Speechification

After listening to the little Will Self gem on walking from La Guardia airport into Manhattan, with some serendipity this piece turned up on ABC Radio National shortly after. It’s also about walking, but a very different kind of walking, and a different kind of storytelling for that matter. Centred around four different voices telling walking stories, it’s a slightly pretentiously based around Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, rather unnecessarily, but it’s worth it for the stories. It’s also interspersed with vignettes - of great marches during the ’30s depression, a bit of Iain Sinclair and Laurie Lee - and beautifully recorded, as ever.

Two stories are told by a student tracing her walk following the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, and an itinerant street performer from Poland, who wanders around from city to city. (I’m less interested in him, but I know that’s largely due to my own deep-seated - but entirely reasonable I think - prejudice against street performers.)

But it’s the other two voices that really capture the ear. The softly-spoken casualty of the music industry is fascinating - a great storyteller. Having left behind a life that had become debauched and empty, he ends up trudging alone through the bush for 3 months, the walking helping to strip his life back to its absolute core. He describes it as feeling himself unravelling, only stopping when he begins to find a little too much in common with the old bushmen of the fences out in the border country of Australia, who would be alone for months on end. They used to say that when they started putting two plates down for dinner, it was time to come in.

Then another great character, an inmate talking of life in prison - the notorious Long Bay in Sydney - and the seemingly endless walking around the prison yard. 3km of solitude - “gangster laps” - punctuated with stolen banter, every day. Or of hearing the footsteps of a new cellmate echoing down the corridor. He’s great. “I mean, that’s all you’ve got left … your walk and your word.”

Oh and make sure you stick around for the short bonus feature: some bloke convinced ABC Radio National to give him a series on looking for decent pubs in the middle of nowhere, called “Where can I get a drink around here?”. So here he is, in the middle of nowhere indeed, but in a town briefly transformed for the race meeting that rolls in once a year. Just listen to the voices.

Radio Eye: Two feet and a heartbeat (mp3)

This entry was posted by by dan on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 10:12 pm . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.