Walking ‘Blakes Road’
Whilst writing my first book Swindon Orbital earlier this year, I learnt something important about the act of writing. It was a crucial lesson, but not one I can share with you right now, because it went on to form the key idea around which my second book Blakes Road is being built, and to share it would be to spoil that.
Blakes Road charts the course of a walk I took from William Blake’s one time seaside home of Felpham, West Sussex, to his eventual burial place in Islington, London. I have long wanted to walk this route, as for the longest time it has seemed me as the nearest thing an Englishman can take to a pilgrimage in his own country. Connecting Felpham with Islington is, doubtless, reasonably arbitrary, but a route that makes sense to one who makes the Sussex coastline his home, as I presently do. I decided I wanted to cover the distance in four days, and spent the autumn of this year waiting for a time when I would have four successive days free, and for which the weather forecast would be predicting clear skies.
That time came on Thursday 29th October, and so on that morning I took the train to Felpham and set off. Three days later on the evening of 31st of October (Halloween) at about 7pm I arrived in Purley, South London, tired and in pain, having trekked for three days through the English countryside and experienced a amazing and unexpected series of events en route.
The forecast had changed radically by the time I arrived, and was by then predicting massive downpours all over the country for the following day, Sunday 1st November. I decided therefore to return home to Brighton, and return again once the weather had improved. Whilst it rained, I reasoned, I could start work on the book.
Today is Friday 4th December and, incredibly, not a day has passed since Sunday 1st November upon which it hasn’t rained. In the past five weeks towns have flooded, bridges have collapsed, and I have barely left my house, electing instead to remain at home in the dry, and write.
In that time I have nearly completed the first draft of the first three chapters. I have arrived at the village of South Nutfield - having been through Arundel, Crawley, Gatwick, and great swathes of countryside inbetween - and a few more days of writing should bring me to Purley, and the 50,000 word mark.
Swindon Orbital focused on one subject: Swindon. Blakes Road is a more ambitious project, tackling a number of subjects simultaneously: Blake, England & the English, Morality, my own psychology, and a couple of other topics I’m afraid I must keep to myself for now. Being so much more indepth, I have found that it is much more difficult to write, and may even turn out to be an embarrassing failure because of the risks I need to take in tying the various disparate elements together, but I will certainly finish it, and we will see where it takes us.
I’m hoping to have it finished by February 2010. Most of my time will be spent on the book itself obviously, but I will probably return here from time to time with news about it.
Tags: Blakes Road, swindon orbital, william blake