{"id":31,"date":"2007-11-15T12:10:06","date_gmt":"2007-11-15T12:10:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blah\/?p=31"},"modified":"2018-07-20T14:24:21","modified_gmt":"2018-07-20T21:24:21","slug":"walking-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/2007\/11\/walking-home\/","title":{"rendered":"Walking Home"},"content":{"rendered":"

A nice little piece in the LA Times about Will Self walking in Los Angeles<\/a>. LAX to Watts is a significant endeavour. I’ve done it by bus a few times and even that takes a couple of hours.<\/p>\n

It reminded me of a day I walked from the outskirts of London into the West End. The Macguffin was the fact that I didn’t have money for the tube, but it ended up being a pleasure in itself. It was almost a straight walk \u2014 maybe ten miles \u2014 down the Edgware Road, through Hendon, Cricklewood, Kilburn, Maida Vale, Marble Arch. I can date it precisely, because it was the Monday that the (fantastic) XTC album Oranges and Lemons<\/i> came out, and buying it was my treat at the end of the walk.<\/p>\n

Riding a bus gets you much closer to a city than driving a car, cycling gets you closer than riding a bus, and walking \u2014 especially this sort of long city-walk performed despite<\/em> the existence of other options \u2014 is just the best way to soak up the feel of a place and really understand the geography. One of the alienating things about LA is that, not only don’t<\/em> people walk, it’s more or less impossible to get from anywhere you are to anywhere you might want to be by walking; if you have a go at it, incidental pleasures on the way are pretty meagre. It’s not a city for serendipitous wandering.<\/p>\n

One of my heading-off-to-sleep thoughts (you can only really do it when you’re safe and warm and home<\/em>) used to be to imagine myself either dumped in the middle of nowhere \u2014 a moor, a desert, etc. \u2014 or some known but distant place, and then either to imagine the pleasure of arriving home after a monumental trek, or to play a game with myself, where I’d try to figure out what sort of reward I’d accept for willingly undertaking such an adventure. I’d put myself in a desert on the other side of the world, or perhaps just a long night’s walk through the cold and dark away from the bed I was currently in. Would a hundred pounds be enough? In the end, the pleasure of arriving home \u2014 with the memory of what it felt like in the desolate starting place \u2014 always seemed the real prize.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A nice little piece in the LA Times about Will Self walking in Los Angeles. LAX to Watts is a significant endeavour. I’ve done it by bus a few times and even that takes a couple of hours. It reminded me of a day I walked from the outskirts of London into the West End. … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1045,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/1045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/northgare.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}