The Long Walk Home

There are three ways to get home from the station. The first is the road, which is quick and faintly unpleasant. The second is the footpath behind the school, which saves four minutes and has a wall on one side. The third goes round by the river, up through the allotments, and down a lane with no name that comes out, rather unexpectedly, at my own front gate. It takes almost half an hour. It is the one I take.

I'd like to say there is a good reason. There isn't. I'm tired by the time I leave work, and the short way would suit my legs. But somewhere in the last few years the long way stopped being a choice and became a kind of private habit, and I'd feel odd abandoning it.

What the river knows

The first part of the route runs alongside water, and the water is never the same. In winter it is brown and loud. In late summer it thins to a sulky trickle, with a heron standing in it like a fussy butler. I have walked beside that river perhaps a thousand times and I could not tell you what I thought about on any single occasion.

That, I've come to believe, is the point. A route walked often enough passes beneath thought. It becomes a kind of weather in the body. The mind, released from the work of choosing, simply wanders, and arrives at the end of the walk a little rearranged, as though someone had tidied the room while I was out.

The allotments

The middle stretch cuts between a row of allotments, and over the years I've watched strangers tend their beans. There is a man with a tin shed painted a defiant shade of green. There is a woman who talks to her marrows. In September they hang lanterns on the fences, small and homemade, and I have, on occasion, stood and looked at them far longer than a grown man in a work coat ought to.

A walk home is the only commute that ever gave anything back.

I wrote that on the back of a receipt, then forgot it for a month, and found it again in a coat pocket on a wet Thursday. It still seemed true.

Taking the long way on purpose

I realise there's a danger of getting sentimental. Plenty of people hurry home, and for good reasons: children, dinners, the plain relief of a sofa. I'm not arguing against efficiency. I'm only observing that we have very few places in a day where we are in transit and nothing is expected of us. The walk between work and home is one. It is a threshold, and thresholds are strange, in-between, generous places.

If you have a short way and a long way, try taking the long one once a week. Don't count it as exercise or a hobby. Let it be a walk with no outcome. Notice the heron, if there is one, and the lights in the windows as they come on one by one.

When I finally reach my gate there is always a small pause, a second or two, before I lift the latch. I have never decided to do this. But I think it's where the day ends, properly, and the evening begins.