online: 1 october 2005
modified: 29 september 2005

26 september 2005 first walk from north west


1:13 First thoughts in new flat after waking from deep sleep... after a week of the moving of possessions and services from one flat to another... and of not writing this...

...i'm unused to the silence of double glazing... cars pass 70 metres away as if without engines...

oracles (noted in journals 94 to 95) tell me to expect both nourishment and spiritual/material difficulty at first, and to meet it with patience, inner strength, and generosity...

...now to sleep more... perhaps...



14:03 First walk on heath from the northwest (after walking it for 15 years from the southeast or south)...

i'm sitting in the much wilder Sandy Heath which is largely oak forest on hilly ground with small algae-covered ponds - i think they are disused gravel pits or diggings... there are very few people here - i've seen only 3 in 40 minutes...

...and now a young man passes in short formal overcoat and carrying what i take be a briefcase...

I could sit here for hours - i have no urge to continue walking - i feel this is more a destination than a route to somewhere else... everything is still except for two magpies, a squirrel (and now two crows) contending for food in a small dried-up pond...

...14:20 but now i move on.

15:16 I ate an egg pastry, in the indoor cafe at Kenwood, and a piece of orange cake in the outdoor one (with a glass of water in each) to celebrate this new start. I feel it strange to be here, in this stopping point of many walks on the southern heath that is now become a stopping point of my first walk on the northern... what i took to be different geographies becomes a continuity...



23:45 in bed beneath the window of the little cabin bedroom from which i can see only sky, clouds, aircraft and stars. No need to write more - i feel ready to sleep after reading, this restful day, The Green Child* of Herbert Read...

*Herbert Read's fantasy fiction of his childhood and his life as a soldier (decorated for bravery in World War 1) and then as anarchist and as critic of art and design and English literature. He turns his very diverse experiences into the life of a man who flees childhood in the Yorkshire Hills to become a wanderer who eventually and accidentally becomes the President of a new republic in South America... The president is propelled by an encounter with of a half-human child with whom he eventually flees the material world to one of deeply felt fantasy.

It was first published in 1935. The copy i am reading was published by Eyre and Spottiswoode, London 1947. I bought it at a second hand book market at the South Bank - a favourite place where i went to recover when very tired by the move - i have been reading it ever since. It feel it will influence what i write next...




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