“What better way to celebrate a country than by passing a continuous strip of it under your feet, literally feeling the entire terrain of a top-to-bottom treadmill composed of tarmac, earth, sand and grass?”
You can tell what this is about from the title. It’s the story of the run and also of the author’s attempts to make a film about the experience – a complicated project indeed. He secures the help of his father (who operates a drone to film aerial shots) and various drivers to meet him at the end of each day’s journey.
He gets lost a lot. He gets his film equipment stolen. He suffers various injuries. At times it’s a standard John O’Groats to Land’s End (JogLe) account, with moments of tedium and frustration.
Occasionally Gavin can sound oddly Alan Partridge-like:
“I often try a thought experiment, imagining what it would be like if I was ‘parachuted in’ to a random workplace and asked to muck in. I imagine myself in those factories, workshops and offices; I hope I’d be able to fit in amongst my fellow employees in these theoretical work placements. Such empathic daydreaming whiles away hours on an urban trail. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.”
See also the passage in which he writes:
“You can’t have your loft conversions, fridge-freezers, fork-lift trucks and basic, functional sanitation without a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes.”
But maybe that’s harsh. He follows this latter observation with the wiser and more insightful: “We are drawn to watercourses because they seem to embody life, even when as comparatively still as a canal.”
He gets there in the end and his document of that experience is worth reading.
