And ever since then we’ve continued, usually doing a week or ten days every two years, but also doing quite a few shorter stretches every now and then. It’s probably fair to say that we significantly underestimated the length of this challenge initially, but we now guess the total mileage (if you follow every river estuary and go round every peninsula of the mainland) to be approximately 7,500 miles. Of which, in our mid-forties, we’ve done about 1,375 so far. Not very impressive, as we’d be the first to admit. And we both realise that if we are to have any prospect of finishing, we’re going to have to take it a bit more seriously. Having said that, to be fair to us, up to now we have been tackling some of the trickiest parts of the walk – one of the sections that is most vivid in my memory is the extreme north-west of Scotland, from Lochinver up to Cape Wrath. An experience of wilderness that I never expected on our supposedly overcrowded island, of being able to walk for almost two days, in the most remote part, and not see a single car. On another day being astounded to see, on the other side of the valley, an entire mountainside seeming to shift before our eyes – over a hundred red deer moving silently. An image of such timelessness, our century escaped us for those moments.
We’ve deliberately left the east coast and some of the south coast (to the east of Dorset) for our later middle age and old age, calculating that the mainly flat nature of these landscapes won’t strain ageing limbs and muscles too much. The very final stretch we’ve planned for the Brighton seafront in about 2050, for two reasons: firstly, it was the place of our first public project after university; secondly, because it is tarmacked, and we rather like the idea of doing this final mile, as a race, in motorised wheelchairs …
Our first walk, in August 1985, ended rather unfortunately. J.’s girlfriend at the time had become dangerously ill, and so we had to rush back to London. The night before, our camping in Burnham-on-Crouch had coincided with a bikers’ convention which involved motorbikes being driven as close as possible to people sleeping in their tents. Not content with causing such disturbance, when we returned, rather wearily, from breakfast the next morning we found all the guy ropes had been cut. After this episode we never bothered with tents again. There followed some glorious years of walking when we slept under the stars, simply stopping where we’d reached by dusk – in forests or by ruined priories or next to barns. All we used were sleeping bags inside ‘survival bags’ (basically giant orange bin liners). It was a romantic way of travelling, albeit one that left us wet with condensation every morning.
On only four occasions have we digressed from our coastal circumnavigation: to walk across Germany, the south-western tip of Ireland, the Ardennes forest and the Swiss Alps. But we’ve always felt a trace of guilt about these wanderings away from the British coast, as if such walks, though enjoyable, were essentially taking us away from our ongoing odyssey.
Perhaps with the exception of that walk in Germany.
We’d come to the end of a period of intense work, culminating in a community performance event on environmental themes in Kemptown, Brighton, in the summer of 1987. We’d also spent a lot of time that year contacting groups and individuals in Germany who’d been connected with the artist and activist Joseph Beuys, who’d died the year before, and was now a key influence on our work. In the darkest days of those eighteen years of one-party rule in Britain – where the country became catastrophically divided, in a way I feel we’ve never really recovered from – we looked to the east for political hope, and progressive ideas, and we found much to admire in Germany. When the free-market ideologues were running rampant in Britain and the left was in a kind of shocked retreat, we found real food for thought and inspiration in Germany – particularly in the newly formed Green movement, and the realignment of the left. In certain ways, the burgeoning ‘red–green’ alliances growing in Germany mirrored J.’s and my politics almost exactly: my strong commitment to the red – the independent, non-sectarian left, and J.’s passion for the green – ecological initiatives combined with more open forms of democratic practice.
So in the spring of 1987 we’d travelled to Kassel to meet people involved with the Free International University (FIU), which Beuys had co-founded in 1973 to encourage far greater participation in democracy, a radical challenge to the limits of our supposedly ‘representative’ systems. We were amazed to discover that an artist like Beuys could span the worlds of activism and education as well, and contribute significantly to national debates – so different to the far more limited reach of artists and writers in our own culture.
In spring 1987 in Kassel we stayed in the house of a former colleague of Beuys’, the art historian and activist Rhea Thönges-Stringaris, who proudly told us that, some years before, she, Beuys and Petra Kelly had sat around the same table where we were eating and first discussed the idea of forming Die Grünen (the Green Party). It was a revelation to us that artists had been central to the creation of the most important political movement of our time. Rhea took us round Kassel and showed us the extraordinary 7,000 Eichen (‘7,000 Oaks’) project that Beuys had begun five years earlier. As one of the most admired artists in the world at that time he’d been given an open brief at the Dokumenta festival in 1982 to create anything he wanted to, using any space within the Fridericianum, the main gallery in Kassel. But Beuys decided to do something remarkable: he turned his back on the safe, white spaces of the gallery and the art world and took his work across the streets of the city. He planted 7,000 oak trees in Kassel, together with 7,000 basalt pillars. As well as foresting an entire city, this would act as a kind of sculpture in time; when the oak saplings were planted the basalt pillars were the same height, but within a few years the young trees would dwarf the stone. There were also powerful historical dimensions to the work – Kassel had been heavily bombed in the war, and the oak leaf had been a Nazi symbol, so Beuys was reappropriating it quite consciously for the green movement. At a stroke he created a living sculpture of astonishing beauty and made one of the most powerful statements in the history of modern art.
Completely inspired, we hitched round Germany for two weeks (clockwise of course), south to Darmstadt, Göttingen and then Augsburg and Bavaria, west to Düsseldorf, first seeing the greatest collection of Beuys’ work, including his early vitrine, Auschwitz – the disturbing and brilliant piece which contextualises all his subsequent work. Then meeting other former colleagues of his involved in remarkable experiments in local, economic networks and the campaign for Volksentscheid (direct democracy – government by the people directly, through the means of referenda). We ended in Düsseldorf, rather self-consciously leaving a hundred red roses for Beuys, outside the house of his widow, Eva, in Drakplatz, before meeting Johannes Stuttgen, who had worked closely with Beuys from the foundation of the FIU onwards.
We returned to London, vowing to start a Free International University in Britain, which we did – in the following year – transforming our shared terraced house in Brixton into a kind of international hothouse of continuous discussion, for seven days and seven nights – ‘168 hours for New Ideas’, as we called it, rather portentously. The walls were turned into blackboards, bedrooms into performance spaces, a giant black banner proclaiming ‘FIU London’ was draped over the front of the house (complete with Beuys’ favourite gold hare motif), and hundreds of people passed through in the course of the week, many from other parts of Europe. An oak tree was planted at the front of the house, with too little space to grow. But, in those heady days, the symbolism seemed far more important than practicalities.