Raising Funds for the Trussell Trust
Abingdon to Wallingford
Abingdon to Wallingford March 12th 2020
Sunrise 6.20 Sunset 18.00
Carbon count: 413.78 Pre-industrial base 280 Safe level 350
14 miles Start 11.20 Arrival 15.25
The day after the budget the day before
(Hedge funds versus food banks),
On a train to Didcot and then a bus to Abingdon,
Past Didcot Power Station edgelands,
Pat business park daffodil roundabouts,
And a stream of greenwashing lorries,
Until I walk beneath the bridge at Abingdon,
Past medieval alms houses
(A Foodbank Pilgrimage),
Splashing through big sky open fields,
Past dovecots and manor houses,
Past bridges and weirs and locks and ferries,
Past thatch and pub and hills and woodland,
Following the line of pill boxes,
With magnolia in bloom in Shillingford,
Blackthorn and hawthorn in blossom too,
Hawk, heron, corvid, swan and skylark,
A rainbow over the church at Dorchester,
Half drowned trees and silvered puddles,
And all the time,
The relentless flow
Of the quickening, wide and turbid Thames,
Past Neolithic, Iron Age and Romano-British remains,
Past Paul Nash’s Wittenham Clumps,
Until I at last reach Saxon Wallingford,
And a bus back to Didcot,
And a train back to Stroud.
The end of self-isolation and social distancing,
The end of losing myself in time and space,
Back to the coronavirus anxiety,
Back to the lack of help for the gig economy,
Back to the land of the five-week wait,
Back to the land of hedge funds,
Back to a land of Cummings and going,
To a land of survival of the fittest,
To a land of ‘herd immunity’,
Now more than ever convinced of the need
For our Food Bank Pilgrimage,
But that’s not the reason why all those pill boxes
Were constructed along the banks of the Thames.
It was to stop the survival of the fittest.
I once walked out into a rain-blossom Thames Valley morning,
Feeling ever so slightly wired
And ever so slightly pantheistic,
That feeling aware of it all,
And feeling a part of it all sort of thing:
The robin singing in the cherry tree,
An Anglo-Saxon springtime song of joy,
No spear or seaxe, sword or shield,
No warrior-cry or smote-shout,
No blood-red stain in the rain-splash gutters,
But the corvids still cried in alarm,
Clacking and fluttering in the trees,
As I walked this watery defensive barrier,
A Dark Age storm-sheet rain cloud,
Enveloping the new-green land.
But later, the sun was shining
As I reflected on the Victorian cult of King Alfred,
That cult of Englishness and cult of imagined democracy,
When in fact we would have a 95% chance of being a peasant,
And a one in four chance of enslavement
A feudal, hierarchical society:
Monarch; ealdormen (jarls, earls); theigns;
geneats, cottars, geburs, boors (villeins); slaves …
‘Each boor must give 6 loaves to the herdsman of the lord’s swine
when he drives his herd to the mast-pasture …
When death befalls him let the lord take charge of what he leaves.’
STATE OF HUNGER RESEARCH:
PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN
REFERRED TO A FOOD BANK
HAVE A HOUSEHOLD INCOME
THAT WAS ABOUT THE SAME
AS THEIR HOUSING COSTS