All in a Day's Walk
A month-long slow food walking performanceArchive for water
Hereford
A walk to Hereford, for a meeting at All Saints Cafe about an installation and walking performance for h.Energy this autumn. (I’m going to be walking in circles around Hereford city, carrying water with an antique milkmaid’s yoke, but that’s another story.)
It’s a long way, and I’m walking halfway back again too before this evening, so I give myself permission to ‘just walk’. I need to get there on time, in time for our meeting at 2. I set off at 7.30 and arrive at exactly 1.30, I seem to be better at timing my arrival when walking even across unfamiliar terrain than I ever am when travelling by other means. Maybe that’s because, on foot, my soul is travelling at the same speed as my body.
I’m bothered by a steady stream of commuter traffic on the road up to Crow Hill, but once I cut across Eaton Park wood and drop down to the Wye Valley Walk, it’s idyllic and tranquil and I’m suddenly the disruptive force: my feet send up butterflies and damselflies from the long grass with every step.
I arrive into the bustle of the city to find it’s the weekly farmers’ market. I speak to Dave who, I read somewhere, refers to himself as ‘the man with the hat’. He tells me that market has been going about 13 years, waxing and waning and waxing in size over that time. I ask if people – customers – ask where the produce or plants come from and he tells me that they often do, and are pleased when they hear that they are his own plants. Because then he can answer questions about them. There are lots of what he calls ‘secondary producers’ here – people selling pies, cakes, preserves or other delights which are made locally and with mainly local ingredients but necessarily combined with others sourced from further afield (like sugar or spices for preserves and confectionary of course). All these are outside my current rules so I can’t buy anything today. But I see that the vegetable stall is from Kidderminster in Worcestershire: he says they set a radius of 40 miles ‘which is quite far’ (I agree, outside my daily walking distance) but that they get enquiries (which they turn down) from sellers as far afield as London wanting to attend. It strikes me that this – the London enquiries – is ‘local’ retail gone mad. It reminds me of a criticism I’ve heard in the past, that many farmer’s markets (but not this one, which is excellent) are far from that; selling over-priced artisan produce and crafts aimed at a monied middle-class market, pricing genuinely local food out of most people’s range. It strikes me that it’s doing more damage than good to people’s faith in the concept of local food, and working in supermarkets’ favour.
Which is a massive shame, because where else than a genuine farmers’ market can the farmers, growers and makers connect directly with their customers and their customers with them? And have important conversations, literally over the produce itself, that allow them to explain the real cost of producing food: prices that reflect a difficult winter, a late spring, more expensive grain, a poor harvest, or the time, effort, love they invest in making it… Then we understand that when we buy food others have grown, we are paying for more than taste and calories: we’re rewarding the growers appropriately for genuine craft, commitment and consciousness.
Personal horizon (or Stoke Edith in search of swedes)
A New Year’s Eve walk in torrential rain to Stoke Edith (or, just beyond, to Newton Cross) where the swedes I’ve been buying from Fownhope Farm Shop come from. Today’s walk is just about walking (and talking if I encounter anyone, which seems unlikely in this deluge). Twenty-six days after I started and I’m only just now getting back to my original curiosity and key intention behind the project: to measure through the medium of walking the limits of my existence, beating the bounds of my ‘personal horizon’. For J. G. Ballard, who coined the term, this was based on sightlines (the limits of where he was able to see from the ground outside his home): only three quarters of a mile for him, in flat country. (According to psychogeographer Iain Sinclair, Ballard spent his year on a driving ban at home in Shepperton, refusing to take public transport and only walking three quarters of a mile in all directions, which meant he got to know his local area very well, and also that he ‘wrote more and better’, Sinclair says.) But for me it was more about ‘effortlines’: how far I was able to walk away from home and back in a day – preferably within daylight. (My original idea was to follow a simple formula of calculating how much light remained between setting off and dusk, then walk as far as I could in a more-or-less straight line for half of this time, then turn around and come back home.) This would of course depend not only on the time of year but also on the terrain, topography and, as it turns out, finding enough calories to sustain me.
It seems laughable now that, at the outset, I saw the local food I’d be eating as largely incidental – the walking would drive the work (and the talking, about food), but I had not considered quite how vital the food would be to fuel the walking. It has turned my idea of what a sustainable – and sustaining – art practice really is, completely on its head (as discussed in yesterday’s blog.)
So it’s both a revelation and a relief to have finally found a balance between calories in and calories out, and to understand in a very profound way how the landscape I’m walking and moving across is literally supporting me, nutritionally as well as ‘gravitationally’ (?). It seems a genuine embodiment of the former Countryside Agency’s Eat the View initiative, which was about connecting consumers to the countryside that provides for us.
This last week stretching ahead of me feels too short – there is too much to do, too many more people yet to talk to, in the food web that my encounters with others has uncovered. I also need to catch up and start ‘walking the food miles’ (as a friend succintly described the project) to all the places where some of the food I’ve been buying elsewhere (or on the farm shop here) is actually grown. So it’s also a relief to strike out away from home with a very physical purpose and rediscover the sheer exhilaration of crossing space. My determination beats even the weather, which is relentless. (My first exchange of the day is on the farm yard with monosyllabic but expressive cow-man Tom, who is also, like me, peering out of a small gap in his head-to-toe waterproofs. He gestures at the sky with his walking stick and says ‘Don’t think it’s going to stop’.)
I have almost given up taking photos of the mid-field rivers, floods, puddles and lakes that have appeared all across Herefordshire… almost.
But after a few miles, even I’m defeated. If I take pictures of them all, my obsessive documentation will slow me down even more than the mud. I also pass (depressingly) intensive broiler chicken sheds in Woolhope, the grain hoppers (unlocal grain? who knows) feeding straight into the windowless sheds in an automated system, so that even that simple connection between feeding – and acknowledging in the process – the animals we eat is lost. I walk over 9 miles beyond Stoke Edith to the main Hereford-Worcester road along the verge in incessant and depressing traffic to Newton Cross, then I turn around and come home. I didn’t see the swedes. But I was grateful for their sustenance and the miles they’d travelled. Every muddy last one of them.
And then, after witnessing the beautiful sunset, I buy luxurious duck eggs, Once Upon a Tree juice and vegetables from the Alumhurst Veg and Egg Shed
There’s no such thing as inappropriate clothing, only bad weather
When I first heard the (apparently Scandinavian) phrase ‘there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing’ I immediately, gleefully and smugly adopted it as my new life mantra.
This winter, I’m not so sure. It doesn’t seem to matter how much Gore-tex I layer onto my body, the water is still finding a way in. Even in wellies. This does not make a December walking performance very comfortable. It slows me down – and not in a good slow-food-slow-activism way either. I’m not sure if drawing my own minute attention – through the immediate discomfort of soggy feet – to the changing patterns of weather and climate is particularly useful in an activism sense, but still…
I’m reminded of my conversation last week with Caplor farmer Gareth on his experiences of extreme weather events in Africa and Fownhope, and how his farming practices are, finally, changing:
SLOW flooding
It’s the eve of the winter solstice which this year will be at 11:12 tomorrow. Ignoring the Mayan/world’s end predictions, I walk into the village to post some Christmas presents, through fields wetter than I’ve ever seen them, latticed by runnels and new rivers. Maybe this is the end of the world after all and this project is remarkably prescient but for a lost consonant: not so much slow food as slow flood.
Foolishly I decide to wear my wellies again which might keep my feet dry but have no grip. I fall twice before I’ve even reached the village and have almost made it to the shop when I slip coming off the slope into the rec ground and slide on my back, laughing, down the bank thick with wettest mud. I walk through the village like a swamp beast, much to the amusement of the Post Office queue where I stand, dripping mud onto the counter, making it worse in my pathetic attempts to clean it up, which only succeed in smearing it further.
The postmistress sympathetically wipes my parcel “It will cost more if you weigh it muddy…”. Then weighted down with mud and apple juice and cider I walk home like a cross child with my unbearably caked-in-mud arms held out stiffly to the sides gritting my teeth. I tell a friend about the fall-Post Office palaver and ask “Should I be doing a PhD in clowning?”. “Or drowning?” he responds.
SLOW
In the caravan, my water is frozen today. (Picture’s from two years ago, but you get the idea.) Even though this only means walking to the very nearby showerblock to fill up buckets, bottles and kettle, I don’t have the mental capacity or calories to deal with this. I don’t walk today, any further than around the fields to break the ice on the three water troughs for the horses. Rough Patch – Banky Field – Rough Patch – Tacklizer – Rough Patch.
Cold, I am slowed down in every sense.
I expend my energy instead on the domestic: making bread, refreshing leaven, fetching and heating water, washing up, fetching wood, sweeping. It takes all my energy. I make a stew and feel better.
My s l o w n e s s makes me think how much I’ve read the term ‘slow’ in various contexts in recent times.
Slow food ‘a global, grassroots organisation with supporters in 150 countries around the world that links the pleasure of food with a commitment to the community and the environment. We work to reconnect people with where their food comes from and how it is produced so they can understand the implications of the choices they make about the food they put on their plates. We encourage people to choose nutritious food, from sustainable, local sources which tastes great.’
Slow pedagogy from Phillip Payne and Brian Whattchow (2008) ‘Slow Pedagogy and Placing Environmental Education in Post-Traditional Outdoor Education’ Australian Journal of Outdoor Education 12 (1): 25-38 ‘Time, and our experiences of it, warrants attention in ‘place’ pedagogies in outdoor education. Place typically involves the experience of a geographical location, a locale for interacting socially and/or with nature, and the subjective meanings we attach over time to the experience. Place, however, cannot be severed from the concept and practice of time, as seems to be occurring in the discourse of outdoor education. The way outdoor educators carefully conceive of, plan for, manage and pedagogically practice time may, in our view, positively facilitate an introductory ‘sense’ of place. We illustrate the under-theorised relationship of time and place in outdoor and experiential education via a case study of a semester-long undergraduate unit, Experiencing the Australian Landscape. It reflexively describes how two post-traditional outdoor educators working in the higher education sector have assisted pre-service experiential and outdoor educators to sense, explore, conceptualise and examine how ‘slow’ time is important in ‘placing’ education in nature.‘
Slow activism from Wallace Heim’s beautiful chapter ‘Slow Activism: Homelands, Love and the Lightbulb’ in B. Szerszynski, W. Heim and C. Waterton (eds.) (2003) Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance Oxford: Blackwell 183-202
Slow = good Slow = better Slow = the answer?
