Place

I have always been drawn to spaces, and the flow of movement through spaces. In my final year of high school, I undertook a Geography project, mapping the land use of several square miles of the west end of Glasgow. As is the way with schools, the finished map was still displayed on a corridor wall, facing the Geography classrooms, years after I left. That year, I won prizes for both Geography and History, and spent both on books on principles of Architecture. On leaving school, I worked as an architect’s draftsman before setting out on the first year of an Architecture degree, though I dropped out, switching to Biblical Studies, after that first year.

Spaces, and their connections to other spaces, fascinate me. Places, I find more complicated. I have lived in Sunderland since October 2013, and have not found it an easy place to love. Perhaps that is because I am an outsider, an in-comer, into a place fiercely loved (if, often, run down in conversation) by native Mackems.

But spaces only exist in places, and it seems that everything I am reading lately has been speaking to me of place, and love of places, love of a place. Louise Penny’s latest Gamache mystery, All The Devils Are Here, this time set in Paris, but with her trademark delight in place, be it Paris or Montreal or Quebec City or the fictional village of Three Pines. Elizabeth Strout’s collections of sparse short stories set in a fictional community on the Maine coast, Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again. Winn Collier’s authorised biography of Eugene H. Peterson, A Burning In My Bones, conveying Eugene’s deep grounding in his beloved Flathead Valley, Montana. Love of place. Love of place. Love of an actual place (even if it finds literary expression clothed in a fictional place).

Invitation to go deeper into love of the place where I find myself. To the extent that I already love this place, it has come about, little measure by little, as I have walked the parish, and run through the city. Walk, and run. Walk, and run. At three miles an hour, and six. Well worn pavements, well-worn shoes. Cardiac exercise, training the heart.

 

The labyrinth

There’s a bay just north of Seaburn where the land drops down an escarpment to a narrow field above a shallow beach. There in the field, overlooking the North Sea, someone has made a prayer labyrinth from found stones, has claimed this sparse strip as holy ground. The land of the venerable monk Bede, the first person to write a history of the English people.

Every ten paces along this coastline there’s a bench-seat facing out to sea, each one with a plaque screwed into the backrest, remembering a loved one who used to stand on this coastline and look out at the horizon. Some never crossed it, never left. Others went away, only to come back again.

This place belongs to Somewheres, to people who live somewhere, who are from this place—Sunderland—even after they are dead and gone. Or, rather, dead and not gone.

Me, I am an Anywhere, someone who can live anywhere. Like everyone else, I am a scoop of clay animated by the breath of God. But where God found that clay is anyone’s guess. My family are scattered to the four winds, my wife’s family also. We grew up 300 miles apart, and met in a third city entirely. We’ve all but lost track of how many times we’ve moved, still find an adrenalin to it. In the Bible, YHWH, the Creator God, is described as a wanderer. So is the satan, the accuser. And so am I.

An Anywhere can live anywhere, comes not from Somewhere but Nowhere. To the Anywhere, nowhere is Somewhere. We can live anywhere, but it is hard to do so Somewhere. Never mind the other Anywheres, the Italians and Indians and Chinese operating restaurants all along the promenade at Seaburn. You’re nobody in this town if you’re not from here. Invisible.

This is holy ground, but God, it is a sparse strip. One path there and back again, sometimes bringing you near the centre, only to turn you away.

We keep running, a 10K loop along the coastal path to the Souter lighthouse and back again. Past the endless benches facing out to sea.