This is what it means

Piles of refuse, dirty pigeons and vagrants...

To me this is Leeds: a filthy stain, dried onto the trudged pavement where the monotony of hungry ghosts' do linger; malcontented and always always vacantly staring. In the station a very sign warning of the untruth of homelessness and want. We do it to ourselves. We gouge away. Cigarettes, alcohol and an ascending/descending array of other poisons. Banal and broken.

Yet the three cities I've traveled between in the last couple of days, Bristol, Birmingham and Leeds, are exactly the same. They offer scraps and titbits. Distraction: opiates for the masses.

And I think it is over entirely for me. Come the autumn I must venture forth once more unless I rot my core where nothing can repair. Life is a movement forward: an energy to be coupled with.

...

A week since I returned from Bristol and how it recedes into the dim past. Most walking memories spring up when I'm feeling low: when I struggle with meaning in my life. They are recalled by the Will of the One because I am not the hopeless case I tell myself. Walking from Bristol to the edge of Exmoor was not easy. Especially during an early summer heatwave, during the last few weeks of Covid 19 restrictions and while being overwhelmed by an attack of hay fever the likes I have never experienced previously.

Somerset is a a picturesque landscape with its rolling hills against the flatness of the Levels dotted with many small hamlets nestling away from the mainstream of the larger conurbations and the heavy traffic on the M5, which leaves the western area for Exeter in Devon. The only part I intensely disliked was the approach to Bridgwater and the boring section draining the levels between Wells and Glastonbury.

During every walk I've been on there are always these ugly, polluted sections which reminds me I live in the 21st century and not the Medieval. During the Medieval I would've been a villein or paysant tied to the manor and couldn't ever been allowed head off on 'pilgrimage -' or a walking 'holiday' (as I feel this week in Somerset was) - so I'm thankful I'm free to live a life I can chose, to some extent. In France it's mostly charming, but then there are bad towns. Le Puy en Velay is a strange mixed up town with the wonderful alongside the decrepit: maybe because it's just the 'start' and not a destination on Le Chemin. Having been in to and out of it on two occasions I saw the east-west passage along the Loire and up into the eroded volcanoes, but as I hung about an extra day back in 2013 I saw the messiness of the artorial roads passing through along the high street - toutes directions. The most fascinating aspect of Le Puy is the climb up to the cathedral: something spiritual has stood in that location for millennia.