TREADMILL TUNES 001

Ran a bit today. 500m runs. Seven of them. Two minute gaps (approx.) between them. This was suggested as something that might be good for me. So I'm trying it. This absolutely requires music. Music of my choosing, that is. Not the(mostly)terrible shit piped into the gym. This is what was shuffled up today:

• Beastie Boys: Egg Man [1989]
• Funk Fusion Band: Can You Feel it (Progressive Version) [1981]
• Don Covay: Sookie Sookie [1966]
• Dizzee Rascal ft. Calvin Harris & Chrome: Dance Wiv Me [2008]
• The Stone Roses: She Bangs the Drums [1989]
• Jackie Mittoo: Ghetto Organ [1971]
• Gogol Bordello: Start Wearing Purple [2006]
• Kreayshawn: Gucci Gucci [2011]
• Mustafa Ozkent: Dolana Dolana [1973]

Two observations: weird coincidence to have three tracks shuffled up which each have titles composed of the same word repeated; I am not conscious of ever having heard a Justin Bieber song so I don't know which one was playing (silently, to me) when I looked up at one of the gym's TV screens and noticed that a video of his seems to involve some kinda rapey, creepy breaking-and-entering/kidnap scenario...  

EVEN THE COLD-HEARTED SHOULD WELCOME CHILDREN

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes looked one hundred years into the future and predicted a world in which the citizens of developed countries would work less and have far more leisure time. With under fourteen years to go, it seems unlikely that this prediction will come true within the time scale set out by Keynes. There's a good chance, in fact, that you are reading this and feeling sure that your leisure hours are dwindling, eroded by your job and by the technologies which enable your job to bleed into the time you used to call your own. The working people in your household, moreover, may well be feeling under pressure to work more in order to meet the rising costs of maintaining the standard of living you and your dependants have come to expect. Of these costs, childcare could very well be among the more worrisome concerns. It's quite likely, then, that you have read numerous newspaper articles decrying the costs and availability of the childcare provision so many people need in order to keep working the jobs that pay for all the stuff and all the services we've been taught to think of as indispensable.

One such article appeared in The Guardian this weekend. Many of the comments below the line were of a horribly familiar nature, the gist of them being  "if parents cannot afford to have children, they shouldn't have them." One charming person used exactly that set of words, in fact. In response, I asked that commenter if he was in favour of Britain having a shrinking, ageing population and a shrinking economy to go with it. Another person then asked me a question which seemed to suggest that the thinking behind my question had not been expressed clearly enough:

"What a strange way to justify having children......are they now being seen as an economic benefit?"

So I explained that, as a parent myself, I know my wife and I did not factor any economic calculation when decided we wanted to have a child together. So why did we have a child? Well, I don't think there's just one reason and I'm guessing that the (pretty much subconscious) workings of our minds were in tune with those of most other parents: the idea of the conception of a child being an act of love; the feeling that being caring, loving parents is a natural, fulfilling part of most people's lives.

But my understanding is that in the poorest parts of the world, one very compelling reason for having children is absolutely an economic consideration.

I remember visiting Bangladesh for a conference a few years ago. Although it was not the main focus of that event, one of the topics under discussion was connected with roles for technology in the alleviation of poverty. In covering this, one speaker explained how even in the twenty-first century, many poor people continue to think of children as future labourers able to supplement the family income. We were told that it doesn't take all that long for the early costs of feeding a small child to be outweighed by the uplift in income. This, we learned, is because children commonly begin to provide income by the age of five, and because all such children contribute way more than they consume by around the age of ten. The speaker opined that for these poor families, though, the real benefit kicks in once the parents' ability to earn income and feed themselves is declining with age. At this stage, we were informed, their children become the primary breadwinners. We were reminded that these are people with no bank accounts, savings or pensions.

Understanding this has NOT made me believe that children born to poor people around the developing world are conceived ONLY as a result of a rational calculation of their economic value. Moreover, I am sure that such parents love their kids. But the economic imperative does seem to be there.

Here in the UK, I think most of us do not consciously think of parenthood in this way. Living as we do, for the most part, in warm, well-lit, dry and comfortable homes and with more than sufficient food, we can afford to believe that economic considerations are not at work when we decide to have kids. That said, won't most of us eventually need our offspring to make arrangements for our care in our old age? Won't our last years be a bit more comfortable if our children are there to do for us the things we can no longer do for ourselves?

Back, then, to the question which was put to me in the comments section of that Guardian piece:

"What a strange way to justify having children......are they now being seen as an economic benefit?"

On balance, I completely agree with what I think the questioner was suggesting: that it seems cold, grim and distasteful to think of having children as being only or mainly to do with economics.

The fact remains, though, that this country is one of many developed nations facing a demographic time-bomb. Not that long from now, retirees will outnumber wage-earning, tax-paying contributors to economic growth, I believe.

So when someone contends that "if parents can not afford to have children, they shouldn't have them", I tend to infer that I'm speaking with someone who does link having children very strongly with economic considerations. I then tend to appeal to the apparently cold, pragmatic views of that person by bringing up the economic imperative for a country like ours to keep producing enough kids. It seems a safer bet than trying to appeal to an apparently absent feeling for the more emotional side of deciding to become a parent!

ON THE FRUITFULNESS OF KILLING TIME

The BULLSHIT JOB that I'm doing at the moment can be done at home. So I do it at home, working odd hours and finding time to do less bullshit things between the various bullshit tasks involved. Hence going to the gym at 10.00 in the morning to be put through my paces by a muscular, cheerful dude who calls me buddy and scores higher for emotional intelligence and bedside manner (well, the personal trainer equivalent thereof) than pretty much any other person I can think of. Smashing off my visceral fat. Buying me a few more years, maybe. Getting the old body to the point where no it no longer feels like I'm dragging around an awkwardly proportioned sack of shit. That is actual progress. There's a spring in my step and my lower back doesn't grumble any more, even after a night spent on a blow-up bed when guest bedrooming somewhere. I have actual fucking biceps, fer chrissakes. Not noticeably large. But there. Really there.

Anyway, after an hour of strong mind, buddy and get your foot higher for me, buddy, I was nauseous and fully wiped out. Had to sit, bewildered, on a PLYO SOFT BOX for what seemed like ages before I could make it out of the sweaty kit and into the shower. Then the shower went on an on and on. Wasteful. Superb. So I get out of there and it's an awkward time. I can't brunch because I breakfasted. I can't lunch because it's not yet midday. Twenty-plus minutes shy of noon, in fact. What to do? Ours is not a town where there's much to do on a grey day bedevilled by insistent, pissy drizzle. So I went into Waterstones because I can always stand to look at books. Even in a weirdly deficient branch of Waterstones - massive children's dept., acres of business books and a dismally small fiction section that's mostly airport stuff. But my eye was drawn to a tray full of books marked all the way down to ONE POUND. 99.9% dross, of course. But then I saw a neat little volume containing profiles of 12 Russians who don't like Putin. I'll have some of that, I decided. I've lost count of the genuinely interesting things I've picked up in those places that only sell remaindered books. It was in one of those places that I got turned on to Ismail Kadare, fer chrissakes. So my mind is always open to the possibility of being led somewhere stimulating by a bargain pick-up. Let's see. Perhaps it'll make it into the suitcase as holiday reading for the impending trip to the USA. So I went off to get my chicken burger with a hopeful smile, my freshly battered flesh notwithstanding. I got them to hold the mayo and the sickly-sweet onion relish, replacing these with jalapeños. I like a slight frosting of sweat on the brow when eating chicken. Then back to the BULLSHIT JOB.

A GOOD WALK SLIGHTLY SPOILED

The idea of the woods is an attractive one. When it comes to the stretching of the legs and the inhalation of relatively fresher air at the weekend, a consensus has been settled upon by the three members of my little family: the woods are the best. A woody walk: that's what we call an afternoon stroll among trees, along muddy paths, over little brooks, crunching over a thick carpet of fragrantly decaying leaves. This all happens just barely outside the M25. So even the biggest of these woods is tiny, really - a little slice of dampened footfalls, of birdsong, of bramble-tangle, of toadstool, of hollybush. The rounding of a corner or a change in the direction of the breeze and, yes, you can hear the swish of traffic on some not-far-off stretch of motorway. People and their houses and their out-of-town business parks and their bigbox furniture stores: close by, really. How long ago was it, then, that to be in the woods in England truly meant to be somewhere unpeopled and unmanaged? Before the industrial revolution, surely. Some time before that, most likely. Weren't our ancestors cutting swathes through old wood so we could build ships and rules waves? Didn't our ancestors' masters take big bites out of ancient oak, hazel and birch so they could enclose land and own it and own the people set to work on it? Something like that. Anyway, however we got here, here we are: tiny green wedges among the tidy homes and the efficient agriculture and the corrugated sides of giant logistics sites. Of these little wooded places, we have a reliable favourite for our Sunday strolls: colour-coded signs marking out circular walks of varying length. The yellow walk, I think, is the longest (and therefore best): X number of miles in a leafy loop back to the car park. It works. And for a while, it worked especially well, marred-yet-improved by the fat trunk of a fallen tree right across the path at the top of a stretch of gently rising land. 3/4 of the way around the circuit, this obstacle lay there for months. Climbing over it became the highlight of the leg-stretching, the muddy palms brandished like proof of having achieved something. No way to get over it without laying hands on its footprint-smothered bulk, you see. It's gone now. And while we still like that walk, it feels like something important is missing as we climb into the final quarter of the circuit, minds turning to "home learning", work deadlines and the cramped, wired, electrified England crowding in on us just beyond the edge of that minuscule remnant of the old forest.

I MIGHT STOP USING INSTAGRAM

The first time I posted something to Instagram was in in March 2013 and by May of the same year I'd figured out what I would want to use Instagram for most of the time: people-free close-ups of the small things that catch my eye... the quotidian beauty of the ugly, architectural details, the way human things look when contrasted with sky or water.

It seemed an admirable replacement for one of the things I'd been doing with this blog in its earliest days. Back then, I was in the habit of lugging a bulky SLR camera around with me almost every day, using it to take photos of things that not many people seem to be interested in taking photos of: untidy doorbells; handwritten signs and bursts of anger; mysterious markings on the streets under our wheels; the matter which accumulates around drains; the strangely even visual slicing of bits of our surroundings.

You can get some strange looks, let me tell you, if observed pointing a bloody great camera at a discarded leaflet, a crumpled beer can or a declaration of love written on a lamppost. Then there's the business of wrestling that big-bodied SLR out of its case. There's the fiddling with the lens cap. There's the hooking it up to the laptop back home. You get the idea: a bit of a ballache. So Instagram seemed like an upgrade: done with the tidy, tiny phone and up online in seconds; arty editing in a trice; the whole social bit of strangers finding your stuff and then you see their stuff and sometimes you like their stuff etc.

But the thing I liked most was the geo-tagging of the photos. I loved that. Not least because of my fondness for snapping graffiti and street art. Because those things come and go. The prettyugly little thing that catches your eye on Monday could be scrubbed off or covered up by Tuesday. Ephemeral. Fleeting. Lovely, then, to have a way of recording precisely were each eye-pleaser had been found and photographed:

 
                                                           
The things I snapped used to appear in PRECISELY the right location. Zooming in, I could tell exactly where a tiny graffito or paste-up had been on the day I'd seen it. Nicenicenice.

But a little while ago something changed. I went to Instagram a picture and the app asked me to "Add Location". I was presented with a list of options, all of them shops, bars, restaurants, or tourist attractions. So Instagram suddenly wanted to associate my pictures of back-alley daubs or interestingly scrunched cigarette packets with places where things are sold for money. Not cool. And there doesn't seem to be a reliable workaround. Unless somebody knows of one?

This has kinda spoiled Insta for me, buggering up its most appealing feature in order to... what..? encourage people to discover new coffee shops? even though it's not obviously monetisable? (Or is it? Am I missing something?)... [BEMUSED EMOTICON]

So maybe I'll be blogging more little visual gems here again from now on. Or will I? Can I ever go back to the ballache of it? Let's see, I suppose.  

BIG TYPO

In October we went to Liverpool and the Wirral for a couple of days. It was a fairly enjoyable if largely uneventful trip. Right now, I'm looking at the handful of photos I took. This is my favourite:

   

This was taken at ADVENTURELAND in New Brighton. Inside: arcade machines. Outside: small fairground-style rides. Not great. But my son liked it well enough. Long may his low standards continue. Budding sophisticate he may be. But, at the age of 10, he can still be fobbed off with second rate attractions: weary, faded mini-golf; a dismal, ill-smelling travelling fair staffed by unsmiling tweakers. So, the cups of tea, the how-have-you-beens, the that's-very-nices, the walking, the eating and all that other adult stuff was punctuated by a short but slow interlude at ADVENTURELAND. The whirligigs whirled. The leaden sky swirled. I just looked at this sign above the entrance to the indoor part of the place and found myself imagining the conversation that would have unfolded when the signwriting firm delivered it to ADVENTURELAND. Didn't anyone look at any proofs or anything?

AMAZON TO FLORIDA

another birthday last month. well spent, too. which is unusual for me. well spent on a trip down to chichester, where we ate well, had front row seats at a STEWART LEE gig and dropped in on a dear old friend of mine. seeing my pal was good in itself. but he also went on to recommend a book that's stirred up a few ideas and given some pleasure in the weeks following the visit.

looking back at that enjoyable weekend away and looking forward to a trip to NEW YORK and FLORIDA that is now less than three weeks away, I do count myself a fortunate fellow. yes, yes.

NEW YORK will be a whirlwind. not even two full days into which a blaze of experiences must be crammed. I've been there before. but this will be my son's first trip to the city and he's anxious not to spend a single moment doing anything as dull as pausing for breath in a hotel room. so we must flash past a number of the main tourist sights, gorge ourselves on suitably american food, catch up with relatives and a family friend who live in manhattan AND sit through our first ever in-the-flesh NBA game. 

FLORIDA will be different. yes, the last bit of our stay down there will be somewhat eventful. but before we go, briefly, all resort hotel and theme park, we will linger longer in the very familiar stretch of U.S. suburbia and american edgelands around which one of my sets of in-laws can be found. no wifi in the house, amazingly! and I can only take so much sun, pale-complexioned, freckle-dotted english rose that I am. and only so many longlonglong infomercials on the tv. so: BOOKS.

good timing, then, that birthday of mine, not least because my other set of in-laws (the just up the road from here in-laws) always ping me a generously fat amazon top-up to mark the passing of another year of this life i'm living. here is the haul, almost all stuff written by familiar writers I can trust to do it for me. intrigued to see if a favourite will emerge in the FLORIDA sunshine between trips to the giant fridge for another weak, pale beer or another helping of HEARTS OF PALM salad:

NO SPECIAL QUALITY OF HEROISM

As discussed little while ago, I recently picked up the latest(?) posthumously assembled collection of never-before-seen (and previously-not-widely-seen) stuff by Charles Bukowski. Yet another volume for the collection.

Last time, I referred to The Bell Tolls for No One as a ragtag collection of short stories. But, having finally read the whole book now (I'm reading for pleasure much less often and much more slowly these days), I see that it's perhaps better to describe it as a mishmash of short pieces of writing.

Yes, of the various forms you will find between the covers of this collection, (familiar!) little stories grown from the kernels of real incidents in Bukowski's life are the most numerous. Yes, also well-represented here are small bits of dirty, ludicrous, fantastical fiction, each one realised over just a few pages: a factory worker shares an apartment with an ageing Adolph (sic) Hitler who is planning to populate the world with horrible creatures born of bathtub flatulence; a cop is kidnapped by a cast of grotesque, Rabelaisian and murderous criminals residing in a crumbling Hollywood mansion; in two separate but strikingly similar stories, mid-air havoc is wreaked by savage, perverted n'er-do-wells terrorising commercial flights.

But among all this fiction, we can discover think pieces that Bukowski contributed to underground newspapers such as Open City. Even in this context, the author tends towards anecdotes of a highly personal nature rather than towards pronouncing on the important and popularly discussed issues of the time.

But in the pages of The Bell Tolls for No One we do find one example of a form that Bukowski almost never used, namely straight socio-political commentary conveying a definite set of opinions presented plainly and unambiguously. This appears as the first part of a 1973 L.A. Free Press column, which does soon revert to something closer to one of the author's usual preferred forms, in this case a first person account of a friend telling a surreal yarn. But for a page-and-a-half, Bukowski writes about the then highly topical issue of American prisoners of war left behind in Vietnam:

The POW propaganda plant is still grinding against all sensibilities. We lost the war, got our asses kicked out by starving men and women half our size. We couldn't bomb, con or beg them into submission so we got out and while getting out, somebody had to come up with a smokescreen to make the populace forget we got our asses kicked. Let's build the POW angle, they said, and so it began. Bob Hope became concerned about the POWs; his wartime Santa Claus kick had rather petered out in the last two trips. The word was out and the act was in. The arrival of the first POWs was put on tv. Here came the plane in. And we waited and waited and the plane taxied and taxied. You never saw a plane taxi that much in any airport at any time in the world. The cameras waited and they bled it to death. Then out came the first grand POW and patriotism was back. 

These words written in the early 1970s took me back to the mid-1980s and to the first time I had any notion of a war in Vietnam having taken place. I was in my mid teens. Paul Hardcastle's 19 hit the  top of pop charts here in Britain and in many other countries. I clearly recall that several of our broadsheet newspapers took this as a cue to run Sunday supplement pieces on the Vietnam War. Up to then, then, I had been only dimly aware of this war. Fair enough. After all, the conflict had spluttered to its untidy conclusion when I was just five years old. I don't remember my parents speaking about it and it certainly hadn't been covered as part of the history curriculum at school. 

Something about the madness, the pointlessness and ugliness of America's ill-fated adventure in Indochina caught my adolescent imagination. So I went on to watch the movies Apocalypse Now and Platoon and the TV series Tour of Duty with morbid interest. Little by little, it dawned on me that all of these works of fiction seemed to be presenting Americans (if not America) as (the) victims of this war. Little by little, it occurred to me to wonder why the suffering and the deaths of Vietnamese combatants and civilians is passed over so lightly in these films and TV shows. Were they not victims too? If you really want to get into it, didn't the people of Vietnam suffer rather more badly than the fighting men of the USA? 

In those movies and TV series we see American conscripts and professional soldiers broken, brutalised and horrified by the things they see and do. We see American families and communities traumatised by grief for their dead or by the psychological and physical damage sustained by returning veterans. So we should, because, undeniably, tours of duty in Vietnam did ruin the minds and bodies of many American men. Men of modest means, on the whole, of course. Men whose families did not have the connections and wealth enjoyed by the parents of draft-dodgers such as Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.

In those movies we see American men dying in battle too, of course. So we should, because around 60,000 US service personnel lost their lives during the Vietnam War. 

Big numbers, yes. Horrible things, definitely. Big, bitter divisions in American society. So of course it's a big deal. Of course movies and TV dramas have explored this American suffering. But are these really big numbers when set side-by-side with a tally of dead and wounded Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian people? No. Decidedly not. Because between 400,000 and 900,000 North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong personnel died in the war. Around 250,000 members of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (America's allies) were killed. Civilian deaths? Estimates vary wildly, but most seem to place the number at well over 1.5 million.

In this context, wouldn't a truly compassionate account of the Vietnam War focus to some degree on the suffering of the Vietnamese people as well as on the miseries of American servicemen? But I think about those movies and TV shows. As far as I recall, the makers of these fictional accounts of the war make no meaningful attempt to convey the scale of the horror visited upon the people of Vietnam and neighbouring countries. This makes it hard not to form the impression that Hollywood doesn't give a fuck about dead foreign civilians.

I am not alone in arriving at this conclusion. In a 2012 article which asks a wider question about why Americans ignore the civilians killed in "American wars", John Tirman notes that "the lack of concern about those who die in U.S. wars is... shown by these civilians' absence, in large part, from our films, novels and documentaries" and that "the entertainment industry portrays these wars... almost always with a focus on Americans."

For my own part, I believe I am capable of sustaining a compassionate response to the plight of the Vietnamese dead and wounded and to the tribulations of conscripted men from poor neighbourhoods across America. I'd certainly welcome a novel, movie or TV drama on the theme of the Vietnam war which invites and allows me to experience both feelings at once. But I do understand why others might consider the existing Hollywood and TV treatments of the Vietnam war and grow weary of being expected to sympathise only with the battered and blooded GIs. It was with this in mind that I read on as as Bukowski continued with his reaction to the return of American POWs:

A POW is a man who went to war knowingly, knowing he might kill or be killed, capture of be captured, maim or be maimed. These is no special quality of heroism in this. There are few real patriots anymore, there have been too many useless wars and they have come too fast.

Most American men of war age merely took a gamble; they figured by going that the odds against them actually getting killed were high. By going and returning, whether they believed in the war or not, they would still retain their decent citizen status and be able to return to their women and their jobs and their homes and their baseball games, their new cars. By refusing they faced imprisonment and/or hiding.

Most weighed it all and considered that going to war was the easier way, especially those with college educations and ROTC training who were able to fly above the muck and blood, only pushing buttons. That some of them became POWs was just tough shit of the spinning of the wheel and they know it better than anybody. And if they are given a free fuck now or a free automobile or applause or a good  job, they're going to take that too.

The other night at the Olympic Auditorium boxing matches, a former POW was introduced and he got up into the ring and was given a standing ovation. I once had an almost-admiration for boxing fans. I now see them in a different magenta lavender brownsmear hue... 

WWBAGWFT2: NOT DESIRE PATHS BUT...?

Just over a week ago, I dropped in on an old friend who lives just outside Chichester. My pal is a big reader - has worked in publishing for ages; used to work in bookshops; used to send me bundles of books to keep me supplied with fresh reading material when living in my pre-Internet Poland of the early-to-mid nineteen nineties. 

We only had about an hour to chat and to look around the new house he's just moved into with his wife and two wonderfully polite daughters, all of whom were at home when we stopped by. So there was little time for one of our proper catch-ups. But I could tell he'd read something new and had it on his mind. I noticed that he kept returning, a little obliquely, to the concept of unloved, unlovely places at the edge of town and country. Every now and then, with just a few words, he would capture quite evocatively the essence of these ignored strips and patches of land. More than once he used the term edgelands. Something about how he emphasised this word suggested that it was one around which he'd lately and repeatedly been wrapping his mouth and mind. But for whatever reason, I didn't pick up on this possible cue to ask more about this apparent neologism, edgelands. I guessed, however, that he and I would return to this theme some time soon.

So it came to pass. Two days later, my friend asked me if I knew of a book titled Edgelands. I replied that I did not. Shortly after that, I was surprised to receive said book by post, courtesy of my thoughtful pal. Replying to my words of thanks, he advised me that he'd "found it to be a mixture of fascinating, amusing, concerning and slightly irritating but a good read nonetheless." I am part of the way through it and I am minded to agree with my friend's words. I do feel that the book contains much to admire while being, at the same time, frustratingly unsatisfying in places. 

Much of the photography and, I think, a little of the writing, here at this is my england (and the associated Instagram account) is evidence of my interest in the kind of spaces and atmospheres explored by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts (both are poets) in Edgelands. In fact I'd really like to find my own ways to capture the essence of these untidy places in my own short stories and attempts at poetry. Effective ways, I mean. Ways that properly please me if no one else. 

Overall, then, it feels like I keep nodding with approval as the two poets put into words a half-formed notion that I've never properly articulated myself. But then, rather more often than I'd like, I feel that the Edgelands authors miss the mark, even if only by a fraction. It's like this book reminds me of an itch... and then fails to scratch it. So at some point, I may feel inclined to say more about Edgelands. But for now I just want to express my dissatisfaction with one particular term coined by the authors.

Consider the photograph below. It shows part of the route I must take if, as now, I find myself travelling, daily, in and out of London in pursuit of a living. Here, I am drawing close to the station near my home:

Notice what has happened to the landscaping crafted around the mid-sized office building which sits close to our local station. In step with other commuters, I cross a busy road and then a bridge, before approaching the corner you see here. Some nameless town planner, you will observe, wanted us to stick to the footpath, our progress describing a gentle curve as we turn our steps into the station's approach road. But see that dry, grassless groove, a sharper angle worn across the well-trimmed grass maintained by some contractor serving the owners of the office complex. On rainless days, numberless pedestrians have shaved three seconds or so from the daily commute by cutting out the prescribed curve, flattening and then killing the grass as they go. For me, it's a decision. I realise now, in fact, that many, many times I have allotted some small portion of my attention to the question of whether to contribute to this process of erosion by angling across the corner of the lawn. Or whether to curve around the outside of the lamppost like a good boy. Does it depend on the weather? On the newness of my shoes? On whether I'm unobserved? On whether others around me are widening and deepening that illicit groove, or sweeping dryly and correctly along the footpath? 

These countless tiny decisions and a surprisingly clear picture of the corner shown above both sprang immediately to mind when reading the following passage from Edgelands:

The post-war overspill developments seen on the edges of many of our cities were planned right down to every concrete walkway, subway and pathway. But their green squares and verges were soon criss-crossed with desire paths: a record of collective short-cuttings. In the winter, they turned to sludgy scars that spattered trousers and skirts and clung to shoes, and during hot summers they turned dusty and parched. Once established, they fell into constant use, footpaths which have never entered the literature. These footpaths of least resistance offer their own subtle resistance to the dead hand of the planner.  

I enjoyed almost every word of this. Almost. But "desire paths"? No, no. This term really doesn't cut it for me. On one hand the Edgelands writers very deftly bring into "the literature" an  instantly recognisable feature of urban and suburban environments which has escaped the descriptive remit of other texts. But on the other hand, once conjured into something tangible, this quotidian phenomenon is mislabelled with a term that seems altogether too attractive. Sylvan, even, speaking to me of improbably nubile faeries leaving traces of their passing across the glistening caps of dewy toadstools. This is about real people cutting across real patches of grass, using the spaces they live in (or travel through) not quite as the planners hoped. Nothing more. No faerie dust. No longing. No lust. So wherefore desire?

So I am looking for a more suitable alternative term for desire paths while being mindful that it may be difficult to create a sufficiently elegant one. But maybe such a term exists in German? Or, if not, perhaps a native speaker of German would find it easier to create one than would a Brit or an American. After all, just over a month ago, this is my england noted that "the German language outperforms English in one important area - a facility for the creation of abstract nouns which neatly (i.e. with one word, albeit sometimes a rather long one) convey quite complex and highly specific concepts or emotional states." This observation was followed up with a rambling attempt to convey certain frustrating emotions experienced (by me, anyway) at pelican crossings and an appeal for passing German speakers to encapsulate these with spiffy new nouns. I asked, then,  "What Would Be a German Word for That?"

So, dear German reader (or, more realistically, M.P. Powers) - these desire paths of Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts: What Would Be a (Better!) German Word for That? Yeah, this is #WWBAGWFT2.

THIS AGAIN