What I wanted to write about last week and yesterday is what it’s been like to walk to sections of the route I’ve traced so far. But I’ve found it difficult to find a way to approach it.
I’ll try again though. Despite the frustrations my walks, especially last Saturday and a week last Sunday have been very enjoyable. The main reason for this, as discussed yesterday, is that what I’m seeing is mostly new and unfamiliar.
Within that unfamiliarity there has been the odd flash of recognition. Sometimes definite recognition, sometimes more questionable. As when passing back under the M60 early in the walk on Saturday I turned to look back at the junction I’d just crossed and remembered coming down onto it from above one day in the snow.
But the thing is I’m certain I’ve never been there before. Nothing I passed before the junction was familiar. Worse, I don’t see how I could have been there. My first thought was I must have wandered down onto it from a brief temp job I had in Radcliffe. But that’s some distance north and east, with the main roads tending a little further east as they cross back inside the motorway. Even if I was working part-time mornings (I can’t remember now) it would have been a long walk in winter with the light limited.
There is the Bridgewater Canal nearby, but I didn’t know it went through this part of the city, and I don’t remember walking any waterway in that direction. I can’t have been coming on it from Leigh because I’ve never been there. And besides, I’d have to have left the canal and looped round the junction in order to approach the way I thought.
So maybe I was mistaken. Perhaps I’m thinking of another junction, or even another city. Perhaps I just imagined the whole thing.
This is one of the things I find fascinating about memory and perception – they’re unreliable and easily fooled. It’s also indicative of how my mind works while I’m walking. Even where the place is totally unfamiliar I’m looking for similarities to what I already know. Sometimes this is logically absurd, such as bits of Kunming in China reminding me of Manchester.
But often it works.
[And there the entry ended. Evidently it remains difficult to write about what it’s been like to walk the route. Incidentally, what I mean by this is a section by section account of what I feel, think, and see along the way. Where ‘section’ means roughly the area I can cover in around 3-5 minutes.]
Matt's big M60 walk 