"Look at it this way"

A few years ago, I spent a lot of time producing an entry for a writing competition, which required a piece of descriptive writing linked the Fens and travelling, and encounters with nature and wildlife. I can't remember the exact rubric, but it was about travelling. I decided to write about a journey that I have made over 2000 times .... from home to work and back again. It took me weeks to write on and off, and at the end I didn't think it was quite good enough to enter, so never used it - imposter syndrome again perhaps. It's sat on my hard drive for a couple of years and perhaps now is time to just put it out there... I'm quite pleased with some elements of it. B1145-A1065-A47-A1122-A10 by Alan Parkinson This piece also acts as an example of quotidian geography . This is something that is the daily experience for many, although a growing number have never had a job, or are currently out of work. Some travel to work or school the same way each day - some by tr...

From an appreciation of Barry Lopez's work by Robert MacFarlane came a mention of J. B. (Brinck) Jackson .  He was someone I could not remember hearing about before, although some of his books looked familiar when I looked further: "American vernacular landscape, J.B. Jackson, whose essays and lectures were so influential in dignifying and directing scholarly attention onto gas stations, lawns, woodlots, road-layouts, ballparks, and other everyday human structures as part of “the full imprint of human societies on the landscape,” in Jackson’s phrase. Jackson was a vocal critic of the exclusionary wilderness aesthetic as it existed in much mainstream North American conservation and (dread phrase) “nature writing.” He apparently focussed on writing and research about elements in the landscape that were defiantly prosaic in nature, and were those seen and perhaps overlooked through their ubiquity and ordinariness. He died in 1996, and his obituary was published in the New York...

A cross-posting from my Geography in/on Film blog. Matt Black's 'American Geography' is a film to accompany a project where he explores the poorer parts of the USA. It is a Magnum Photos project. Between 2015 and 2020, Matt Black traveled over 100,000 miles across 46 states. American Geography documents the experiences of those living in some of the poorest communities in the nation. Starting in his hometown in California’s Central Valley, where billions of dollars are generated every year in agricultural output but one-third of the population lives in poverty, he traveled to other areas of “concentrated poverty” – as US census definition of places with a poverty rate of 20 percent or more. What Black found is that rather than being distant anomalies, these communities were rarely more than a two-hour drive apart enabling him to cross the country without ever crossing above the poverty line. There is also a website which has further details on the project including diaries...

"Veer off the track Take the path That leads beyond the map I'm a travelling man Each day I walk the byways of this life..." A track by the band 'Big Big Train'. And there they are playing their instruments for real in an excellent live performance. I miss that feeling when the bass pedals can be felt in your stomach at a gig...

Michael Palin was on the Andrew Marr Show this morning. He was asked about what travelling might be like in the future as we come out of lockdown and lose our holidays. How should we cope with that. " I think you can travel less and travel better. If we have to be confined to travelling in the UK, it's not a bad place to travel - there are all sorts of wonderful places - and different landscapes and different sorts of atmospheres - Northern Scotland, Cornwall. Go to places and learn more about them, enjoy them more. Find out more about your own country. It's going to be very difficult for people right across the world to actually travel again as we did before until we find a vaccine. Nobody is going to pack people into aeroplanes as they did before. No cheap and cheerful flights around the world. It's going to be very difficult to see the rest of the world. So narrow your horizons is not necessarily a bad thing. Look more carefully Look more thoroughly L...