Introduction

During a ritual conducted around the statue of Harold Wilson outside Huddersfield station during The Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography 2019, participants were invited by Crab & Bee (Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith) to make a promise to the future. 

Mine was to ‘actually write poems’. 

This has happened, albeit during the lockdown period of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, which means the resulting writing was made in the context of an indoors-based existence. In this time physical walking was restricted to domestic living space, a small-scale geography opening out on to unwalkable distances comprising dream, memory, media and imagination.

Having decided to ‘shield’, both myself and my partner did not venture beyond the end of our garden path for some months, eventually ‘easing’ only to allow ourselves trips to collect prescriptions and walk to the postbox at the end of the road.

Not for us, then, the lockdown experiences of deep exploration of the locality, as the only places we were exploring were our own rooms – and on one occasion our roof when I cut down a fallen television aerial. Lack of aerial has done nothing to reduce our daily diet of TV however, the screen and its flow of images being a major element of the space we occupy.  Screens of course not one-way as we are present to others (deliberately and otherwise) through various devices. 

In a sense we perform being at home, with many aspects of performance such as costume, props, characters all clearly present. Larks against a background of death and fear. 

During this time we are sustained by deliveries – itself a walking project as, although vehicles are involved delivery, the delivers walk considerable distances (16-18,000 steps per day in an article I read), a mass drift  across driveways – paths – pavement – gardens. 

As the lockdown proceeded this became for me a period of dreamy torpor punctuated with bursts of mental activity.  My focus would float between concerns with practicalities (‘What’s the best way to get food delivered?’), theoretical questions (‘Does poetry written as psychogeography have distinctive features?’), and fictions (‘How are Sexton Blake and Mlle Yvonne going to escape from Dr Huxton Rymer’s boat?’) – the strands sometimes merging (dreaming the viewpoint of a 150-year-old detective peering at supply chains, the networks morphing into a kind of terrible ever extending vortex, giving rise to vertiginous fear of scale.) 

The domestic archaeology of decluttering would unearth long-lost objects, such as the James Bond car from which the title of this sequence comes (a sideways 60s jump from Harold Wilson.) 

I experienced a painful nostalgia for past and future walks, yet persisted in ‘Don’t Walk’ mode, purposeful ambulation limited to steps on an exercise device, psychogeography confined to a screen-based expedition. 

Out of all this – the experience of lockdown, the memories, some dreams, an extended virtual walk – I made the poems that were promised to a future that has now arrived.