mersey valley, transpennine trail, reddish vale
While you walk thoughts slip in focus, are found, created and lost, and it can be hard to shut them up and enjoy the day. Our thoughts and speech are so attuned to the rhythms of walking it's the perfect occupation for a writer. It's also the only way to see a city. Yes cities are large and you can't go far quickly without a car or bike or public transport, but they're only ways to reach specific destinations by a specific time. To know the city you have to walk it, and that means leaving the roads sometimes.
Manchester has footpaths, parks, cemeteries, rivers, canals, disused canals and disused railway lines, most of which can be walked along in places. They form a shadow geography, along with old buildings and historical street names, that hint at the shape of the old city and its suburbs. They shed a new light on the contemporary city, help to clarify how it fits together, where the joins are and where the fissures are. Just as the steep camber of a street, the remains of tram tracks poking through tarmac, the cobbles under the road dug up to reach water pipes, or the remnants of whatever plan a park was made to make the last hundred years a bit more hazy, a little shorter.
In a sense the city haunts itself, and walkers haunt the phantom, colonise and recreate for themselves. Their thoughts drop, or float, or submerge, or make persistent rhythms accompanying their steps. Some thoughts stay. Either where they'll be remembered quickly, or where they'll emerge a lot later. Most where they'll mix with other thoughts and create bright hybrid thoughts. And later you sit, tired from 4, 5, 6, 7 or more hours walking, and the thoughts keep walking. Because you're no longer walking you can watch the thoughts and track them through the city, see how the two organisms, you and the city, fit together.
There'll be more of this.
Manchester has footpaths, parks, cemeteries, rivers, canals, disused canals and disused railway lines, most of which can be walked along in places. They form a shadow geography, along with old buildings and historical street names, that hint at the shape of the old city and its suburbs. They shed a new light on the contemporary city, help to clarify how it fits together, where the joins are and where the fissures are. Just as the steep camber of a street, the remains of tram tracks poking through tarmac, the cobbles under the road dug up to reach water pipes, or the remnants of whatever plan a park was made to make the last hundred years a bit more hazy, a little shorter.
In a sense the city haunts itself, and walkers haunt the phantom, colonise and recreate for themselves. Their thoughts drop, or float, or submerge, or make persistent rhythms accompanying their steps. Some thoughts stay. Either where they'll be remembered quickly, or where they'll emerge a lot later. Most where they'll mix with other thoughts and create bright hybrid thoughts. And later you sit, tired from 4, 5, 6, 7 or more hours walking, and the thoughts keep walking. Because you're no longer walking you can watch the thoughts and track them through the city, see how the two organisms, you and the city, fit together.
There'll be more of this.
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