An Evening Walk

I've just been taking a bit of a break from blogging. As I mentioned two or three posts ago, I'm writing a book. It's been going well but I decided I really needed to get my head down and knock out more words. Words going into blog-posts aren't going into the book!

I've recently eased up on myself, though. The other day I wrote this. It actually follows on, I've just realised, from the last-but-one post, so I've included the video I posted then:

I went for a walk this evening, as I often do, over the fields and up the hill opposite the house. It's not one of those big hills, the names of which walkers utter in hushed tones, just a humble bump in the ground, just steep enough at its steepest part to get you breathing heavily. The air was warm and still and the sky a deepening blue with just a scattering of tiny clouds high up, grey tinged with pink.

To get there, I made my way up the lane and along the edge of a field of young Holstein heifers. They were inquisitive and came over to see what I was doing there but, although they came close up to me they shied off when I made any sudden movements. At the end of the field, where the hill begins to steepen, I crossed a stile into a small wood which covers the hillside at this point. I made my way up through the trees by the side of a small beck that mysteriously vanishes underground, soaking into the grass, a few yards from the stile. Half way up, I sat down on its bank and ate a piece of chocolate. I could've sat there for a long time, as it's a magical spot.

From where I sat, I found myself thinking about my surroundings and the many layers of memory and association I laid over it as I looked around. I could see out through the trees to a wire fence and the field beyond it. This was a piece of modern, managed farm-land. The trees had been planted for a reason (there were signs that someone had been rearing pheasants hereabouts in the recent past). Then there was my recent past. I didn't grow up here: I moved here as an adult, out of necessity, never dreaming that I'd stay put for almost half my life. Having experienced 'step' relationships with people, it struck me that, in a way, this place was my 'step home'. So much in life gets changed or modified. Things get broken and then remade. It's neither a perfect nor an imperfect situation. It's just the way it is. Nevertheless, up to moving here I'd never stayed in one place for long. I'm pleased I didn't know I'd still be here now when I moved here all those years ago.

The landscape hereabouts obviously holds all sorts of associations for me now. Funnily enough though, I had not explored this wood until quite recently. I was walking round filming in it only the other week. Over the last three decades, I've often been out for local walks but if I find a route I like I tend to repeat it. I suspect most people are like that. We find comfort and pleasure in repetition. We don't set out to systematically map an area in our minds.

Then there's the less recent past, the times before any of us came along. To get here, I'd walked over the gentle undulations of a medieval field system. Going even further back, not far from here, my stepfather came across a neolithic axe-head.

Watching the film I made in the wood and walking in it afterwards, it struck me how seeing a place depicted lends it an aura which, when you visit it for real, it otherwise wouldn't have. The same effect can be created with other forms of depiction, literature and simply story-telling. It's obvious really - you only have to think of the locations of famous films, images and books. In a way, that aura, though, is only a more intense, striking version of the aura association and memory lend to a place anyway.

And when we think about or visit a place we know, what do we know about it apart from the aura we've created around it in our minds? The significance we ascribe to things isn't out there – it's in our heads. If you strip the aura away, the names we give to the features, the memories, the associations, what are we left with? Roquentin, the central character in Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea, discovers the answer, looking at the roots of a chestnut tree in the park:

All at once the veil is torn away, I have understood, I have seen.... The roots of the chestnut tree sank into the ground just beneath my bench. I couldn't remember it was a root anymore. Words had vanished and with them the meaning of things, the ways things are to be used, the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping over, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty lump, entirely raw, frightening me. Then I had this vision.

It took my breath away.