Mildly giddy on the cusp of new things

Jennie suggests I might be racing through this project too quickly, and it’s true that I’m keen to press on. As David Thomas once sang in a Pere Ubu song, ‘My hands are complicated thoughts…but my feet just want to go.’ And I’m finding the process (the planning, walking, writing) exciting, revelatory – not as [...]

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Now with added photos…

Home now, with leads aplenty, I’ve added pictures from phone and camera to the interweb, for your viewing pleasure. To whet your appetite, there’s a rather painterly shot of a crane in Leeds. Moving on, pictures of the Parkgate-to-Chester leg of my main walk are in a set on Flickr. And in another set,  images [...]

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Concrete sermon: Mersey Ferry

Itinerant puppeteer and social commentator Walter Wilkinson visited Liverpool in the mid-Thirties. In the brief account of the visit (in Puppets through Lancashire, 1936) he and his partner Winifred remark on the Merseyside penchant for building on a massive scale: “The Mersey Tunnel is the largest sub-aqueous work of its kind in the world. The [...]

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Walk the Line II: Liverpool Central to Docks

I meant to stroll, drift and dream the city around me. In fact I rushed, like a droplet in a torrent, following any green man crossing chance, snatching blurry pictures in the evening light. Liverpool’s outdoor spaces didn’t feel like places to linger, more like places to move. I first came here nearly 20 years [...]

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Ormskirk to Maghull

Later in the walk, getting to start points will present difficulties. However as the previous day’s leg finished at my house, I had zero travel time to the start. I headed out over the small hill at the back of where I live, territory I only know from dark early morning trips to the paper [...]

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