Motherload

Literary Movement Beneath My Feet: Writers on Walking ed. Duncan Minshull Notting Hill Editions,  2018,  £9.99 Beneath My Feet is an anthology of writers meditating on walking, intended to be ‘tucked into a rucksack’. Conjuring visions of hiking with Kendal mint cake in one hand and Wordsworth in the other, it is a wonderful assemblage.  I originally wrote this review for another publication, but managed to miss my deadline by a few days, after which it seemed to go walkabout. So I’ve decided to post it here. After all, this particular gem may come into its own again, if Covid comes back to bite us in the Autumn.  I blame Rebecca Solnit for missing my deadline. ‘I sat down one spring day to write about walking and stood up again, because a desk is no place to think on the large scale,’ she begins.  As soon as I read this sentence, I went for a walk.  It may not have been on a large scale, but early morning constitutionals, golden hour passeggiata, foraging ...

How do I bring this experience to an end? I have just been given the most generous gift possible by my husband, my children, and my friends — a month, by myself, in the country. To come away from my everyday life for a whole, fire-filled, walk-soaked, wind-wakened month, to be able to write exactly what I wanted and have been trying to write for so very long — the release from a bottle I have to stuff myself inside most of the time — has been… calm. The whole point about being here has been its understatement. To be able to escape the hysteria of exams, schools, Forest School clothes, what Doris Lessing calls 'the housewife's disease' through her character Anna Wulf in The Golden Notebook: The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I-must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael's-breakfast-don't-forget-I'm-out-of-tea.-etc.  Each morning I have been able to wake when...

This morning was the weekly Farmers' Market in the local small town. I had been writing and felt like a change, so walked the mile or so along the side of the field to the town, and found the market in the old Town Hall. In London, Farmers' Markets are as full as art galleries, cinemas and restaurants. They are places to be seen. You go to them to display your localist credentials. We go to them so that we don't need to sit down at a table to eat goodies. "Look, darling, that's what a real turnip looks like! Don't worry, we're not going to buy one, Mummy doesn't like them either. Now, where are the sausages in buns?" I was the only customer at the Farmers' Market in Suffolk. There were four trestle tables lined up in the hall, its raised stage at the far end fringed with tired brown curtains. Every word I uttered boomed around the place as if I were Queen Mary come to launch a ship. I felt compelled to buy something from every stall. At one...