It was May the 12th, 2018,
Synchronised walking was happening all over the globe
Via a shared urban score:
‘Cities tend to start in the middle and spread outwards, thinning as they go…
a familiar phenomenology … in the middle of things.
But where is that exactly, and how can we be sure?
…you are unlikely to encounter a sign telling you that you have arrived.
This is, of course, one of the surest indications …
that you are back in the middle of things:
the signs pointing the way will have dried up.’
But we were in the country,
Far away from the City of London;
How could we see, hear, touch, taste and smell
The space-time of a city, out here in the shires,
Far away from Jeremy Corbyn and the TUC Rally,
Far away from William Blake and London:
‘I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe …
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear …’
But we did descry the Reverend Kilvert
As we wandered into the spring of 1870,
Slipping down some wormhole of time:
‘Hay in the distance bright in brilliant sunshine …
Every watercourse clear upon the mountains in the searching light …’,
We wandered past the wooded site of the Battle of Bryn Glas,
Where Glendower’s and Mortimer’s armies clashed,
In bloody carnage in 1402:
‘The noble Mortimer …
Was by the rude hand of that Welshman taken,
A thousand of his people butchered …’;
And there, farther in the distant hills,
A tumulus at the source of the River Lugg,
And there, Offa’s Dyke,
There, a deserted medieval village,
As we made our way through woodland and holloways,
And through a profusion of flowers and names:
Bluebells shimmering on high spring sward,
Ferns and bracken unfurling their fronds,
Primroses, daffodils, stitchwort, cuckoo flowers,
Lady’s smock, cuckoo pint, lords and ladies, priest’s pint,
Campion, sanicle, rhododendrons in a churchyard:
‘Some village Hampden that with dauntless breast
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’;
The churchyard conjoined William Blake and Thomas Gray,
The churchyard conjoined the time and space,
That connect shire and city –
For those twelve days taken from the pay packet of 1752,
Take us to a TUC rally on old May Day in London in 2018,
And William Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’,
Transmitted across the country on the BBC,
Just like a city-walk …
a familiar phenomenology …
Comfy old BBC,
Entertaining, informing and educating …
But just as a city changes shape with the centuries,
With a centre that wanders away from itself,
So the BBC’s signposts,
Now turn only to the right.