Walking back to happiness: after some forced time off his feet, Mark Hooper takes a few tentative steps…
There’s a pattern emerging here. I started this column with grand intentions and was promptly stopped in my tracks by a random injury. There were all types of cheesy metaphors I could have made about bruised hearts, but let’s be honest, we don’t go in for those weekend supplement platitudes round these parts.
Nevertheless, I found myself back where I started recently. I don’t know how or why but, following a trip to Gloucestershire to talk about walking (what else?) with the Memory Band’s brilliant Stephen Cracknell for Pop-Up Stroud’s Subculture: NeoAncients festival, I woke up at home in agony. I struggled to get out of bed, get dressed, put on my shoes or tie my laces. After my GP’s online-only self-diagnosis booking system directed me to A&E, a young, keen junior doctor prodded, probed, scanned and X-rayed me before triumphantly declaring I had a textbook case of sciatica.
As things progressed (or, more accurately, deteriorated), walking started to become a problem. The pain spread its way downwards by frustrating increments. At first, it felt like I’d pulled both my hamstrings. Next, my calves felt unbearably tight, as if they were constantly tensed. Eventually, having taken various vitamin supplements while waiting for further scans and blood tests and being told there wasn’t much I could do except ‘be patient’, it settled down into a weird numbness in my right foot. Sometimes, this is nothing more than a pins and needles sensation in my toes that won’t go away. Other times, particularly at night, it escalates into a sharp, raw pain that feels like I’ve taken the top layer of skin off.
All of this can make walking tricky, as you might imagine. And yet walking is still the best therapy for me, both physically and mentally. It’s ironic that all this came about as I was discussing going on a walk with Stephen to commemorate the re-release of his 2013 Memory Band album On The Chalk (Our Navigation Of The Line Of the Downs). During our Stroud talk, we touched on how the LP was inspired by the music and mythology surrounding the ancient Harrow Way, teasing the theory that it was once part of a European Superhighway before the British Isles broke away from the continent. Stephen being Stephen, he promptly shot this theory down in flames, whilst pricking several other pompous bubbles of received opinion.
I came away from the talk newly enthused by Stephen’s hilariously iconoclastic take on almost every subject I brought up. For instance, when I mentioned how Alfred Watkins (author of 1925’s The Old Straight Track) described his ‘epiphany’ moment where he physically saw an apparition of leylines mapped out (‘like glowing wires all over the surface of the country’), Stephen deadpanned, “It’s amazing what tiredness, hunger and hallucinatory substances can do to the brain”.
I’d arrived in Stroud intending to further explore a landscape I knew intimately – my dad grew up right on Minchinhampton Common, a magical place which overlooks valleys that drop down on three sides, with Stroud nestled at the foot of one of them. I’d wanted to visit the famous Longstone there, a solitary standing stone on the common, said to mark the burial site of a Danish chief who died during a battle at the brilliantly named Woeful Danes’ Bottom. In fact, further research reveals that no Danes or their bottoms were involved, but rather a Saxon called Wolfhang (‘Woefuldane’), who was actually buried at nearby Gatcomb Tump – a long barrow dating to 3,500BC. One legend – as noted by Julian Cope in his The Modern Antiquarian: A Pre-millennial Odyssey Through Megalithic Britain – has it that if you pass a sick child through one of the holes in the limestone menhir, it will be cured.
Sadly, I didn’t get to test this theory – or to try to find the random countryside track I’d spotted deep in the middle of a drunken lockdown evening while watching Dulcima on BBC2. An obscure 1971 film by Frank Nesbitt, Dulcima stars John Mills as a dipsomaniac widower who becomes infatuated with his housemaid (played by Carol White), which was filmed in and around Minchinhampton, Stroud and Tetbury. I didn’t know this at the time, but as I watched White’s Dulcima take a country lane into Stroud, I immediately recognised it, and texted my cousin Mischa. By pure chance, Mischa had just been going through a stack of old family letters, in one of which our grandmother had written about the excitement amongst the locals because of all the filming going on.
My grandfather – always known to me as ‘Mr Fox’ – died when I was a young boy, but instilled in me a love of nature and walking that has stayed with me. It felt right to try and seek out this track that had somehow stuck in my mind, no doubt on a country stroll down the valley with him and/or my parents. But, as circumstances played out, I’ve had to slowly edge my way back into walking, a little more each day, learning to enjoy the moment regardless of how far I get, trying to make it part of my routine again.
The best walks are often the ones you don’t intend. Meeting up with my friend Dee in King’s Cross six weeks later, we didn’t plan anything more than a mooch around the markets and posh pop-ups of Coal Drops Yard. It’s not the obvious place for a walk – especially for the diehards who remember the area from its days of semi-legal warehouse raves. Now, the temporary portaloos have been replaced by a row of luxury brand outlets, overlooked by the headquarters of tech multinationals. Where I once remember staggering into the dawn light after an all-nighter at The Cross, now kids play in the fountains dancing outside Central St Martins college, while an open-air cinema attracted a late afternoon crowd along the canalside. Walking along the towpath as a Lord of the Rings film held its audience captive from the opposite bank, I realized this was exactly the spot described in Blood Knots by Luke Jennings (better known as the author whose Villanelle books inspired the TV show Killing Eve), where he first goes ‘urban fishing’ at night.
After browsing through the novels and records at Word on the Water – canal-boat bookshop that has become something of a local landmark – Dee and I headed back the way we came, briefly blocking the view of various orcs and elephantine creatures as we crossed past the screen again. Without even planning it, this turned into an extended walk up to Camden, interrupted by kamikaze cyclists, at least one fair-to-middling celebrity actor, and endless clouds of weed.
Climbing the steps and emerging onto Camden Road, we engaged in a bit more idle browsing, had a drink, and watched as fight between two groups of lads bubbled up in front of one of those punching machine arcades games on the High Street. At first it was vaguely amusing, nothing more – all empty machismo and handbags-at-dawn limbs flailing – but it quickly escalated, with crowds of smartphone-wielding onlookers quickly marking the perimeter, and a nasty mood swallowing the whole scene up.
By the time we’d retrodden our steps, police tape blocked the route, so we headed back down the slope to the canal again, following it all the way to Islington. It may not have been the walk I intended, but it was the walk I needed. Along the way a random man on narrowboat asked us to nominate a song and we laughed as he blasted Blue Monday out from his bluetooth speakers, following us as it echoed down the mid-20th-century concrete jetties and older tunnels.
By the end, we’d walked for mile in both directions, lost in conversation and the bizarre sights of the most urban of walks. Fuelled by a renewed energy, I’d completely forgotten about my right foot. By the time I made it back to the tube, the dull numbness in my toes had risen to a prickly, throbbing pain, but it was tempered by that reward you feel after any exercise. I was back in the saddle. My bruised heart was healing again. I was back out there, taking tentative steps – putting one foot in front of the other and seeing where they led me. It’s the only way.
