Two more young black men …

Two more young black men eat each other.
One disintegrates, emptied out, gutted.
The other interred in a pit of justice, police, court, prison, parole, police, court, prison, parole, police, court, prison.
The only trace now memorials made of damp flowers and photographs and 'did anyone see' posters on the corner of my block.

21st Century Fulfilment

I received a message from Ocado prior to my delivery last week to let me know my order was being packed in the 'customer fulfilment centre'. There are many things I will find in my delivery: toothpaste, vinegar, and toilet paper being just some of them. I'm not sure I ordered 'fulfilment'. And I'm not sure I'm going to find it in a packet of figs or pledge furniture polish either.

Endings

My neighbours for the last two nights have been shredding each other …
There must come a point in a relationship when you know that it's over. Probably at the point of slamming doors and esteem. Inverting intimacy to use every piece of knowledge of the other's fragility to displace them, to disappear them, to end it without having to take the responsibility of walking out. Like taking a blowtorch to wallpaper, there is no going back from that kind of sustained stripping of self, certainty, sanity.

Mary Berry is a goddess

My favourite statistic of the week:

In the UK last night, 1.72 million men watched Arsenal's Champions League qualifier on ITV1, while 1.92 million men tuned in to watch The Great British Bakeoff. And I say to each and every on of you 1.92 million men 'well done'! What better way to spend your evening than with a can of lager and Mary Berry on the tellie. Watching her wrapping wafer thin biscuit base around spoon handles to make tuiles is grace personified. 

My most embarrassing moment of the week:

When Dingo Baby came downstairs to find me lovingly staring at my freshly made chilli pepper jam (and I even grew the chillies). What with the decorating of the doors in teal and the potting of herbs and succulents on the balcony, I'm coming over all Kirsty Allsopp.

On walking ...

Henry David Thoreau described walking as a ‘holy art’, derived from those who set out ‘à la Sainte Terre’ (saunter), to the Holy Lands in the Middle Ages. Walking 100 miles, however, may seem less of a pilgrimage and more of a punishment, and certainly involves more profanities than any holy art should. But there is something to be said for its epic qualities.

Preparations are biblical in proportion, and probably incredibly annoying for anyone who is not interested or has to live with someone who is obsessively going over a route description for the 27th time, checking the weather three times a day, working out what to eat and when, and the optimal way to bandage feet and change socks en route.

And like any good religious allegory, that which is written in the aftermath is more likely to be based on scraps of memory that have a tendency to shape-shift with each retelling. As the pain and blisters are forgotten the route is relived and the mythic quality of the challenge grows: the brightness of the full moon that lit our path, the appearance of a 'swamp man' who guided people safely through the mud, the forbidding presence of Scrawsden Farm (I'm sure the owners are lovely people but I'm pretty sure their dogs belong in a 'Twilight' movie).

Along a trail that included the stark beauty of moors (Bodmin and Dartmoor), forests, industrial history, and 14,000 feet of ascent, I should at this point wax lyrical about the celestial qualities of the Cornish and Devon countryside. That part of the world, is, after all, known as ‘god’s own country’ (although I think several other folk intent on raising their sense of self esteem also use the phrase). But I confess that in the last 20 miles the route could have been in the Himalayas and I still wouldn't be able to remember it. What I do recall is cursing the very idea of ever doing another 100 miles again as I limped up the last vertical creek bed and down the final knee collapsing descent to the finish.

The beauty that I do remember is that of walking within the quietness that descends on people who must concentrate to stay awake, stay on track and stay upright. It is both funny and concerning to see people falling asleep on their feet and veering off into the bushes. I had my own scrapes with the countryside, mostly brought about by trying to read the map and route description at night and walk in a straight line at the same time.

Now a route description, like all good myths, is a very subjective thing, being just one person’s interpretation of the landscape. For example, where our route description said ‘bear right 90 degrees to pass along a ridge and then bear left 270 degrees to head towards the tor opposite’, I would probably have said something like ‘just head for the great big rock on the hill … you can’t miss it’.  And the instruction to ‘pass on the right side of the line of trees/barn/ruin’ becomes tricky when you start to ponder if that should be your right or the tree’s right; a choice that is not helped by my directional dyslexia. It is perhaps ironic that I choose orienteering as a sport but tattooing the letters ‘R’ and ‘L’ on the appropriate hands has helped.

There is fantastic satisfaction when shedding a page of route description and map at every checkpoint, indicative as it is of another set of miles done and only so many more to go. But this joy is matched only by the terror of getting down the road and realising that you have accidently thrown away the wrong page. This swinging of emotions is perhaps the best way to describe what it’s like to walk 100 miles. Finding the peanut butter sandwiches at a checkpoint … joy. Finding you have to wade through yet another field of mud … not joy. And so it goes for, in my case, 35 hours and 40 minutes.

The physical existence of the route description became a lifeline to reality, though, when approaching evening on the second day. I avoided the hallucinations that many who complete 100s have suffered, but instead was struck several times in the last miles by moments of transcendence when I was suddenly aware that I didn’t know what I was doing, why I was doing it or where I was going. All I knew was that I had to follow the route description. This incoherent rambling apparently continued verbally for some time after the event as reported by my long-suffering partner who once again was spending a weekend waiting in a community hall for me to arrive bearing a litany of things lost, bent, broken, unclean and drifting.

The transcendence is probably a neat trick on the part of the body to try to get the head to stop overriding the pain indicators that by about 40 miles are already starting to max out depending on how hard you go. Blisters, for example, can reach impressive proportions. I didn’t feel them too much this time thanks to some nifty taping and the screaming pain of something tearing in my right foot (who knew you needed a flexor digitalis longus tendon to make your foot move). 

As I dragged my sorry self into Checkpoint 12 at 80 miles, with an ankle that was starting to look like an elephant's trunk ready to throw in the towel, it was only two cheerful blokes who encouraged me to swallow my pride and some pain killers that got me out the door and home again. Whoever you are, and the dozens of others who helped along the way, I salute you. The true legends of an endurance event are those working in the Checkpoints where food and drink and funny stories are served. Never have I felt so graciously cared for, so well fed, so cheered up, so supported by strangers, working all through the night and into the next day for nothing but the love of the sport.

I was also encouraged by fellow walkers, complete strangers who helped each other even when detrimental to their own interests; who inspired in their ability to slice their own blisters or butterfly clip their own cuts and keep on going; who swapped food, plasters, water and directions. I kept running into people that I'd met at other events over the last six months that created a sense of fellowship. I thought often of the much older woman who sat next to me on the bus to the start, a grandmother who’s grandkids know never to ask for her on a Sunday as she’s ‘out running’. There were the awesome ladies from 'the North'. I don't know what they put in the water up there but it's special. And Stephanie, on her 6^th 100, who hadn’t been able to eat or drink anything without throwing up since about the half way mark, who still made it home an hour in front of me.

No-one really knows what brings on the nausea – perhaps the disorientation of simultaneously walking and reading maps at night or perhaps the body unable to get enough energy to sustain itself. After beating out hundreds of miles in practice events I had worked out that my body rejected all attempts to be a sophisticated athlete when it came to nutrition. No amount of scientifically developed carbohydrate or protein bar or gel worked. Just cheese. ‘Eat lard, go hard’ seems to be my body's preferred motto so whoever made those cheesy biscuits and that quiche, you are a legend.

Just as my body is a bit old-fashioned, so too my approach to navigation. It’s possibly just envy that those with GPS don’t spend an extra couple of hours on the course finding their way as those of us with just map and compass do, but such technology seems to lose the art of walking, or at least way-finding. Okay, it’s not fun when it’s 4 in the morning and freezing and I have lost my place in the route description and therefore have no idea where I am. But the skill of map reading, of understanding the scratchings and squiggles on a piece of laminated paper, brings us into a deeper relationship with the landscape as the brain translates two dimensions into three.

At the end, however an endurance eventer finds their way home, we all share that sense of achievement and the most delicious of meals where we can actually sit down and stay down (it could be cat food and we’d still enjoy it). We recount our favourite and most horrendous bits and forget the throbbing feet. One of my fellow saunterers pointed out how 'unnecessary' the routing of this year’s event over stony tracks had been. Strictly speaking, the whole event could be classified as unnecessary if we were to hold to it standards of normal bodily stress.

But therein also lies its exquisite nature. In a world that is increasingly automated and technologically mediated, there is great freedom, as Thoreau recognised in the 19th century, in just putting on boots and walking. Doing so over long distances may not increase any sense of freedom but it does require that the body, long subsumed to the predominance of a brain-led economy, must be felt. In order to finish, the mind must  override the body but can only do so on the basis of trust; that it will not break down, that it will heal itself. There is no room in a long distance event for any of Descartes's dualism as unnatural tirednss and physical exhaustion blur or even rupture (hence the hallucinations) the veil between mind and matter. The mind extends into space via the body, and the body begins to think that it can go on.

So despite swearing I would never be so stupid as to do it again, the strange thing is that today I found myself going over the route for next year. The chance to be part of something akin to a holy art is all too addictive. 

On why middle aged women should take recreational drugs ...

At some point in a woman's trajectory we become, by necessity, sensible. It may be the career, the need to look after children, the mortgage, the dodgy knees after years of stilettos and/or running on roads. It may just be the years of multi-tasking as professional, activist, sex goddess, carer. As women can now apparently have it all, I am therefore going to advocate the need to let it all go, even if it's just for one night a year. Be unsensible. Find yourself a comfortable festival and pop some recreational drugs.

The advantages of waiting until middle age is that we now have the perfect combination of skills to actually enjoy getting off our trolleys. The side effects of staying up all night dancing can be a bit like jet lag perhaps but we know how to deal with that ... we travel. We spend our days organising ourselves and others, so no matter how spacey we get such is the training of our minds we can remember where our tent is and when and where we booked the massage for the next day's recovery, including that we booked in for an hour so we can tell the hippies trying to jump the queue to sod off. We always remember to put on the sunblock and we don't have to spend ages looking into a mirror - which is just as well if your face takes a bit of a trip without the rest of you.

We have an income so if we forget where we put the teacup from the cafe, no worries, it's just a pound deposit. And while the young ones try singing along to the words to Sympathy for the Devil  we actually know them. (I really wanted to hate the Rolling Stones but damn you Mick Jagger, with your moves and your 'woo woos', you really are rather charismatic). We can enjoy the musicians no-one has ever heard of, and the fact that there are still people selling magic wands and spirulina balls. Another economy is possible.

We have the clarity of insight (both with and without chemical enhancement), to recognise that Nick Cave is not a rock god, not the messiah nor satan, but just a grumpy man having a very long mid-life crisis. (I felt for the young woman he singled out from the crowd - her moment of glory slightly mocked when hit in the head by an inflatable dolphin). Get some therapy Nick and be well.

We can stretch out on the grass wherever we like and not worry that people are dancing over the top of us because at our age it just shouldn't matter any more; like it doesn't matter that I forgot a strip of leg hair in the rapid epilation before launch or that I'm wearing a purple bra under a white t-shirt or that I'm not wearing anything remotely neon in colour or waving glow sticks about. We can fully appreciate how Sinead O'Connor, Moya Brennan, Beth Gibbons and Laura Mvula really feel. And if you think you can move like Beyonce you probably can. Your knees and hips will remember what to do.

We don't feel the need to keep talking about a trip for days on end (do people still not realise how boring this is!). We have the maturity to know when to let it go; that a festival will end and we will go back to our homes that we own, wash our own clothes, have a cup of tea and be sensible for the rest of the year. But if things are still moving the day after in slightly odd ways it's okay. We can cope. That's what we do. The world can shift from under our feet - divorce, mentally unstable partners, cancer - and still we keep on going, fortified by 24 hour Farmers Markets that sell green tea and cheese platters with double gloucester AND goats cheese. 

What to avoid? The Orb .... great music but very, very scary projections of gigantic eyes. Drinking too much toffee apple flavoured cider, no matter how good it tastes. And under NO circumstances take recreational drugs if you are sad or in any way deviating from what your friends would define as a relatively normal state of mind. We all have a suitcase of baggage we carry around but some are more neatly packed than others. There is nothing worse than splitting that suitcase open for the world and all the young ones to see. Crowds will part to avoid you. There is enough of that from the young ones - 'but he said he loved me' she sobs. Well yes honey, but was that before or after he popped an 'e'?

With the usual caveats in mind (yeah yeah I'm still middle aged!) throw yourself into that mosh as Fat Boy sets it alight. Trust that everyone else is on happy pills and looking out for each other. Trust that English men are generally shorter, lighter and politer than Australian men, tend to be on more disco biccies and less beer, and know how to dance (i.e. wont accidently knock anyone out with uncontrollable thrashing motions if they happen to be standing nearby). We have no-one to impress but ourselves, so pick a colour you like ladies and move.

Between Hagiography and Hate

As I survey the politcal wreckage  of impasse this week, between an ossified nostalgia for 'Maggie' (marked by amnesia from those who rolled her) and a rose-colored socialism of the 70s that offers no alternative except the reclamation of words, I once again hear the steady beat of left-right-left-right that everyone must march to it seems. This rhthym defines politics in this country, producing a paucity of thinking and imagination and lazy debates of 'you're left/right and therefore wrong'. It means you have the excuse not to listen. 

There is no way forward when our political lives are divided between hagiography and hate, a division that has achieved little in the way of equality, environmental sustainability or democracy. Neither the 'right' nor the 'left' seem capable of acknowledging the complexity of humanity: that disorder is not necessarily a bad thing or that, heaven forbid, people, rather than living under a false consciousness, might actually like being middle class. Ideologies are always troubled by a shade called grey. I confess I have heard Zac Goldsmith, a conservative MP, speaking out against the third runway at Heathrow and criticising the lack of democracy in Parliament whenever whips are brought out to bring into line errant MPs who might have an independent thought. Way to go, Zac! Is he 'left'? Am I 'right'? Does it really matter? Would I disagree with him on many other things. Absolutely. Forgive me, but I'd rather be out of sync.

I have no idea at the moment what politics will look like in the future but I know it hasn't reached its potential in the present. I know the future is not a 'third way' (oh no Tony Blair, you stay down!). I know it's not just about reclaiming terms, redefining 'socialism' into blue labour or red tories. I hope it will be something like the London Citizens campaign - an unexpected coalition of all sorts that are actually achieving something on the London Living Wage Campaign. But perhaps we can start with a politics of humility. No politican should expect or get a state funeral. They should do their job, do it well, and retire and die with dignity as any one else can hope for.

The Wickly News

I now own a piece of London. It's just a little piece; an ex-local in a yet to be gentrified part of Hackney, with the traffic hum of the Eastway between us and the lights of the Olympic Park. Given the eye-watering rents in London, and the historically low interest rates its probably a good thing to engage in generating debt I hear you say, sensibly sounding like an elder relative.

But there is only one good reason that I can think of for buying my own space .... The chance to spend days putting flat pack together! I love flat pack almost as much as I LOVE my new Bosch. I love the fact that I made the bed I sleep in, the wardrobe where I hang my clothes, the table I eat off and the chairs I sit on (not to mention a desk, an office chair, a lounge chair, a bedside table, and a bathroom caddy).

Now I know the real craftspeople among you will be rolling your eyeballs - ikea is not exactly artisan - they also need to rethink their tax policy and what's in their Swedish meatballs (refer to recent horse meat scandal sweeping Europe). But it is about the only opportunity I get to justify owning power tools. And there is something awesome about the scale of the place, and, perhaps only to those of us who are compulsively organised, about being able to count every nail, screw and allen key in each pack.

More importantly, anyone into flat pack instantly gets what some of the most densely written concepts in social science are on about. Take 'assemblage', for example, one of the popular A's (others being Affect, Affordance and Actor network theory). There are bits, we put them together generally according to a plan usually derived by someone else. Sometimes there may be bits left over or bits that don't fit quite correctly and require a degree of pressure, or a hammer, to get them into place. Affect is the sensation you get when you realise you should have bought two of the wardrobe door packs (damn you ikea) or when you can only get to an ikea on a Sunday afternoon along with the rest of London, and realise an embodiment of Dante's seventh circle of hell. And the interactions between human and non-human on such occasions, between people, and more people, and trolleys and prams and cardboard and aisles and soft and hard furnishings, are all you need to experience to really understand Actor network theory. A theory for exiting ikea without feeling claustrophobic or developing rage would be handier.

The new home is also a great place to engage in some ethnography of hipster led gentrification. Cross the Eastway and you enter a space where a shop, run by a man who shaves only half his face, survives by selling just one type of bike - fixed gear. Next door the shop sells only 12" vinyl. In the cafe, a woman enters wearing a towering flowered head dress and no one blinks. And everyone, from the bike shop to the laptop repair shop, serves espresso with their goods. Between the Eastway and the Peanut Factory is a Cash & Carry and book warehouse. Next to the White Building, with its trendy micro brewery, pizzeria and performance spaces, is a swingers' club with blacked out windows. Dotted among it all are squatted dross-scapes, warehouses and artist studios. And binding it all together is the smell wafting from Mr Bagel's and the German bakery across the road. Welcome to Hackney Wick.

Notes to Self for the New Year 2013

1. 

Must learn to fly ...

Blame Fuerzabruta ... I would be more than happy to run off with them to create wanton playgrounds and random adventure ... as long as I get to wear a harness and run through the air smashing through walls (you really have to see the show).

2.
Must never use diet coke as a substitute for flying ...
That stuff must have so many 'e' numbers in it you may as well just have a disco biccie. I was home by a very respectable 1am only to find myself still dancing alone in the living room at 4am after just one can bought in haste. As I now repent in leisure I reflect on the fact that nothing is more guaranteed to generate that particular strain of British passive aggression than someone dithering at a bar with a crowd 20 deep behind them.

3.
Must honour my toe nails in the pursuit of flying ... at the speed of jog ...  for this could be the year they never forgive me and refuse to grow back .... Wadebridge to Teignmouth, 100 miles in under 48 hours. Bring it on!

4.
Must shed unnecessary baggage in order to achieve flight ...
This includes cupboards full of clothes I never wear, scraps of paper whose purpose I've long ago forgotten, a yarn stash that is out of control and the argument with the real estate agent over guttering. No matter that, two weeks later, I can now think of half a dozen devastating retorts to his egregious (what a word) fibs. He will soon fade from view like the taste of diet coke and I will be left with my own little apartment with Dingo Baby as my lodger.

5.
Remember that all women need room of their own if they are to fly ...