked footpath and walking through his farm instead, and it might turn out within time that I remember the walk because I was feeling unwell and a man shouted at me and a ram who looked like it wanted to didn’t but it might turn out that I don’t remember. Some walks are different, though; they grab the nearest knife from the nearest drawer and carve deep tracks into your mind. Maybe there was nothing earth-shattering about them; you were just more in the walk that day, in your head. The stepping stone walk in December 2020 was one of those for me: five sets in all, over the course of 13 miles, all on one tiny grudging winter’s day, when Dartmoor flailed and tumbled and belched with weather. My nonchalant negotiation of the trickiest of the five sets (no, not the ones in the photo above; those were piss easy by comparison) startles me, as I look back. All nine of the stones were totally submerged, yet I made it over, with ease, light and balletic, instantly ready to take them on again, if anyone had asked, which they didn’t, because nobody was there; they were all at home, being logical and dry and admiring each other’s mud-free trousers. It was that time of year on the moor when you witness the vast lichenous disarray of the place in full, when the trees show off their bright green feet, that time when the battery on birdsong has finally run down to nothing and it occurs to you that your soul has been wired to its variations all along and that now you’re stranded, in the middle of a powercut but you don’t fully mind because of an innate awareness that the power will be restored and that the power needs downtime for everything to successfully function and retain meaning. The walk had started as pure December lockdown survival, with a bit of exercise thrown in, but became something more useful: one of those moments in life that pushes you through a little door in a wall. I remember the sign on the church near the point where I decided my route should begin. “What does God want for Christmas? Look in the mirror!” it said. I didn’t have a mirror, so I looked in the church window. “God wants a blue £6 anorak from the Ashburton branch of Children’s Hospice South West?” I wondered, appraising my reflection in the stained, dirty glass. Jumble sale on top, dancing queen below: that was me. I had new walking boots on: not from a charity shop, pricier than what I normally go for, easily the fanciest I’d ever owned. In these boots, I had all the moves. No stepping stones can defeat me, I thought. But of course such arrogance cannot go unpunished. Later, I dropped my debit card in a peat bog. Worse still, at the time it happened, I didn’t know which peat bog. There were about 34, in all, and that was just the ones I could see when I peered through the cloud I was inside. I had to go back, retrace my steps. I met a couple of fellow walkers and gave them my phone number. “This is a weird question,” I said, “but if you find a debit card in a peat bog could you call me?” By the time I located the debit card, three quarters of an hour later, I had written four or five pages of book in my head, some of which involved a man losing his debit card in a peat bog. During the course of my search for the debit card I glanced through a gap in a wall and spotted a stone bench that looked like a bus shelter from the Flintstones. A small bearded dog, almost certainly drunk, emerged from a farm and pelted me with insults but, having had some experience with dogs, I knew the insults were likely a projection of some trouble it was having wrestling with the hard facts behind its own inflated self image. The day was one when a lot of what initially appears bad is in fact good, including the rain. By the time I drove home it had really started minging it down, or to be more accurate, minging it sideways, heaved by a wind from somewhere even higher, even more forsaken by society and its infrastructures. I knew the ghosts in the river beside my house would be shouting again when I got back, rushing past my kitchen window from the high moor, on the way to the sea with all their deep inky gossip. They could go in the book too. Attention-seeking fuckers. It would serve them right. Several moorland ponies were sheltering behind a wall, in a row. Some waterlogged sheep had snuck in on the very end of the line, hoping nobody would notice they were sheep. But I was there, and I noticed. I noticed that they were sheep.
I’m writing a new novel. Yesterday morning I got excited because it was 90% funded but then got a lot less excited when I found out that there had been a data glitch on my publishers’ website and it was in fact only 72% funded. It’s now a little closer, but we still need another 100 or so supporters before it becomes a reality. The absolutely brilliant thing about that is it means I can get on with writing it and writing more new Substack pieces and generally stop talking about the book here, except maybe just in passing, occasionally, in a far less anxious way than this. MASSIVE THANKS if you have already supported it. I am so grateful that you have that kind of faith in me and promise I will do everything in my power to make it the opposite of shite.
NOBODY HATES YOU , DAFT TWERP! Now your dad has spoken, I can say I enjoyed another great bit of writing.
You must be more careful when you are unwell!
I lost my debit card in one of my 4 compost heaps, found it again when I dug them out in the winter. I knew manure was worth more than money.