Perambulation

I mentioned in a comment to an earlier post that, for selected sixth formers, our school used to provide an alternative to compulsory games on Wednesday afternoons called "Perambulation". This involved driving out into the countryside with our favourite English teacher (dear old Roy Cross, a cricketing pipe-smoker / pipe-smoking cricketer, whose policy was always "smoke 'em if you've got 'em"), walking around for a bit, then stopping off for a pint on the way back. As I said in the comment, this was probably a more realistic preparation for our prospective lives as teachers and weekend ramblers than chasing balls across grass.

I have always had an ambiguous relationship with "games" as understood by the British; that is, competitive team sports, preferably involving a real risk of physical injury. Despite being a small chap, I have always been improbably strong and foolishly unafraid of bodily harm, and have the sort of natural hand-eye coordination that makes for a decent sportsman. So, unlike many bookish types, I found myself a regular fixture in school sports teams, if mainly low down in the order. But also, unlike most sporty types, I took a fairly ironic and laid-back view of things like "winning".

Chasing girls...
Boys vs. Girls Grammar, 1971. You'd have to have
known me a long time to even think I'm in in this picture...

Although I did play in second-string teams as a rugby wing forward and a close fielder in cricket, my main sporting distinction was that, from the age of 11, I was the goalkeeper of the hockey first XI. Idiots with the kamikaze instinct required by a hockey goalkeeper are hard to come by, and I was talent-spotted early on. "Look, that boy there doesn't seem to mind if larger boys hit hard balls towards him at high velocity -- is he very stupid?"

Goalkeepers are a breed apart in any sport. You dress differently, and you spend most of the game leaning on a goalpost, watching the seagulls flocking over the playing fields or thinking about girls, until there's an urgent shout and you're ON! Muddied oafs (oaves?) are charging towards you, and you have to stop them and/or stop the ball flying past you into the net.

Luckily, in hockey, you're armed with a stick, and have stout pads on your legs and padded kickers over your boots (not to mention a cricket box in your pants). You're damned near invulnerable, so it's "Charge!!" into the oncoming enemy. My speciality was fouling the forwards (preferably stepping on and occasionally breaking their sticks) and then deploying my secret weapons: left-handedness and cat-like reflexes. I could hold a stick in my right hand and save a penalty flick with my left 9.9 times out of ten. It's very gratifying, for a swot, to be pounded on the back and cheered by the sportiest, coolest boys in the school.

But that was only in the Spring term. Come the sixth form, I began spending the Winter and Summer terms with the Perambulators. I recall those outings with great pleasure. Numbers were restricted to about ten, drawn from both upper and lower sixths, so it was a pretty exclusive club. I can't remember how the membership was decided, but it pretty much amounted to that self-selecting handful of boys whose idea of a good time was a walk in the woods with a schoolteacher (hmm, that doesn't quite sound right). The smoking and drinking part was not widely advertised as a feature of the activity, obviously.

Odd as it may sound, I had never been "walking" before. Working class families in the South East of England didn't (and probably still don't) "go for a walk" -- I'm aware it was different in the North. On holiday, we sat on the beach, swam in the sea, or went for a ride. At weekends, we might occasionally go for a picnic, but that primarily involved sitting and eating. Recreational walking, involving special footwear and the use of maps, was something you might do in the Scouts, but was not a recognised family leisure activity. Besides, our parents and grandparents had done quite enough of that in the Army for a lifetime, thank you very much.

I became notorious in our family for always walking everywhere (not so difficult, in a town where you can walk from end to end in less than an hour). To school, to the shops, to friend's houses, even to nowhere in particular all by myself, despite the fact that there was a perfectly decent bus service. It just added to the family sense of my oddness. On one famous occasion I walked the nine miles down the A11 from my sister's new house in Wymondham into Norwich city centre, though I did catch the bus back. I liked the sense of freedom it bestowed -- don't like it here? start walking! -- and came to love the up-close, intimate view of the landscape and roadside that only walkers get. I would often escape into the cold and rain from the claustrophobic inertia of family occasions by announcing I was "just going for a walk".

Spot the reluctant walker
(Well, it is very wet, windy and cold)

A liking for needless walking -- "perambulation" -- and a recognition that walking counted as a valid alternative to formal sports later became an entrée into a certain sort of family life rather higher up the social scale. It meant I didn't laugh hysterically when a bracing walk was proposed on Boxing Day afternoon, for example, or wonder out loud why anyone would want to book a remote cottage in Wales, 25 miles from the nearest beach, for a summer holiday? Thanks to Perambulation, I passed these simple entry requirements when I encountered the Prof's family; why, I could even use an OS map in a high wind.

But walking also has a spiritual dimension, that is harder to describe, and takes a long time even to notice. There's something about the rhythm and the physiological effects of keeping a steady pace over medium to long distances which is conducive to thought and to well-being, and which heightens a meditative combination of self-awareness and self-forgetting (unless your boots are too tight). It's a very health-inducing activity, but some would go even further. The German film-maker Werner Herzog wrote a strange little book in 1978 called Vom Gehen Im Eis, translated as Of Walking in Ice, and published in 1991 by Jonathan Cape in a small, jacketed format very reminiscent of the series "Cape Editions" mentioned a few posts ago.

In a move typical of Herzog, when he heard a friend and mentor -- 78-year old film historian Lotte Eisner -- was dying in Paris, he decided to walk from Munich to Paris, "believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot". It took, in Herzog's account, from 23rd November to 14th December 1974 (about right -- it's 450 miles). The book recounts the journey -- a sort of expiatory pilgrimage -- in the form of a diary.

Whenever I dip into it, I am reminded of the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came", by Robert Browning, in which perfectly innocent stimuli like farm animals and implements become transformed and incorporated into the narrative of his nightmarish personal quest. But much of Herzog's apparent lunacy will be familiar to any walker:

As I walk the word 'millet', which I've always liked so much, just won't leave my mind, the word 'lusty' as well. Finding a connection between the two words becomes torture. To walk lustily works, and to reap millet with a sickle also works. But millet and lusty together doesn't work.

The belief that there is something grounding, centering -- sacramental, even -- in walking is widely held, and you won't hear any objections from me: solvitur ambulando (roughly, "the answer lies in perambulation").

In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.

(Navajo Blessing Way chant)

Lately, though, I've had a little foretaste of old age: painful cramps up my lower legs whenever I walk at any speed above a casual amble. It seems that all those years of walking have taken a toll, not least because of my tendency to wear wellingtons rather than proper walking boots. The podiatrists think they can sort me out however, and today I had a little compensatory foretaste of heaven: two young women in white -- angels! -- manipulating my naked feet as I lay happily on a fancy reclining couch. And all on the NHS.