My Running Route 2

A couple of weeks ago I was staying in the Netherlands for work. While away, I managed a run through the shopping precinct in Tilburg and three around the canals of the Jordaan near where I was staying in Amsterdam...

I decide to re-walk one of the Amsterdam routes and stick to the brief of noticing things that interest me.

There are a few things I notice but choose not to photograph too often. Firstly bikes because they are everywhere. Secondly, knick-knacks in flat windows because they are creepy. And thirdly shop windows because I always see myself in the reflection.

There is something a little disturbing about a man wandering around with a camera looking into windows. I am the sort of person who cannot help but notice people inside their houses as I pass them in the street, mainly because I am curious. So gentrified, self-conscious and designed is the Jordaan that I often confuse Dutch living rooms with shops or offices. I walk past rooms that seem to spill into the street and peer in to see the people within living their gentrified, self-conscious and designed lives. I wonder whether these people may like others to marvel at their perfect kitchens and immaculate furniture. I cannot take their photographs though. There may be laws against it.

I turn onto Lindengracht, approaching the fruit and vegetable market and ask the proprietor if I can take her photograph. She is happy for me to do so and I am pleased that she is happy. I have not yet decided on what the point of my walk is and what the subject of my blog post should be. 

By the time I get as far as Café Thiyssen I am mired in an ethical dilemma. I take photos of a man on the corner, minding his own business and having a coffee. I take some photos using my zoom and some from a distance. The man reads his paper. What am I doing? I guess I am trying to capture something of undisturbed Amsterdam life, but what right do I have without the permission of my subject, particularly if I am sharing the photos online.

I have not worked through this dilemma by the time I reach the Lekkeresluis bridge and take photographs of some people conversing outside of Café Papeneiland. I snap three photos but am unhappy with all of them. They don’t look right. I need to relax. I am guilty of having the idea of what I am looking for before I have found it. No more taking photos of strangers without their permission, I tell myself.

At the top of Noordermarkt, I find a happy compromise and snap a street scene that captures a few people within it but dispenses of the creepy close ups. I pop into CiTea on Prinsengracht (the cafes and pubs of Amsterdam love a mezzanine level) and take a photo of the proprietor and his customer with their permission. 

“You from the New York Times,” the customer asks me.

“No.”

“Oh, English. The Guardian, maybe?”

“No.”

“Well, why the fuck you want our photo then?”

It’s a good question. I tell him about the blog and about how I am re-walking my running routes. He does not look convinced.

“Enjoy Amsterdam!” he says. I smile and leave. I am a tourist and he knows it! Better that than a business traveller, perhaps!

Part of me feels I should maybe have a little card that I can give to people that tells them about the blog. Part of me feels that I don't need to have a clear plan in mind and should just follow my instincts. After all, I’m only writing this for a giggle.

I take some photos of a group of youths smoking by the side of a canal. I am a long way away and I am pushing my zoom to its edge. I still feel unhappy with the photos and this is possibly because I am uncomfortable playing the paparazzo. No more taking photos of strangers without their permission, I tell myself again.

At ‘t Goede Soet I take a photograph of the owner and her incredible selection of chocolates. She is happy for me to do so and gives me a card.

I ask a man with a fetching beard if he would mind me taking his photo outside his shop of trendy garments. He is happy for me to take a photo of the shop but he will not appear in the photo. The shop front is not that interesting but the fetching beard is. We reach an impasse and I slope off.

I ask myself again: what am I doing? Am I only interested in shops? I hoped that through the walk I would capture something of the environment and of Amsterdam life, but I have only managed a handful of tourist snaps and a selection of hyperlinks. I am not doing very well.  It is hard to see Amsterdam through anything but a tourist’s eye.

Crossing a bridge at Leleigracht, I discover a legitimate and guilt-free way of introducing strangers into my photographs. Taking photos of people with their permission feels tame and without feels unethical. But what about those who enter your photo without permission? Surely those lads are fair game?

 

This well dressed man with a green bag walks into three of my photos.

He seems to be going my direction at first, but after a while I realise I am following him, willing him to enter my fourth photo. At the point I take a hold of myself. I snap five photos looking down Eerste Egelantiersdwarsstraat and I am invisible to the chatting couple approaching. This is brilliant.

(I live in a city filled with tourists and students. When I first moved to Oxford, I was very respectful of those taking photos. On my way into town, I would dance up the High Street like Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean video, dodging the tourists taking photos of everything they could see from Magdalen up to Carfax. I soon stopped caring about the photos I ruined and nowadays make my way up the High Street more like Max Cady leaving prison. I am not alone. Most people who live in a tourist town would be able to find themselves in holiday snaps from around the world. One could easily find pieces of the ‘real life’ of a town in the photos that everyone else is taking. For every ruined tourist photo there is a golden nugget.)

My last few photos are those of a tourist, but that is fine because it is what I am. I am unsatisfied by my walk and with my photos. Tourists take photos to remember rather than to understand. Maybe I should have taken more photos of the canals. Maybe I should have stopped for a coffee and a piece of apfelkuchen. I am a long way from home.

Return to Burton Bradstock

I last visited Burton Bradstock two years ago with Emily and our friends Joe and Keeley. Joe is a journalist and keeps a wild swimming blog, where he follows in the footsteps of his hero Roger Deakin and ‘re-swims’ the entire of Waterlog. Our first trip to Burton Bradstock featured in one of Joe’s early entries and captured my favourite day of the year.

 Emily and I return on a warm and bright day at the start of October, towards the end of our Indian summer. Although early on a Sunday morning, the beach is packed with strollers, and customers throng the Hive Beach Café. I waste no time getting my clothes off while Emily protects my dignity with a well-placed towel. She watches on the beach and takes photos while I have my moment in the water.

The day before in a bookshop in Bridport, the owner told me that she had been swimming the day before and it had been warm. She is not wrong. I wade into the sea with confidence and the sand soon shelves down so I am up to my waste. A wave crashes over me and I am submerged and swimming.

When we visited before, I remember being overwhelmed by the beauty of the stretching headland and the curve of the coast. Joe and I swam in small circles so as not to go out of our depths and we talked of being ‘in’ nature. Today my thoughts are morbid. I feel the pull of the sea and the ferocity of the waves and the feeling of being ‘in’ nature is humbling rather than empowering. If the sea chose to take me I would have no choice but to let it.

As a gigantic wave comes over me, I am pushed forwards and into the grasp of the sea in a manner reminiscent of the famous dolly zoom in Jaws when Officer Brody first sees the shark. I imagine drowning. I imagine Joe hearing the news of my lifeless body being washed up on the Dorset coast and swearing off swimming for good, leaving his blog unfinished. He writes a book, but not on his search for transcendence through swimming and instead on his search for closure in his grievance as he works towards returning to the water. In the final chapter, Joe too goes back to Burton Bradstock with friends and family and they all join hands in the water…  

… to be honest, I didn’t get that far in thinking about it. I see Emily on the beach waving at me and I swim back to shore.  I leave the sea behind, exhilarated and glowing. As I towel off, Emily, tells me that I was very far out and that she was beginning to worry. I tell her about my morbid thoughts and about Joe swearing off swimming. Emily gives me a funny look.

“So, you’re saying that if you drowned, the worst thing about it would be that Joe couldn’t finish his blog?” she says.

Before leaving, I take a few pictures of the rowing boats that have been left on the beach: I am taken by their shape, the colour of their cracked paint and the texture of their ropes. 

My Running Route 1

My fiancé and I have started going running. We have made several attempts over the years and failed to get past the third or fourth run every time. This time we are trying ‘Couch to 5k’ from the NHS website and it is going well. We’re on our fourteenth run.

It is early days so we are only making modest perimeters around our home in Oxford. We are finding out how far we can push our bodies and I am finding out what I look like in the mirror with less of a fat tummy. We are also spending more time dashing about our neighbourhood and part of me wants to slow it down.

Running feels a bit like exploring on fast-forward. I want to learn something about the new routes I am following. I decide to start walking the running routes with my camera and take photos of all the things I notice. That is my only brief and this is my first walk.

I start from home, taking a left onto Catherine Street and past the abandoned factory that features two examples of the Oxford duck graffiti, reported in the Oxford Mail over a year ago. I have often mistaken the ducks for cock monsters. Other examples in the city are better drawn, which leads me to think that the ones on the factory and further up by the corner shop are homages rather than originals. Many of the reported examples are in north Oxford.

I have a quick conversation with two ladies about the amount of graffiti in the area, one of whom has been the victim of the Soup? tag on her own house.

“I wouldn’t mind if it was artistic,” she says. “But what is the point of soup?”

I suspect it may be another homage to the SOAK tag of Charlie Silver (also associated with the BWS tag), who was prosecuted and fined a few years ago for graffiti around Oxford. 

There is another example on Hertford Street, just round the corner. It is less impressive than some of Silver’s tags and I suspect another fraud. The police it seems are aware of the profile of the taggers and are closing in. Whether Silver is involved is another question entirely. In July he was set free after the prosecution against him collapsed after a CCTV cock-up.

I enter Cowley Road from Magdalen Street, near to the ancient site of St Bartholomew’s leper hospital (just by what is now Bartlemas Surgery). The old chapel is still there off Cowley Road but it is not the direction I am going. 

Instead, my camera snaps a surfeit of signs that direct me away from the private property of Oriel College. The founder of Oriel, Adam de Brome was also the warden of the leper hospital in 1336, two years after Oriel was established. The land on which I am standing has been in Oriel’s possession for nearly 700 years.

Other signs tell me to slow down and not to drink. 

I turn onto Barlemas Close and see a green transformer on the side of the street with a poster of a boy holding a balloon. The caption above says “This Won’t be Here Forever” and it feels appropriate.

A hedge runs up the side of the close that blocks the views across to the Medieval chapel and the allotments. I turn off at the path that leads to Barracks Lane and walk along the fence and the undergrowth that keeps the public out of Lincoln College Recreation Ground. 

A mile out the city and I am still kept on the other side of the fence from the university.

It’s not that I want in, but I’ve heard the college bars are a lot cheaper than your average Oxford boozer.

I’m more interested in the undergrowth anyway.

Someone has lost his shirt.

And his pants.

And his surgical glove.

The Barracks Lane Community Garden is a welcome sight at the end of the path.

Someone has a big one growing.

At the entrance to Cowley Marsh Park, it is clear that ROFE has tagged ownership on the way in and the way out.

And on a dogshit bin, later on down the path.

I am flanked by fences again and the undergrowth prevents me from peeking through to the tennis club.

I am surrounded by trees and a sludge stream, which I had not noticed before, trickles down the leg of the path to my left.

There is unseen irrigation and piping I had not noticed. I shudder when I think I’ve found a drowned duck in the bog.

But it is only a misshapen log. Or is it? I’m pretty sure it’s a log.

Out in the open again and into the park, I notice more rubbish and detritus, some left a little too neatly.

I think of that embarrassing scene in American Beauty where Wes Bentley gets all mushy about the plastic bag blowing in the wind. Because that is us, right? It’s a kind of metAphor for the way we lead our lives?

Sometimes the plastic bag hits a big bush. 

Out in the open, there is a strange mixture of accidental and deliberate. I have been used to feeling that the fence are keeping me out, but what if instead they are keeping us in. 

I keep to the path without question, but there are different paths I can take. I think of desire lines and imagine the ones that may have been created here in the park. Centuries ago when this was a marshland, there was only one route from London into Oxford across the marshes. This became Cowley Road: an ancient desire line.

I think about the choices I make in where to tread. I barely disrupt the patterns I see. I am a passive visitor to the marsh. I leave nothing but take my photos. Others leave their shoes.

There is more graffiti too. Nothing as possessive as that of ROFE, but instead a modest record that someone was there. 

I can relate to that. I respect it.

I see desire lines encircling a patch of rough grass and man-made stonework beating the path I take. There are places to sit to watch the new basketball courts it would seem. Labour councilors have invested time and money in the marsh, only to add gym equipment. The park backs a tennis club and a golf club, and just up the road there is a David Lloyd. I only run though this park. I don’t have time for chest pressing.

I take a right out of the park and walk alongside more fences to my right and another sludge stream to my left.

There is texture in the undergrowth and a bag of tinnies. 

The old print works is overgrown and the graffiti artists have had their way, albeit with wet feet. 

I wonder the meaning of the ellipsis. Maybe Haz feels temporary about himself, or perhaps he is emphasising something else.

Where the track meets the road at the corner of the print works, I spend some time looking at where the water is escaping under the street. Leaves and twigs and a plastic bag collects in the iron grill. I think back to the tubing before in Cowley Marsh Park but am unable to connect.

I join Marsh Road and walk down towards Cowley, past the Marsh Harrier. I cross the main road and take the path that follows the stream up to Florence Park. 

There’s something about this brook. On our next run, Emily nails it. “It’s a bit poo-y,” she says. She is right: it stinks. And then I suddenly realize that this is the same bit of water that I left at the grill by the print works; the stream has travelled underground, trickling under where I’m standing. Oxford is built around water: it showcases its sparkling rivers and students and tourists punt on them. I have been following different Oxford waterways on my walk that are submerged and hidden from view. Probably because they stink.

(Later I read reports of other Oxford underground streams)

There is more graffiti too.

Someone has left there clothes by the side of the stream. When we run by here a few days later, the clothes are gone. Who has taken them? Someone clearing up? The original wearer, after having aired them? Someone who was desperate?

The path is less well kept than others and I am oppressed by fences again. There are allotments on both sides, but the ones to my right are blocked by hedge and metal. To my left, glimpses of the gardens can be seen through the bushes. Some of the fences are man-made. I imagine gardeners working together to create walls.

There are surprising colours in the green. As the sun comes out, I try to capture the sparkles of light in the water but fail. I cannot find what I am seeing.

 I see my third shoe of the walk.

Where the water disappears under the road, a shopping trolly has been pushed into ditch. It contains cans and leaves. There is a supermarket up the road, but a pound is not required to unlock it from the rest. I wonder whether the trolly in the water was ever of any use. Did someone bring it over here to help them with their shopping or was it just stolen because it could be. I imagine the thief getting this far and questioning why she had taken it in the first place. Did she push it because she couldn’t think what else to do with it? Or maybe he always planned to push it off because he wanted to see what it would look like when it was falling and what it looked like when it hit the water. She must have had quite a run up because it travelled quite far. Was he alone or with friends? Did they throw their cans in afterwards or had they left them in there already?

I look at the trolly and think about it for longer than is necessary.

I leave the path where Rymers Lane meets Cricket Rd and cross over to the path continues alongside Florence Park. I am met by a crow in the path.

I get close enough for an average photo and the crow disappears into the house extension to my right and I leave it there.

I pass a break in the fence and continue to where that stream continues from under the street. There is more man-made stone work. 

I continue along the path. The sun is getting brighter and the colours from the park become more intense.

I come across blue bags in the bushes and red and purple confetti in the grass, a white and blue shirt, a yellow shirt, a carton of squash, a squirrel, some Lucozade and some pasta. Consistent with my original brief, these are all things that interest me.

When the park comes to an end, I take a right at Campbell Rd and follow the path alongside Larkrise Primary School. There is a large path for bikes and a smaller path for humans. There are painted markings on the floor to denote the international sign for ‘walk here.’ 

They are weather beaten and diminished and have taken different forms. One looks like an arrow, one looks like a sad duck, one look like a freaky bunny. There is something else on the ground, reminiscent of the Rorschach test that I do not understand.

There are unpronounced black markings on a faded blue sign and a faded sign on a lamppost splattered red.

When I stop to take a photo, a red-haired cyclist stops for a chat.

“What are you taking a photo of.”

I point it out to him.

“So what’s that about?”

“Well, it used to be one thing. And now it’s something else.”

“Right.” He thinks about it. “Thanks for that”, he says. He cycles off, probably thinking abstruse motherfucker. 

I am nearly home. On Boundary Brook Rd there is an order on a wall prohibiting ball games and a wall to the side of a garage crammed with rubbish.

On the corner of my road, there is another tag from Soup? I am back where I started.