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.