this little world Chapter 1

Farewell to Phones

Aylesbury, Bucks - May 6th 1996

Time did some very odd things that first morning in Aylesbury. It played tag with its own tail. Going round and round in a seamless succession of starts.

I answered questions over and again, smiling for the same photograph. Suddenly I was a hero and I was also a fraud, desperate to break out and to do something to justify all the attention.

I am bad at starts. They are so arbitrary. Beginnings are beyond me and I need to be in motion before I even admit to myself there might have been an initial state, a line in the sand. I hate the desperate platitudes of the best laid plans, the clean scrubbed sense of readiness that comes with a beginning. It was only the local press that I was talking to, but they gave me cause to have second thoughts, to wonder why I had given up a perfectly good job, a perfectly good life to walk around England of all places.

I was reliving all the worst errors of my life. I watched a ‘Headful of Doubts’- a film of neuroses produced by my sub-conscious and directed by Woody Allen. My life had become a series of soliloquies. I was not making sense and I was being asked about why I had promised to dress as a duck for the day.

Interviewer: I am joined today by Gavin Stewart, a thirty-three year old former City Trader who’s swapped his FT and City desk for a rucksack and walking boots. Gavin good morning.
GS : Morning.
Interviewer: Well .. if you thought you had been out for a long walk over the weekend think again! Gavin is proposing to walk an amazing 2,000 miles around England! Gavin’s route will take him from Aylesbury this morning all the way along the canal to Leighton Buzzard (essential local reference). From there he tells me that he will walk all the way up the East Coast to Whitby. Then after Hadrian’s Wall, he’ll wander lonely ...eh...like a cloud ( slight chuckle ) through the Lake District. But that’s not the end as he will complete his circumnavigation of the country by returning here to Aylesbury, coming back to this spot in three months time. Gavin - that’s a bit of a stroll?
GS: It certainly is.

Patterns. I was looking for patterns. A way out of this maze of expectation. Instead I found a pattern to local radio interviews.

The interviewer led the conversation by providing the facts of the interchange. I, as the subject of the interview, was there to provide the response, the congregation in the church of radio. The interviewer had fixed views about what was newsworthy.

Giant marrows have weights - and Long Distance Walkers have a charity. Nothing else about them could possibly be of interest.

Interviewer: Now Gavin you are not just doing all this all for fun. For the listeners at home, let me tell you that, unfortunately, Gavin has decided not to dress as a duck for the day, but instead he is wearing a solar powered baseball cap and a T-shirt for a locally based charity ADEC....what does ADEC stand for Gavin?
GS: The Aylesbury Development Education Centre....
Interviewer: How much money do you hope to raise with your walk?
GS: As much as...
Interviewer: Well Gavin that’s all we have got time for I am afraid. It just remains for me to wish you good luck and to ask you to come back and share your experiences with the listeners when you return.
GS: Thank you.

I had not wanted to talk about charity stunts or about Aylesbury duck costumes. I had wanted to talk about my recurring dream. That would make some interesting radio. The one that had come back to haunt me after years of mouldering at the back of my imagination. The one where I was a Grand Prix driver sitting nude in my car.

I feel the car revving up... I want to go. I want to go. But when I do finally try to start I stall the car and have to sit stationary and silent while in the logic of my dream - cars, then walkers, dogs and patients in hospital beds slip pass me, off into the race. All of this by the way always takes place to a soundtrack - David Bowie’s Heroes.

Sometimes in the dream I fume at my inertia, but other times it ends on a happy note with me getting out on to the track, that suddenly becomes a field full of poppies on which I lie down and sleep.

Somewhere the walk actually started, though I am buggered if I know where. It made closing the loop impossible at the other end in August. But ends are easy when you finally get to them. You simply stop. So let’s call the start the canal bridge in Aylesbury. It has such an official feel to it when you see the pictures of me standing with a crowd of well-wishers.

It was a pretty day and the Aylesbury Arm of the Grand Union Canal contrived to look idyllic, reflecting the blue sky above and the flash of colour of the underside of a diving kingfisher. Even the dog shit on the path by the newly built Tescos had taken on a warmed brick tint in the sunlight. I strolled out with a crowd of friends along the towpath.

After walking for awhile I read the note I had written to myself the Christmas before. A note from the smug me that I currently wanted to kill. Take pictures I had written. Take pictures. Take pictures. Try to remember.

OK, I thought. I can do that.
Exhibit One. Aylesbury.
I turned round and looked.

It’s an odd place to start a dream. Aylesbury; a typical, a place that could be used to represent the whole South East England. A place that forgot for a while about its human dimension and set about knocking itself down. A place that has installed more by-passes than a cardiac unit.

Perhaps the best photo to sum up Aylesbury (and my feelings about it) would be of its County Council Tower (which was handy as it was the only building that I could see this far out into the country). For sheer inappropriateness for its environment this building should win a prize. A tower of cold concrete shaped like a coal bunker in a townscape of much lower buildings. It sticks out like a seal in a jug of custard. From a distance it resembles a tombstone. Here lies Aylesbury - RIP.

The canal I was walking alongside by contrast was built on a very human scale. Hand built, in fact, where every bucket of soil dug was resented. A product of a craft culture where the skill of the canal builder was in following the contours of the land and in conserving the valuable resource of water and manpower. Most of the canals in England are two hundred years old now and despite years of neglect they still basically work. It’s testament to a craft approach to life which makes things to last.

Without realising it, I had committed myself to a journey to find value. Did I prefer the canal or the concrete? Which England was my England? I was an unwitting pilgrim who had taken up a quest. I was Gawain accepting the challenge of the Green Knight.

I should add that the Aylesbury Arm of the Grand Union Canal is barely wide enough to accommodate one narrow boat and in the places where the reeds have invaded it looks like a long garden pond. It’s become a sort of folly. A monument or perhaps mausoleum to the canal building craze. A hobbyist’s stretch of water, which for commercial purposes is as practical as a plate glass battleship.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland .

The finest feature of this section of the canal is its view of the long wave of the Chiltern escarpment. As the Aylesbury Arm rises to the main branch of the canal it stands up above the surrounding fields, giving a panorama which sweeps over miles, from Cymbeline’s Castle near Chequers right along the line of the ancient Ridgeway to Ivinghoe Beacon. The eye seems to leap from the furrows of the ploughed fields onto the white of the hawthorn hedgerow and then off for miles soaring like a crow. Even here in the relative quiet of the fields the present day butts into the day dream. On a fine day you are lucky if you can enjoy it unhindered, by aircraft noise and helicopters passing overhead, by off-road vehicles chewing up a nearby lane and by walkers standing around blocking the towpath admiring the view.

At Marsworth the Aylesbury Arm joined the main branch of the Grand Union Canal. Turning left led towards Leighton Buzzard.

I successfully completed the day’s navigational challenge.

It was still early in the season and the canal was almost empty of traffic. The lock gates gleamed. Their recently painted panels reminded me of the black and white fronts of mock Tudor houses. The water was almost still, reflecting the romantic reds and the greens of the mothballed boats.

I found it perturbing to be walking home on the very first day. In fact this short section on the canal to Leighton Buzzard was the only bit of the route which I covered twice. The second time in August I really did come home, but then there was no one around to give me a welcome so I’ll make do now with mixing my memories, intercutting my real unassuming homecoming with making a speech at Leighton’s May Fayre on this first day. I remember trying to say something inspirational about the town. Something appropriate for the end of a long walk.

Leighton Buzzard looks at its best coming up the canal from the South. The spire of All Saints rising up out of the remnants of the River Ouzel’s water meadows. Once you get close enough to be within the modern bypass it all seems reassuringly distant and self-contained as it must have been in the past. A small market town. A mirage in the green fields, like a liner sailing across the expanse of the ocean.