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Posted on 16 September 2007
Wise Blogger John Davies said:

Two-and-a-half miles a day is too quick

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I'm walking the M62. Or actually, doing a coast-to-coast, from Hornsea (East Riding of Yorkshire) to Crosby beach (the Merseyside site of Antony Gormley's 100 statues, and close to where I've lived most of my life). I'll be following the great Northern motorway quite closely (though safely and legally) over the Pennines and I'm stopping for a few days at a time in the urban centres (Hull, Goole, Leeds, Huddersfield, Manchester, Warrington, Liverpool) where my walks will be circular ones, often in the company of local people to guide me.

It's a slow walk. I'm talking two months to do it and at 145 miles direct, that averages out at about two-and-a-half miles a day. It's not for charity, it's not for sport, it's certainly not for speed. A bit like a joke (and plenty of people think it is a lot like a joke), if I try to explain what this walk is for, it loses its point. If you get it, you get it. And I hope to get a few things from it.

I've been on the road over a fortnight now, and if I've learned one thing it is this. Two-and-a-half miles a day is far too quick.

Which is where I shall have to attempt an explanation. The idea of this walk has something to do with spending a lot of time in the urban mundane, watching and listening closely to how people relate to it, teasing out the hidden depths in the everyday. I'm blessed to have been granted a sabbatical for this project, but I'm bucking a trend in making this journey. Most people take their sabbaticals in California or Canada or Congo. Me, I'm doing Hull, Halifax, Huddersfield. Most people think that they'll learn new things if they visit somewhere 'exotic'. Me, I think the exotic is more to do with a change of attitude than a change of continent - if you believe that there's enough in the detail of life in Goole to make it quite different from the detail of life in Gilberdyke, than you're on your way to embracing this form of exotica.

I'm blogging my journey [here] and in that blog I've already recorded numerous minutiae about the places I've been and the conversations I've had. In a week there I learned a lot about Hull - and wished I could have stayed there longer, to get to know the place more deeply. After 36 hours there I left feeling the same about Goole. Now I'm in Leeds for seven days and staring at the A to Z tonight I anticipate that when I move on from here I'll do so with the same sense of only having scratched the surface.

That's why two-and-a-half miles a day is far too quick. But one thing I hope from my journey is that what I learn in other places will help me to see my Liverpool home with fresh eyes. Describing 'the gentle art of strolling' the eccentric English traveller Charles Hurst wrote that it took a special ease of grace to be able 'to walk a good English mile in an hour'. I'll be going far slower than that when I finally get home.