Notes From A Series Of Miserable Walks

These are a collection of notes, observations and thoughts I’ve made while walking/running the same route throughout most of the lockdown. They are edited and at times, rephrased, for ease. Initially, this was an experiment for a University assignment, but I kept on writing after it was submitted because what else do you do when you’re stuck with your thoughts for this long? Write a poem? Anyway, if you’re interested in some mundane observations from a boring town in Kent do read on. If not, enjoy the rest of your day.

i) (Jan. 2021) The UK’s national lockdown is supposed to ease up soon, although I often forget the date, until I log onto Twitter and read tweets along the lines of “I can’t wait to get a haircut in April” or an advertisement from my local gym about ‘losing the lockdown tire for the summer’. What’s interesting about this kind of Instagram ad is what it omits. Usually, these ads promote workout classes with names like “Booty Burn” or “Beastercize” - these fast track weight loss programs that are designed to optimise your body for the purpose of sitting on whatever beach you can get an EasyJet flight to. I wonder whether whoever is running marketing for these chain gyms are struggling to justify to users as to why they need to be shredded if the furthest they’re probably going to go to this Summer is Bournemouth or Dorset, and whether this might lead to them rethinking what Gyms are for, and if they really need any more upbeat, high-intensity-interval classes. That said, they could always rebrand these programmes into a sort of Prep-School for wannabe Instagram fitness instructor-Reiki hybrids that are really just gunning for the GymShark endorsement. Which begs another question : What would be the Eton College of Fitness Prep School? Maybe Barry’s?

ii.) (Mar. 2021) It takes about 15 minutes, walking, to get to anywhere even remotely “picturesque” in this town. I never really noticed how mundane and uniform the suburbs were in the past. Yes, I’ve always had my issues with the suburbs of North West Kent - that it didn’t really live up to the whole “Garden of England” thing that Kent is known for - but today, I noticed that you really have to squint, far into the distance, to see any kind of human activity. I see friends post pictures of beautiful London parks, glistening in evening sunshine, or blanketed in the soft morning mists you see on postcards, or of the yellow stone-bricked cottages situated between acres of farmland. Sometimes, they’ll be accompanied with captions that remind us that an outside world exist, that parties will return soon, and we might be able to enjoy expensive coffees again.

What I do see, are cars. Lots of cars. Dozens and dozens of moving cars. Vauxhall Astras, Renault Clios, Fiat 500s, the same brand of White Mercedes van with a ladder on its roof. Most of them go over the speed limit, as they rush to whatever motorway will get them out of town the fastest. On my walk today, I noticed a driver tailing a tired cyclist on the main road. After 3 attempts to overtake the cyclist, the car drove over the sidewalk to get around him, honking their horn loudly after. Had it been a few seconds later, the car would have hit an elderly couple walking. What’s funny to me is that while I was terrified, I don’t think that elderly couple had even noticed.

iii.) (Feb 2021) The snow makes nos cans look beautiful, strange and disorientating. The pellets (?) has been sitting near a drain on the road for the last couple of weeks, and I hadn’t really noticed until I saw shining spark of gun-metal grey when walking down the main road. Balloon gas is a running joke in the UK, because of how often you’ll see them in parks, on streets and outside Churches. When I used to work at my parent’s shop, one of the jobs I was given each morning was to sweep up all the used nos cans that would be waiting for us outside the shutters when we’d arrive before the sun came up. I remember seeing a Tweet from an American visiting London for the first time, asking why there were so many around, and whether people were having a ton of parties he hadn’t seen.

I’m happy to see the pile. Maybe it’s because something as moderately new as snow, after months of skies that go black at 4pm, has made me see something so ubiquitous, and quintessential to British suburban life seem and feel so new. It’s a reminder that in spite of little else going on other than suburban families building home extensions and people fighting for parking spaces at the supermarket, there’s a reminder that people do remember a natural happiness - one that isn’t tied to a Netflix series, Amazon purchase or whatever discourse is happening on Twitter.

I take a moment to observe the pile of canisters, that are neatly collected in a circle. Some of the canisters have thumb shaped indents in them. My initial assumption was that they were thrown out of a car, onto the side of the road. But now, I imagine a group of twenty-something friends walking down this 5 mile long main road and stopping for a Balloon break before they also take the same walking route again. I hope that’s the case - they would be having a lot more fun than I am.

iv.) (Don’t know what date this was, possibly Feb 2021.) I’m thinking mostly about why a pale grey sky is so unappealing when it comes to going out for a walk. It’s the grey sky’s prosaic, its sadness, that reflects suburbia’s lack of imagination. Often, I return home more miserable than when I started out. My theory is that contrasting colours can help you notice the monotony, and appreciate the commuter town’s natural melancholy. It might be one reason why so many of these towns produced the best ambient landfill indie of the late 2000s (I still find it the best music to walk to).

Grey, specially that soft, dull grey that doesn’t commit to vicious winds or punishing torrential rain, blends that tediousness together. Broken roads mesh with the broken pavement, a reminder that there’s no real way out - all you’re actually doing is walking around in circles that feel longer each time. It amplifies the uniformity of terraced houses, differentiated only by the kinds of extensions and conservatories attached to them, or the kind of stone patterns used to extend the driveway. There’s a man I pass sometimes who is always washing his Mercedes S class, but it hasn’t left the spot for well over six months. Maybe he’s doing it begrudgingly (like these walks) in order to pass the time. But I wonder whether it’s representative of a broader crises happening in commuter-suburbs. If the purpose of your town (to commute) vanishes, what exactly is the point of a place like Dartford, a place with relatively few places of natural beauty, of shuttered high streets, houses for half a million pounds and narrow, decaying pavements that lead directly into the middle of a motorway?

When I was a teenager, I dreamt of escaping this place and never returning. To me, the town’s celebration of its insularity, it’s fortified efforts to prevent any kind of route out, or welcoming road in, signalled its disdain for the youth who were planted there by middle class parents wanting an advantage to get their kids into a surrounding Grammar school. To me, the situated dullness was the purpose. It was designed to be unwelcoming to anyone who didn’t think that money was there solely to increase the value of your property to the next generation of London expat.

No longer being able to escape, I try to accept the mundane once again. I’m practicing calm through observing uniformity, perform light breathing exercises as I look for pockets of stillness in between fenced off trees and side streets. On a clear day, I’ll be able to see a solitary country house on a hill, and depending on what time I go out in the morning, I’ll be able to hear the sounds of the Thrush, or spot the Siberian Chiffchaff perched on electrical wire. As it flies into the distance, it pierces the grey with a shot of crimson red, a cut that, though vanished, hasn’t fully healed.