The Walk

 The house is built for days like this I think as we step through the upvc front door and walk past two small hatch-back cars. You had been worried about your hay-fever and feeling sneezy. I tell myself that you will enjoy this when you get there but also remind myself that saying this out loud would not be helpful. In my patronising way I imagine I am with a horse that needs calming. Just get on the road I think and we do. Turning left out of the drive down the anti-clockwise curving descent of the crescent. Our home stands halfway around this arc. We pass the children’s chalk drawings reminding us to stay cheerful and happy. Then it’s on to the junction at the end of the road where a rich swathe of grass opens up. A football pitch where both of us played for teams and with each other. What’s your favourite memory of the seaside I ask inspired by the blue-sky breeziness filling the air? I don’t like the seaside remember? Oh but we had fun playing cricket outside the triangle cabin (in the cliff top holiday park). Yes, you acknowledge with a small nod and a fleeting faraway look. Me and Ralf (your younger brother) got shouted at you remember. Ah yes, what happened then I probe, enjoying this opening onto the past. Me and Ralf got shouted at by a man for running behind his cabin. We did it again and so he shouted at us again. The thrill of feeling your exhilaration spreads through my own body and I feel tears of longing begin to find their way to the surface as we swish our feet down the left wing of the lock down standard-length grass of the daisy spattered pitch, a stadium full of various leafy fans looking on with baited breath. Right down the front, the blackberries gasp inwardly at our larger-than-life proximity.

 

Okay, I suggest, we’ll cut in here and at the end there’s a low branch so mind your head. There is always something immediately soothing about a compacted mud path through a glade. We pick our way through carefully watching our step. Not Hansel and Gretel but a contingent reconstruction of their last known movements. The low branch appears like the familiar end of the ghost train ride. I stoop to stick my head through and see a couple coming down the main path. You and I wait for them to pass and then stagger out into the open. You put on a Cornish accent to suggest that we must have looked like a couple of goblins emerging bent over, out of the trees. I’m happy that you were not embarrassed to have made this unconventional appearance out of the wings. You are a few inches taller than me too so stooping could have been potentially more demeaning for you. The young couple have a dog and as they walk ahead they split and a puzzled look flashes over the woman’s face. Her blond head of hair echoing the glossy mass of the loyal spaniel. Her partner ambles up the slight incline and I whisper he’s looking for the poo bin as he swings the customary scrotal plastic bag a little too casually. Why do you always have to talk too loud? Was I talking loudly? We’re going up there I indicate, where there’s a small bridge behind the eighth tee.

 

Did you like it at an all-boys school?

Well it was different. Bundles every five minutes and shouting in all the lessons.

Doc Rock liked that. He thought it was funny so he just let it happen.

So you liked sixth form?

Well yes you could hear the teachers. It was all calmer.

You pass me the metal walking stick. I place it between the gaps of the planks on the bridge and it feels somehow deeply unsettling. Trip trap trip trap

Now on the other side of the bridge we decide to try and lengthen our telescopic walking aid. You pull it out beyond the nipple that secures it in place. You’ve gone too far I say.

It needs to go in there. And trying hard not to pinch the tip of my finger I slide the two sections into position. There.

It’s still the same height you say. No I think you’ll find it’s taller now. I look at you and contemplate the mystery of your height. You hold the walking stick at your side with the handle at your hip. Oh yes that is higher. On we go past the main brick bridge built by Napoleonic prisoners of war (I am told). We’re going to walk through here. I point scanning for the snicket that somehow always remains hidden from view when I walk this way. Like a secret door it only reveals itself at a certain angle. Two golfers approach down the fairway so we cut through the rough. That’s a hacker I say indicating the man on the far side. What’s that you ask. Well it’s a golfer who hacks the ball a short distance into the rough and then hacks it a short distance again into some other rough. Can a golf ball kill you? You ask. I don’t know you’ll have to google it. How many deaths by golf ball every year? If it hit you in the temple it would be lethal I suggest. We duck into the clearing before we find out. On the shaded path on top of the short cliff down to the river is a holly hock. Ah a holly hock I say and you pretend to massacre it with the walking stick. Don’t do that I plead with a chuckle. The same laugh I made when my big sisters tickled me. The bluebells have all gone I note. Do they only come out in spring? Yes. I realise that my nostrils are tensed in preparation for the pungent atomised air of wild garlic mingled with the damp compacted soil but they too have gone. We spot another holly hock. Then the giant oak tree that has fallen across the river onto the other bank. How recent as that you ask? I don’t know. It’s still growing look at the leaves. Does it know it’s in such an undignified position I wonder?  All your arboreal neighbours standing loftily around your recumbent shaded form, their glossy green leaves shimmering as they catch the sunlight. I’m tempted to walk over to the other side of the bank this way I say half expecting you to egg me on. Instead, we carry on picking our way along the path on the gladed bank.

Now I was reading how cells communicate by producing certain components when they come into contact with receptors is that it, I ask? And a diagram forms in my head. And I say well this is going on all the time in our bodies it’s as if we are part of the whole cosmos which is one substance. I pick my way through carefully aware of how your mind has been a fragile place. We go on through the glade which feels like the perfect example of a woodland meandering path. So, I say these biological and chemical entanglements underpin all the things that we do whilst the part of the brain that decides what we think we are likes to think it is in control. But I say there are at least two experiments that I know of that demonstrate how there is a little time lapse before this data identity decision making part of the brain is activated. It’s called “lag” I say. There is a spike in brain activity after the arm has moved for instance, I say pushing a branch out of the way of my face. So it’s all preordained you say and I say ah no that is how the conceptual ‘in control” brain would frame it – that is determinism. The idea that we are moving along a fixed path. This can only emerge from a cognitive kind of post-rationalised version of events but really we are all organisms and we feel. Perhaps if we could feel our sense of feeling this “lag” as it is called would not be such a problem? We are so busy thinking things that we don’t really notice the feeling underneath. We think in order to create a hierarchy, for instance there is the scientific structure of the world in molecules and atoms and then there is the emotional response to this. The emotion is a secondary response to the primary material of atoms. It’s a hierarchy but really it’s just a mode of thought. I look over and you are still smiling. You nod and I go on. So, if we can feel our sense of being part of the one substance of the cosmos then these abstract modes of thought might not be so divisive and occlusive of actual difference? Perhaps they could become more useful again? On we go back over another wooden bridge. I like these chats with you I say it makes me have to clarify my thoughts and your understanding makes me feel less alienated. Yes, you laugh I don’t think mum gets it. Well maybe I think but I honestly hadn’t thought this is what I meant. Perhaps there is no real conceptual understanding only a post rational view of feeling? You are my son and so you feel my ideas. That’s not how I was told it works in the psychoanalytic realm – you and I are in combat. We cut to the right through another jinking path with characteristic dappled sun light. Where to now you ask and we both spot a group of boys smoking on a bench placed incongruously in the middle of this woodland area. They remind me of the bundles at the boys school you described. Smoke your skunk I sing. They’re not smoking weed I say just acting as if they are. I feel their eyes upon us as we enjoy our blissful meandering and I let their collective gaze slide off like a momentary shower. We are coming back into a more open defined area. We pass a small weir that I have often stopped to look at on my solitary walks. Its bubbling flow is gently soothing. A couple of men appear walking towards us dressed in shorts and clothes made from materials designed to effectively communicate your serious walking intentions. They have a map between them. I am transported back to Snowdonia and think how these two would not look out of place up a rugged scramble path on the way to a peak overlooking a sweeping vista, instead of here on the riverside walk I have taken for the last few years in my lunch break. The men even look like they are visitors from Holland or Scandinavia but I can’t quite hear their accents. We look at each other and laugh. I point down the path like a serious hiker. My own father was fond of pointing out the human habit of pointing and he’s right it does have a kind of hubristic self-deception about it but not always dad. Ahead of us is the last stretch of path, which is a well-defined footway taking us back to the clump of trees we had stumbled out of like goblins.