I know lots of other people are keen on walking as well, because when I go out into the street I see them doing it, and if I head over to my local shop I often find Mike, the proprietor, plodding up and down the aisles of biscuits and Brillo pads. As we pass each other we’ll sing out a cheery ‘hello!’ because we’re just two walkers doing what we love and this engenders a certain fellow feeling. Many serious walkers are pretty down on the whole business of shopping, and see trolling around expensive retail outlets racking up consumer debt as a poor substitute for the windswept romance of the fells, but I say fie on you! On a good hike in the West End or around one of London’s many indoor malls, I can travel as far as a mile, while the frequent stops to heave my plastic give the whole experience great style and elan.
I suppose the real objection to all this walking I do is that it takes the form of what’s termed ‘linear access’. I start at point ‘A’ and, using a direct route, walk to point ‘B’. Granted, I may make diversions to points ‘C’ and ‘D’, but these too will be along fairly defined paths. What I don’t do is ‘roam’, and that’s precisely what the new Countryside and Rights of Way Act allows me to do. Personally, I find the whole notion of roaming quite alien, and I’m not even sure that I know how to do it at all. Take my morning routine: where am I to go if I don’t walk to the bathroom? Should I just stroll aimlessly around the bedroom until I end up pissing in the bookcase? This has been known to happen, but usually only after the ingestion of strong liquors. And what about my walk over the road to buy the paper? If I roam up and down Mike’s aisles for too long, tolerant as he is he’ll call the Old Bill.
I’m not just being facetious about this. As I say, I welcome the opening up of an area the size of Luxembourg to the British public, and concur heartily with those who say that for far too long the big landowners have been allowed to hide their bushels under a. . er. . bushel. But roaming, I ask you. I don’t think we’re going to see the Forest of Bowland — one of the new areas of outstanding natural beauty which has been opened up — covered with cagoule-clad worthies ambling about in a completely random pattern, like smoke particles in Brownian motion. Isn’t it more likely that they’ll naturally fuse into flocks and packs that will then denude the patches they settle on, and perhaps end up having to be painlessly culled by high-velocity rifle bullets?
Isn’t the sordid truth that by turning walking, that most primal of physical activities, into a recreational pursuit like paragliding or motocross, the roaming lobby — quite inadvertently — participate in the downgrading of more workaday ambulatory activity? The kind of walking they have in mind requires a fair outlay on kit and usually — for those of us who live in large conurbations — a long train or car ride before it can be undertaken. Besides, isn’t it the case that there can be no rights without responsibilities? And I’m not talking about shutting the gate here. The harsh fact is that far from taking responsibility for their walking the vast bulk of the population is more prepared than ever to sit around on its fat arses licking pure salt and watching reality TV shows.
Still, at least that leaves us linear walkers with plenty of elbow room. I walked to Newhaven this summer from the front door of my house in south London. It was eighty-seven miles and it took me four days. In the first three days out I encountered more people in electric invalid carriages (three) than I did on foot. On the fourth day this changed, because I’d got to the South Downs, which were covered with people roaming. It’s an irony that can’t be lost on the Duke of Westminster and his buddies, that, having lost unlimited grazing for one kind of livestock, they’ve now acquired another species.
Havana. . in Brighton
I went to a wedding at the weekend in Havana. . in Brighton. Let us just dwell on that phrase for a few moments: I went to a wedding at the weekend in Havana. . in Brighton. Havana was very nice as it happens, two large airy rooms, with galleries running around them, fans revolving lazily on the white-painted ceilings. The staff were bustling and efficient, wound tightly into their immaculate, ankle-length aprons. There was no sign either of the sleaze and corruption one associates with the Batista regime, or of the penury and paranoia that has dogged Fidel Castro’s exercise in nation building. But then this was Havana. . in Brighton.
I think it was brave of the bride and groom to hold their wedding in Havana, because the bride comes from an Anglo-Chinese family and they must have fairly negative feelings about communism. As for the groom, well, he’s a dyed-in-the-cashmere capitalist, a true getter, so the venue must have seemed more than a tad outré. Still, he betrayed no anxiety as he ushered the guests in. There were painted ladies on stilts, a brace of conjurors, the food was noisettes of lamb, rosti, rugula salad — not quite what you expect from Cuban cuisine, but then this was Havana. . in Brighton.
Later, as the Victoria train made a lengthy detour via Haywards Heath due to engineering works on the main line, I reflected on how Graham Greene might have reacted to the wedding. It’s almost impossible to conceive of Greene visiting any kind of theme restaurant, even one as discreet as Havana. Perhaps this alone confirms that he wasn’t quite the towering genius some once thought, and also explains why his books are beginning, ever so gently, to slide out of print. It seems to me incontrovertible that nothing that is human can be strange to those creators whose works will endure, not even an Irish pub in Maputo.
Had Havana been Brighton in the 1930s it would’ve allowed Greene to kill two fictional birds with one stone. He could’ve written a novel called Our Man in Havana Rocks. . in Brighton, the action of which would concern the sad machinations of a down-at-heel British spy running a theme restaurant who is threatened by a punk gangster. If you think this is preposterous, you need to consider the fact that Greene himself never even visited Brighton. During the composition of Brighton Rock he put up at the rather more genteel Bexhill-on-Sea and sent researchers along the coast to do his legwork for him.
I don’t know why I’ve got it in for Greene at the moment — he never did anything to hurt me. Still, the revelation that, far from being an urbane globetrotter, he never got further than Sussex, while the vast bulk of his output was written in the vicinity of Clapham Common, is one I must share. It was not by accident that critics dubbed his late-colonial milieu, with its dipsomaniac expats, tormented priests and nymphomaniac natives ‘Greeneland’, because it was first and foremost a country of the mind. The Human Factor, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American — all of them were drummed up by a fantasist who knew no more of South America, Africa or South-East Asia than a schoolboy armed with a decent atlas. Travels with my Aunt should really have been entitled Hanging Out with My Aunt, while Greene’s very first fiction, Stamboul Train, is a blatant lie, as any close reading of the text makes it perfectly clear that the train in question is travelling on the branch line from Ely to Peterborough.
Does it matter? I hear you ask. Surely it’s a very prosaic conception of fiction indeed which insists on such a factual basis? After all, even Kafka wrote a novel called Amerika without ever going there. Well, yes and yet no. I do think a sense of topography is integral to our enjoyment of fiction, and that even if we haven’t been to a place we can somehow sense whether the writer who describes it has. I remember being in Brazil (or do I?) ten years ago, and the Brazilian literary community being much exercised by John Updike, who’d just published a novel called Brazil. ‘’E was only ’ere a week! One week!’ expostulated my genial translator, Hamilton dos Santos. What he would’ve made of Terry Gilliam’s film of the same name I shudder to think, set as it was almost entirely inside the cooling tower of Chiswick Power Station.