Rant in D Minor: The walk of life

Iain Sinclair does it. Will Self does it. Alan Moore does it. There’s something about walking. The simple procedure of setting one foot in front of the other can sort out the head and the heart, help addicts kick their respective habits, and act as a creative laxative for songwriters, poets, journalists and novelists.

Scripture is full of god-bothered prophets embarking on marathon hikes into the desert. Ulysses is an epic perambulation around Dublin, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road a grim trek through a post-apocalyptic wasteland in search of deliverance on the coast.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, the act of walking kids to school every morning makes one empathise with the twin protagonists of that gloriously gloomy book. I got rid of my car a couple years ago, having concluded that I was squandering a small fortune on tax, insurance and fuel just to spend half the day stuck in traffic, cultivating an ulcer. Besides, I didn’t want to bring up children who expected to be chauffeured half a mile to school five times a week. Ye gods, in my day we breakfasted on pterodactyl jerky and trudged barefoot across ten kilometres of frozen tundra, dodging sabre-toothed tigers along the way, just in order to squat in a cave and learn hieroglyphics from a one-eyed troglodyte. Who was I to deny my spawn such a character-building experience?
So now we walk. When it rains, we bring umbrellas.
Only problem is, the suburban sprawl isn’t made for walking. We have to trod long tracts of hard shoulder before finding a place to cross the dual carriageway. Traffic lights favour comfy, dry drivers who splash puddles in our faces as we wait in the downpour by the side of the road. And if you forget to go before you leave the house, there’s nowhere to pee in the concrete jungle.
In McCarthy’s 2005 novel No Country For Old Men, the grizzled and sage-like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell maintains that courtesy is the binding agent of a civilised society. “It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners,” he says. “Any time you quit hearin’ Sir and Ma’am the end is pretty much in sight.”
This is borne out daily on the public highway. You can train schoolchildren to obey traffic lights, but it’s worthless when motorists cheat. Several times a week, some hurried and harried driver will attempt to shave a few seconds off his journey by breaking a light as it turns red. By the time he’s halfway across the junction, the pedestrian signal is green. Whatever hope a grown-up has of using their discretion in such a situation, a child taught to follow the lights in the expectation that adults will do the same is in a perilous position. More than once in the past year the present writer has witnessed some cube-bound cowboy, having misjudged or completely ignored the lights, screeching to a halt mere feet away from schoolkids. On one occasion it happened to my daughters and myself, and I was so startled and shocked I drove my boot into the car’s radiator grille while the kids looked on, wondering if their old man had finally lost it.
The Sheriff was right. This is how civilisation falls apart. Not with rioting and looting and fucking and cannibalism in the streets, but a few seconds snatched at the traffic lights on a drizzly Monday morning in Blackrock.