A Journey to the Front-of-the-Train Place

1. PROLOGUE / TAKE YOUR HEADPHONES OFF YOU SOD 

I had gotten out of the habit of taking long walks. 

    Or maybe I had just gotten out of the habit of other habits that would lead me to take long walks.

    Truthfully, that 28 mile long journey through Suffolk the summer before was an outlier; I'd grown far keener on long cycles with friends than long walks alone. But I was inspired by Sebald, Sinclair and Self to see what I could get out of my mind if I allowed it to wander.

    There is a song by Fleet Foxes that I like, it’s called Battery Kinzie. 

    I tell a lie; it’s not a special favourite of mine but it just came on the stereo as I am writing now. I don’t know why the song’s called Battery Kinzie and I’m not sure if it would make a relevant anecdote for this piece if I did. I’m just keen to hold onto the following line from it:

    “do not wander, do not wander, do not wander through the dark”.

    It sounds like they’re declaring, wholesale, that wandering is unproductive. That they don’t want this girl, Kinzie or whatever, to wander away. But the final vocal hit reveals that this is not an order; it is a warning. Announcing that wandering is best done when it is done with intention, when it is done in both mental and physical light. You need to see (in both senses) the land you wander through if you want to gain something from travelling aimlessly through it.

    I agree with Fleet Foxes. So it would have been unproductive to walk another 28 miles. I actually aimed to cut last weekend’s walk down, from 11 miles to barely 9, for exactly the same reason; I couldn’t tell what the extra two miles would net me. Like any other endurance sport, I think walking has that period of lucidity – the mental light – once you get into the rhythm: it’s not just that the exercise seems to become almost automatic, but you begin to have more interesting thoughts as well. The period doesn’t last forever. It stopped for me in Suffolk when my heels started to give out on a five mile straight through a dull, dried-out plantation forest. There was no fresh direction, no fresh surroundings, and no fresh hell to save me from my aching legs. I was wandering in the dark.

    So perhaps that made me more cautious in future. Perhaps I relapsed into long bike rides (a very casual interpretation of touring) because they did not require such a wandering mindset. I knew before I set off exactly where I was going, and for a good few hours my mind would be focused on cardio and choosing the right gear and watching for drivers and maybe at a push watching the scenery. In this respect, touring – like so many other contemporary pastimes – did not really leave space for the mind to wander. Not even in the dark. My mind while cycling was a well-lit broom cupboard.

    I wouldn’t say any differently for my state of mind while, say, “wandering” around the supermarket, or “wandering” to the park. In lockdown these activities acquired a new profundity because they suddenly felt somehow regimented, ordered. And perhaps we are inclined to seek order when creating new habits by cordoning off and controlling as many senses as possible. I think this is why you probably put your headphones on when you go for a walk. The sounds in the park are not that interesting. The sound of the A504 is not that interesting. I wouldn’t contest any of this. But inevitably, much like how a deaf person has much better faculties in their other senses, someone whose brain is overflowing with audio cues will struggle more to concentrate on everything else. And that isn’t just sight and smell and taste but the thoughts you have over the top. Your mental soundtrack, consensually crushed by another soundtrack blasting out of your ‘phones of choice. A well-lit broom cupboard in which your mind could never hope to wander – brought to you today by System of a Down.

    My friends say I am cynical, and they are not wrong. Actually, they don’t say I am cynical – I have to say it for them. I think it’s because they’re exasperated by my inclination to embellish basic human impulse with some higher purpose; how I apply a perverted deductive reasoning to what I consider the insidious and unprecedented foibles of modern life, and everyone else just considers progress at a cost. I put the blame at my own feet for failing to annunciate – like someone such as Theodor Adorno does so beautifully – exactly why there is “no right living in wrong life”. But because my cynicism is compromised equally by a judgmental streak and a petulant tone that requires an increasingly high tolerance (moral or alcoholic?), I feel pushed to go and talk this through alone, with myself. I will wander through a good territory and let my mind generate its own interlocutor.

    Except I didn’t intend any of this. 

    I just went on a walk and had some thoughts and smudged them together in retrospect, for this piece. Obviously.

2. IN THE FRONT-OF-THE-TRAIN PLACE

    I have lived in Hornsey, North London for almost a year but I have never made a conscious visit to the distant village of Watton-At-Stone. At first glance these two things feel undeserving of the “but” conjunction; where is the (inevitably obscure) contradiction here? Well, they are on the same train line at least: a chink in the Great Northern that slinks back to Stevenage after Watton. And I think, at some point last year, there were works on that slinky section; so on the front of many a train I rode out on from Inner London, there were the three hyphenated words: Watton-At-Stone. After a while they became a sort of a myth, for my sake at least. So many trains going to such an ostensibly mundane place. What was there? I asked. And I honestly did ask that. My inquisitiveness in matters of infrastructure is not for artistic license; it is unfortunately real.

    So there I am, on the last day of August, taking the train out to Watton At Stone (the period of mythos now over, the train will go on to Stevenage) with the intent of making a circular walk through the countryside and stopping only to eat a haphazard foil-wrapped quesadilla and perhaps look at some trees. Pausing to pick blackberries is exempt – that comes naturally to good wanderers.

    Only halfway through the walk did I recognise that it could make me think in a similar way to the 28 mile journey through Suffolk, as I began to see more between the hedgerows (more than the blackberries, at least) and think on topics with a loftier intention. Perhaps it was the similarities in the East Anglian rolling hills, or perhaps eating enough wild blackberries in a set period of time can help your mind wander. I wandered well that day. But I still didn't know why my mind wasn’t wandering at home.

    It came to me when I sat down in a glade between two fallow fields. I was staring out onto nothing much and had nothing much on my mind when I suddenly realised what differentiated this moment of inaction from the inaction I experienced in my bedroom in Hornsey. It was about head space: that here I could be absent minded and not feel like such an act was doing myself any harm. My mind will not be drawn to old misgivings or some negative thoughts, but rather just be allowed to gently wander: to re-establish my ‘self’ in the midst of a field. To reorient and refocus as opposed to succumbing to the gentle dearth of North London nothingness, which was deeper and more frightening. Minor preoccupations over rent or shopping lists or the point of it all, and indeed the fear of someone else's eyes seeing me with these preoccupations, were far off thoughts that needn’t discomfort me in the moment. I was free to saunter through my mind's eye without the jitters or nerves that would quickly onset in my bedroom at home, a space now associated with work and all its individual daggers to my personality, as well as the free time thereafter when thinking deeply was limited by the whims of flatmates and friends and the next (ever proximate) working day. This is what comes of the wandering mind in stressful places.

    So maybe I oughtn’t be so harsh on the people who always put their headphones on when they go for a walk. If allowing your mind to wander in certain places does you more harm than good, who can blame you for trying to box it in? For creating broom-cupboards out of podcasts, playlists and bingeable sitcoms? The broom-cupboard can be a helpful device to employ in a panic attack, too. But I think that more often than not, we stop our mind from wandering not because we expect something harmful, but because we don’t expect anything. Meanwhile, we know exactly what to expect from Adam Buxton or System of a Down (I should note here that I don’t listen to either of these so I couldn’t tell you if they’re good tools for self-actualisation). If the choice is between an immediate, measurable and certified pleasure, and an uncertain emptiness that could draw up exactly nothing good, it is not surprising we choose the broom cupboard more than the expanse.

    I know this isn't new. The Romantics were aware almost 300 years ago that walking in the countryside relieves your mind of a certain pressure, and frees you therefore to wander in lightness. But my contemporary caveat would be that the pressures from which we wish to free ourselves have been exacerbated by the intensity of always-online notification barrages – or worse, the existential horror brought on by a lack thereof. This is combined with social media's status as a rare source of immediate pleasure during the lockdown, when there was a drought on most other (legal!) sources of dopamine.

3. CONCLUSION

    While I was out walking, I ripped a top-layer sticker off one of the direction signs for the public footpath. It was getting ratty, and the difference between layers interested me – so it felt like a win-win. The difference was subtle: the old sign was a big arrow with “public footpath” along the top and “Hertfordshire County Council” along the bottom. The new sticker on top had replaced the bottom text with “hertfordshire.gov.uk/row”, where I assume “row” stands for Rights of Way. So what had changed, really? Hertfordshire County Council had decided to take their own name off the sign and put a website up instead. Who could blame them? Hertford is just a small town in the middle of smaller county, and most of the council services they provide are online anyway. What good does the county council do out here in a field? It still exists as an administrative entity, but it doesn’t matter so much in name – especially if it can be replaced by a URL that does more for the waylaid traveller.

    All this to say that superficial changes happen all the time, and we hardly notice them. Our lives gently waft into cyberspace with our tacit consent. But COVID-19 has been one of the few times in recent memory when sudden institutional changes have taken place in a way that is very hard to miss. Working from home, for example, is not an isolated change but a tinderbox for a series of changes to everyday life that are not insubstantial taken together. Now we work where we live – so by and large, we live where we work. We don’t commute, we don’t travel half as much, so we stay in place more – physically, but mentally too.

    As I reached the end of my walk, I saw through my naivety to accept that the middle of East Hertfordshire, on a bank holiday, at the tail end of the Coronavirus crisis, is a very quiet place to be; and then I suffered a microcosm of loneliness. But even as I grew winsome, coming up to yet another diddly old church with no present congregation, I knew that this solitude was just a short term change of pace to jump my mind back into its proper gear. Perhaps the risk we now face is that we do not have access to half as many chances to change our pace. I think we know, when we think about it, that keeping ourselves cooped up in well-lit broom cupboards is a dangerous thing. A mind without a chance to wander is barely a mind at all.