(no subject)

I was trying to explain to my husband today the difference between a walk and a ramble, the latter term being one I've adopted recently to denote a particular kind of time out of doors.

The word walk rather reminds me of what you do with a dog - you take them out for an hour, around the neighbourhood. I think of family holidays where I'd be driven to a car park, we'd get out and spend an hour going up a path to a viewing point, then back, and back into the car to drive for another 20 minutes to the next walk - this artificial, tourist's activity, sort of abstracted from any *reason* our ancestors had to make ways through the forests and exercise our legs.

Whereas a ramble - ah! What does a ramble say to me? Bilbo Baggins with a hand-drawn map and a blackthorn staff, the Famous Five carrying a picnic of home-made chutneys, the children of Stand By Me going on an eternal afternoon's adventure to find a dead body, Apaches playing in the farmyard: an unmapped, boundless time, hemmed in by neither clocks nor formal plans, only the commitment that an afternoon will be thoroughly wasted ambling about in the countryside. By implication, a proper ramble may not lead you home at the end of the day, but to a little inn eight villages away, where they will put you up after a dinner of rustic cheese and a beer. This is what we were supposed to do with the wilds: for a few hours, we are explorers, or wanderers, or drop-outs and idlers, just being and bimbling.

A ramble demands you bring a wet-weather clothes in a bundle, just in case, as well as hearty snacks and water - perhaps a book; there's no time you have to be back, and nowhere you need to be; perhaps you'll find a nice spot and nap for a couple of hours - or find you have travelled a great distance. In part, it's about making-real those expanses in your mind.

When in The Machine Stops, Forster writes:

"You know that we have lost the sense of space. We say “space is annihilated”, but we have annihilated not space, but the sense thereof. We have lost a part of ourselves. I determined to recover it, and I began by walking up and down the platform of the railway outside my room. Up and down, until I was tired, and so did recapture the meaning of “Near” and “Far”. “Near” is a place to which I can get quickly on my feet, not a place to which the train or the air-ship will take me quickly. “Far” is a place to which I cannot get quickly on my feet; the vomitory is “far”, though I could be there in thirty-eight seconds by summoning the train. Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man"s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong."

this is a little of what I mean by rambling establishing the existence of physical space - Man is the measure. And so, by retransforming the world from a collection of little nodes that I am driven between, and a rigidity of time which demands when we must be where, it is transforming, really, an entire landscape - or at least, our experience of it.

Rewild Yourself Snark

In looking for what humans want it’s always instructive to see what rich people actually get: and so often, that’s a large country house set in a park full of stout trees with an open sward grazed by deer and a lake running right through the middle. That’s the human idea of the good life, and it’s why rich people have created it again and again."

I am not getting on with this author of a Rewilding book at all

Many years ago I lived on the edge of London, just within the M25. And I was filled with a mania for a garden pond. The fact that there was no room in the garden for such a thing was no deterrent at all. Eventually we found a place in which we managed to insert a pond two or three feet square. It was dug and lined and planted with a couple of off-the-shelf water plants and that was it. The cost was tiny, and so was the pond.

Well, good sir, it sounds like you did have space for a pond and could afford one, and what I think you're not understanding is that when most people say "I don't have room for a pond or any money", they aren't being lazy or letting the human world cloud their vision, they genuinely can't.

(no subject)

"An Englishman’s home is his castle, but a castle is nothing without a moat. A little water defines the place, makes sense of it, adds a richness to everything all around. A pond is the centre of the stage: the garden’s focal point, drawing the eye, bringing in many other living things. More than that: it’s a statement of what a garden is for."

I miss being this middle class :(

(no subject)

"‘I’ve always longed to see a puffin.’ How many times have I heard that plaintive remark? It’s generally expressed in the sort of tone you’d expect if the person had always longed to see an angel – as if an expedition to see a puffin would require months of planning, specialist equipment of the most colossally expensive kind, along with the luck of the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. The fact of the matter is that all you need is a train ticket, or the means to make a car journey. We are the tiniest bit reluctant to make a journey for the sake of the wild world."

Like a train ticket or a car journey and the energy for a weekend away are anything but wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, and anyway mate, I grew up in a puffin area, and I've never seen one despite multiple fiver-for-a-boatride-round-the-rocks attempts which were in walking distance of my home.

(no subject)

Review: Rewild Yourself

When you dash off a couple of lines, just as a record that you completed some reading; and in the course of writing, hit eight paragraphs and discover you really, truly, hated this book.