After a turbulent month, on Saturday I had the most productive day yet in terms of planning my route. But before I get into that I’ll briefly explain what happened that made the month so turbulent.
My last days out walking the route before last weekend were 14 and 15 February. I took a break the following weekend, and by the weekend after that, 28 February/1March, a couple of things had happened.
Most significantly my mother’s illness entered the final, terminal stage, necessitating a lot of travel to and from Lancaster. She died on Saturday 7 March.
At the same time I was offered a new temporary job starting on 9 March, and on 4 March signed for, and collected the keys to, a housing association flat; though I don’t move until 12 April.
So with all this happening it’s not surprising that I should take a break. And with my mother’s illness I expected an enforced disruption at some point. But I was surprised that on my return to route planning I should make so much progress and enjoy the day so much.
The weather should have really fouled-up the day. It fell into three phases. Early on there were intermittent showers sweeping across. Not wet or prolonged enough soak, but just enough to be irritating. In the early afternoon it rained heavily for nearly an hour. I stopped twice to shelter and lost some time, but mostly continued walking and got saturated. Then the cloud got blown apart and the rest f the day was dry, sometimes even sunny.
Yet despite the often miserable conditions I had a great time, and his was by far the most attractive leg of the walk so far. I also had reason to be proud of myself – which I’ll come to shortly. About a quarter of an hour’s walk from Besses O’ ‘The Barn Metrolink I ran out of city and the road turned to a track. This swung left and away from the M60.
I was approaching junction 18 of the motorway, where effectively the M60 crosses itself in a giant concrete and tarmac X. In fact the upper V is formed (from left to right) of the M66 and the M62, while the lower half of the X is the M60.
This is why the track heads away from the M60, it takes a detour to cross the M66 by bridge. It then follows the M66 back some way, before making a similar diversion to cross the M62 in the same way.
It is at this section where I was most proud of myself. I get bad acrophobia – fear of heights – especially where there’s a motorway thundering underneath. I had been fully prepared to crawl across these bridges in order to progress. In the event I didn’t need to. Instead I stopped before each bridge, controlled my breathing and allowed my heart-rate to slow, and got used to the sight and noise of the traffic. This took maybe ten minutes the first time, and half that the second . Then I walked down the centre of the bridge, concentrating on the path immediately in front, and and managed to cross without panic.
And at this point too, crossing the M62, I began to travel southwards down the eastern side of the M60. Here also I was still among fields. There was briefly a road and buildings, but notably more rural than urban. It wasn’t until I was entering Rhodes via the A6045 that my surroundings started to look like the city again. And shortly after that there was a pleasant section through Alkrington Woods.
Unfortunately, not long after leaving the woods it started raining very heavily, and did so for around three quarters of an hour. But even this had its positive, a anyone following my Twitter feed would have known. Heading uphill in the downpour I saw a large frog hop out of a garden hedge and across the pavement. It paused there until I reached it, at which launched itself into the wide temporary river of rainwater rushing down the side of the road, and was swept away.
From here the walk was closer to the urban landscape you’d expect. Though to the end of the day’s walking there was a quiet interlude on the Oldham Way, along the Rochdale Canal.
I’m confident that with an early enough start, and a long day, I can finish planning my route in one day.
One of the curious things about this day’s walking is how easy it was. There was no point at which I felt lost; I made good progress; and despite the rain and the two bridges it was thoroughly enjoyable. It reminded me how much I want to do this walk. I’m looking forward to my next day’s planning (possibly 12 or 18/19 April), and to the full circuit on 30 May.
Back near the beginning of this journal I wrote about how creatively I’m more of a performer and especially improviser than anything else. The other side of this is that I’m not very good at art which needs to be planned out in advance. In writing for instance I can just about manage a short story, or even short script. But for anything longer where I need to sketch out a plot beforehand; not a chance. Once I know the story in outline I lose interest.
At the same time plot is the least interesting aspect of any fiction to me. I’m interested in characters, their interactions, ideas, and in the quality of writing. Yet we’re forever told about ‘three-act structures’, ‘character arcs’ (a way of imposing generalised narratives on individual experience), and ‘the hero’s journey’ (ditto)*. My solution to this tedium in my (largely unpublished, and probably not very good) short fiction and scripts has been to create a loose framework within which characters can take on their own life.
An example – mentioned as a clear illustration rather than for any particular quality – was a script called 16 Tears. Here the conceit was in the title – a couple meet and fall in love. Something causes one of the couple to shed a single tear. As they do they somehow know that after a further fifteen single tears have been shed the relationship will be over. So the story progresses, dropping in on the couple at different stages of their time together. It doesn’t show every tear, it doesn’t need to – just the first and last, and significant stages in between.
This is plainly a fantastical, unreal, even nonsensical premise for a drama. And for the most part remains in the background, many scenes not including tears at all. But the script itself remains mostly grounded in real-life. The framework, the conceit of the 16 tears is simply a device to provide structure in the absence of plot, conventional structure, or story arc.
Precisely this sort of framework is at play with the current project. Whatever I produce will be hung on the structure of the walk around the M60. The subjects of what I produce – be it this journal, my planned sound and visual works, or anything else, like performances such as that on 28 February at Peter Barlow’s Cigarette – may turn out to be entirely autonomous and unrelated to each other.
Not that I think this is an inherently better way of working. Rather it is more interesting to me. And it’s the way I’m happiest working. Indeed, working to a pre-existing plan is simply impossible for me. It’s boring and I can’t motivate myself to do it.
*I forgot another personal bugbear in this litany; ‘it’s all about the story’. No it isn’t.
Matt's big M60 walk 