Mark Mason on Walk The Lines

In an exclusive article for The Dabbler, Mark Mason, author of this month’s Dabbler Book Club choice Walk the Lines (published today), explains how he came to walk the entire London Underground network, overground…

My project to walk the entire London Underground network overground started as a way of ‘conquering’ the city – getting to truly understand the London I loved, which had been home for thirteen years. It certainly did that: I saw parts of the capital I’d never visited, and was forced to reevaluate other parts I thought already knew. (Tottenham, for instance – have you been there lately? They’ve got the poshest Poundworld you could imagine.) I met people who opened my eyes to how and why we interact with maps, like Bill Drummond, ex of the pop group The KLF, who told me about his childhood habit of drawing ‘Bill’ on maps of his native Scotland then walking the resulting route.

And I learned no end of London trivia: how MPs reputedly gave permission for the Bakerloo Line because they wanted a quick route up to Lord’s for the cricket … that there’s a Little Ben, a 30 foot replica of Big Ben outside Victoria Station (I’d walked past this hundreds of times but never noticed it) … how London gave the Russians their word for ‘train station’: a Russian delegation visiting London in 1840 to learn about their successful new railways (those were the days), were shown Vauxhall station. Believing the name to be the general word for that sort of building they copied it, which is why the Russian word for a train station is ‘вокзал’, pronounced ‘vokzal’.

But writing the book also opened my mind to wider truths about the nature of walking – of travel itself. One of these came on my District Line walk, in the graveyard of Kew Church. I’d paused there partly to shelter from the rain (stair-rods, it was), partly because Richard Phillips, a 19th century writer, had paused there on his own walk from London to Kew. The book he’d written about the journey had been part of my research. Leaving aside the fact that he was a pompous old tit, some of his conclusions really struck home. ‘I could not avoid,’ he wrote, ‘feeling the strong analogy which exists between such an excursion as that which I have here described and the life of man …’ He thinks of the graves at Kew. ‘Was not life the mere dream of their now senseless tenants – like the trackless path of a bird in the air … ? May not the events of a morning which slides away, and leaves no trace behind it, be correctly likened therefore to the entire course of human life?’

Here I was looking at those self-same graves. Something came back to me from an interview I’d done earlier in the book, with Rachel Martin-Pe’er, who was about to qualify as a London cabbie. As we’d talked about the 19,000 miles she’d driven to learn London’s streets, she said ‘our whole lives are a journey, aren’t they?’ At the time it seemed nothing more than a throwaway comment. But now it seemed a fundamental truth, one that helped make sense of a feeling that had been growing stronger the further I got through the project – I didn’t want it to end. After the District Line walk I’d have done five of the ten major lines (the Waterloo and City being too short to really count). One more step after that and I’d be nearer the finish than the start. Reminded me of how I felt turning 35, remembering what the Bible says about three score years and ten …

My love of walking the lines, I saw now, wasn’t just a love of London, or of exercise, or of achieving a goal; it was a love of life. Looking forward to a journey, planning it – especially a journey marked off, as mine were (at least on the Tube map) by regular little dashes on a lovely straight line – is a subconscious substitute for the thing we can’t do, namely controlling our life. That’s why airports and train stations are such magical places; they allow you to be reborn. And relishing a journey in the memory is the equivalent of immortality, or at least reincarnation. That’s why I’d loved tracing each completed walk in magimarker on my map of London.

As the rain hammered away on my umbrella, I thought of the ‘senseless tenants’ in the graves before me, how each of their lives had been ‘the trackless path of a bird’. And I remembered another conversation, this time with my editor, who once said he thought I wrote books for the same reason he published them: to leave something behind. A shelf full of objects that say ‘I was here once’. I hadn’t agreed at the time – immortality has never been my bag. But now (and maybe it was relevant that since that conversation I’d become a father) I wondered whether Nigel wasn’t right after all. Was this project – this book – something to be remembered by? If you’re trying to stop the path of your life ending up trackless, what better tool than over two hundred miles of track?

You can buy Walk the Lines from Amazon now. Join the Dabbler Book Club here  – it’s free.
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4 thoughts on “Mark Mason on Walk The Lines

  1. Worm
    July 13, 2011 at 13:24

    The book sounds ace! I’d love to do this kind of trip – just pick a random thing to conquer and then see what happens en route; visiting every surviving Little Chef in Britain perhaps, as part of a eulogy to the dying art of majestically crap british road food. There would be chapters on Wall’s sausages and the advent of the game-changing Ginsters slice, and I would attempt to get to the bottom of exactly what that powder is inside tins of travel sweets

  2. ianvince@mac.com'
    July 14, 2011 at 09:10

    I, too, will be making a point of reading this book soon. We seem to have become rather disconnected from our place on the earth, so much so that everything seems to be a headlong rush to the end when we really should be savouring the journey.
    Books like this would seem to remind us that the itinerary is much more important than the destination.

  3. zmkc@ymail.com'
    July 14, 2011 at 12:28

    I once recommended a shop called Zont to someone in Budapest – they have very good umbrellas, I said, not realising that they would really, since zont means umbrella. So I sympathise with those Russians, although only now do I understand why that was one of the few pieces of Russian vocabulary that slotted neatly into place instead of behaving like a large and ill-fitting brick as I tried to hammer it into my memory

  4. Gaw
    July 14, 2011 at 14:20

    Another Russian railway story that’s somehow emblematic of the country is the one about why there’s a random kink in an otherwise straight stretch of the Moscow-St Petersburg railway line. Apparently there was a notch in the ruler the Tsar used to mark the route on his engineers’ map. No idea whether either this or the voksal story are literally true. But if they’re not, they should be.

    We seem to be living through a period in which there’s a lot of literary interest in walking, which I think is a very good thing. It seems that the more virtual we are in one part of our life, the more we crave real experiences in the rest. The more music downloads, the more live music. The more online reading, the more literary festivals. The more web surfing, the more tramping around. And so on. I take great comfort at seeing this sort of self-righting mechanism. We humans are more mysterious, more unpredictable and yet more sensible than we often suppose.

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