Footsteps

T and I were in the café thinking about how to approach the topic of footsteps. She wondered where the phrase ‘don’t judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes’ came from and I said I’d check it later as a possible start. She then mentioned that one of her favourite memories of footsteps was walking along the sands of a beach when she was younger.

9,000 year old Formby Beach Footprint

I was trying to decide between ‘shoes’ and ‘sand’ when my own memories of running on beaches came to the fore. Whenever I think about that I see the opening scenes of Chariots of Fire in my mind and I have to gulp a bit. Of all the possible similar experiences there is one that I’m always reminded of and that was when I lived in Great Yarmouth. I’d run as far as Caister up and down the huge sand dunes. When I got to a certain point I had to turn round and follow my footsteps back. It was a hot day and when I came to a halt I was so exhausted that I was sick all over the last dune. A wonderful few hours.

That was following in my footsteps but whose footsteps would I follow if given the chance?

Buzz Aldrin's Footprint

Well, top of the list and by 238,850 miles would be Buzz Aldrin. The first person on the moon could have stepped off the landing craft and sunk down into the Moon’s surface. You can’t be too careful.

If I had been taking the footsteps myself then I would have been in Trevor Francis’s boots as I stepped out onto the St Andrews pitch in September 1970 for my home debut at the age of sixteen. I would have scored as well as he did and not been in the Cattell Road end watching.

Trevor Francis

I think one of the great pleasures is walking the streets of a city at night. I probably would have been spotted but I would loved to have followed Charles Dickens as he roamed London. It was said that he loved the glorious, mysterious, sometimes dangerous life of cities at night, which he characterised as scenes from a magic lantern; but he also felt at home among the homeless. It was their experience of the city that, because it spoke to him of some crisis both of self and society, he most wanted to voice.

As for poetry and walking I’d like to be a bit more up to date and I would definitely follow in the footsteps of Alice Oswald as she prepared for her wonderful book ‘Dart’. In it she followed the river from its source to the sea. She threads conversations with a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers, canoeists and more with short comments at the side to create a work that rushes and slows as the river itself. 

Here’s the first lines:

Who’s this moving alive over the moors?/An old man seeking and finding a difficulty./Has he remembered his compass his spare socks/does he fully intend going in over his knees off the/ military track from Okehampton?/Keeping his course through the swamp spaces/and pulling the distance round his shoulders.

I suppose as I’ve covered past and present footsteps I should look forward to who or what I could be stepping out to. And what comes to mind is going back thousands of years. Many thousands. I would like to see the 9,000 year old human footprints at Formby which are located along a 4km stretch of the coast between Lifeboat Road and Gypsy Wood. Not as old as the ones found in 2013 in Happisburgh in Norfolk, they were 900,000 years old but have been washed away, although they were completely recorded by scientists before that.

By the way I did look up the origins of the ‘walked a mile in his shoes’ and it comes from a poem by Mary T Lathrap entitled ‘Judge Softly’. And the line was ‘Walk a Mile in His Moccasins’.

Here is a poem about some other footsteps:

She sends me Photos of Milestones

To Todmorden 7 – To Halifax 4 ¾
Shifnal 4 – Salop 3m 6f
Thirsk 6 – Helmsley 8

In the measured tones of
James Alexander Gordon
bringing back memories
of late Saturdays
anxious about the scores
from the pocket radio
and the distance left
as light fades
on a country road

Six miles to Thirsk
with a knapsack on my back
striding a verge of years
not counting the footsteps
thoughts straying to evenings
and a decent pub
able to ignore
furlongs and fractions
as nothing more
than quaint signs pointing
to a past of contradictions
that now measures every month
as a perfect number.

First published in South, April 2015

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.