diary pages

Jan 1st, 2025: Walking so softly &c &c

The project I didn’t mean to complete in 2024, a text score, and slowing down

Every so often in my (musical) (personal) (imaginary) (delete as appropriate) life, it feels as though there are patterns between things that I might be able to understand, if only I was a little bit cleverer. A sort of grasping at shadows that I can never quite get to solidify.

Sometimes, all of these seem to line up - the ground under my feet, the text holding it together, and the music that it asks you to discover.

I’m a few beers down in the Wetherspoons in Soho that used to be a cinema with a group I barely know, and I can’t remember how we end up talking about Pauline Oliveros. The line from one of her “Deep Listening” scores has been rattling around inside my head for a few weeks now, joining me on the road and surfacing in strange places: “walk so softly that the soles of your feet become ears”. The boy I’m with laughs politely when I tell him this. He heads to the bar and I make my exit not long after, but it hits me on my way home: the “soft” part of Oliveros’ footsteps doesn’t have to mean quiet.

I have a history of giving up on things, just as they’re reaching their endpoint. Ask my housemates about the stacks of unfinished craft projects that have turned up in the last few months. Or the 12-week meditation course I opted out of in week 11. Perhaps 2024’s new year’s resolution to be able to do the splits by the end of the year (and the other, secret resolutions I never told anyone, and failed to keep all the same) is something I had a little less control over the success of, but who knows if I’d have made it if only I’d stuck at trying past July.

Something I wasn’t supposed to be doing was walking the Capital Ring, a 78-mile circular walk around London, designed and (mostly) signposted by TfL in the early 2000s. Between March and August, I take an inordinate number of tube, overground and national rail trains to various start and end points around the loop, and walk it in thirteen sections, in too-small shoes, mostly alone, occasionally joined by a few of my dearest friends.

London is a strange city. It’s walkable, or rather, it would be if it wasn’t so big. The tendency of most Londoners is an over-reliance on the tube network which leads to it feeling like a book of postcards, unconnected. Looping through the boroughs by foot really makes you appreciate the way in which the big city swallowed up everything in its path. The contrast between the 87 horses I see on a leg of the walk in Eltham (with, of course, views straight out to Canary Wharf and the Shard in the background) and the desolate unfinished-feeling concrete of Stratford and the docklands makes it feel like I’m travelling to different worlds, although I’m a similar distance out from “central” London.

I’m not counting how many steps I’m taking. I’m more interested in watching the wildflowers change as I walk through old woodland or riverside or heath. Even the cracks in the pavements have spaces for spring. I don’t even have many photographs. But the bliss is in being.

I read that pure attention is prayer, and it’s often struck me that this is what we do in our concert halls too, our hush, our ritual, our worship. Feet taking me wherever they will, circling a common centre. The purest attention, the deepest listening, that I’ve given to the changing landscapes of the city I never expected to live in. What part of this isn’t art?

III

Here’s the thing. Walking is still the best coping mechanism I have. When the black dog comes calling, what better thing can you do than take it for a walk?

As a child, I built dens, cleared rivers, and dreamed up new worlds for myself in the woods behind the back garden gate. At primary school, walking the lines painted on the school playground over and over was something I understood, when the colours and the voices were too bright and too loud. As a teenager, I’d climb onto my desk and escape out of my bedroom window when it felt hard to breathe. I walked the city walls in York in the brief months I lived there, sometimes knowingly, sometimes coming back into myself by the side of a road, steeped in history, more often that not covered in scratches, not quite sure how I’d gotten there.

It’s no surprise that this is the thing I keep coming back to, to stay grounded.

Everywhere I’ve called home, and some places besides, I’ve let my feet teach me the lie of the land, and mapped out the routes that get me back into myself. I walked the canals in Birmingham, when it was the only way I could leave the house without being sick. Debated the best way to walk round Cannon Hill Park (anticlockwise) until they dredged up the pond. Let my feet find the quietest places with the best trees to perch in, within a three mile radius of the house I spent the COVID-19 lockdown in. Started walking the six miles home from my Saturday job in Golders Green the first year I moved to London, after passing out in one too many tube stations. Spent another new year’s day thinking abut drowning, somewhere between Cockfosters and World’s End. Eased the inexplicable fear in my chest by making the pilgrimage up the New River Path to Alexandra Palace, several times a month. Found out the hard way that the difference between being myself and being someone worth talking to was the distance to Gladstone Park and back, no matter the time of day or night.

I start 2025 with my right knee still wobbly from yesterday’s nine miles of canal. I start 2025 blinking in the dark. I start 2025 wincing as my girlfriend tries to massage 26 years of tension out of my shoulder blades. I start 2025 eating slightly chewy leftover poppadoms on the eastbound platform of the central line at Shepherd’s Bush station. I start 2025 with a strange itching to make something good. I start 2025 making decisions about sounds so small you’ll never hear them over a string orchestra anyway, and and trying to work out how to reproduce them next week. I start 2025 halfway through an arbitrary journey between two cities I’ve called home. Shoes rubbing a little, the smell of wetsuits drying, dry skin cracking on my right hand. Whoever this makes me this year. Whatever this makes the year, this me.

Even without the unravelling, as a non-driver with a irrational distrust of taxis, it makes sense that my feet are the way in which I map out my world. I’ve never had a great ear, for a musician. But I have this: the soles of my feet, time and time again, becoming not just my ears and eyes but something else, a tool for finding where I am in this whirlwind life. The feedback that persuades me I’m real. Even when I change with the weather or the seasons like the landscape does, I’m listening.