And as he walked, the rain settling in a misty

cover across a bed of stone-enclosed

pastures, the Crab Man enjoyed the
metaphor of disturbing and being disturbed
by many fields rather than simply tramping a
solitary line. He crossed an empty pasture
and, looking back, the sign on the gate said:
“Bull In Field”. He shrugged. There or not
there, there is always, in some sense “Bull in
Field”.

He passed a young man carrying a plastic

lunch box and a pickaxe thrown over his
shoulder, looking like a refugee fleeing
history.

“Off for a day’s work?”

“Definitely.”

It’s was a long walk that day and he’d started

an hour early. J----, from the B&B, rang the
Crab Man’s office to say she was worried for
him. His blisters were bad, but he walked
through them, the skin bursting and
hardening. The pain was hungry, it wanted to
eat up his concentration. Today, he must
actively “look” in order to see.

Beside the Derwent, wreaths had been laid. A

bucket improvised as a gate latch. Signs told
of voles, brook lampreys and great crested
newts. He had the names now, but he could
not see the animals. He became lost in some
fields and then emerged along a road where
the backyards were like miniature memorial
gardens and theme parks.

“No Respect For Old Lane” says a headline in

a discarded newspaper.

He climbs Curbar Gap and onto the moors.

“Good morning!”

The Crab salutes a couple walking their dog,

just out of their car.

“Going far?”

But their walk is a private affair and they

don’t want to talk. Nor any walker or cyclist
he meets this day. And so it becomes a day
of private journeying. Listening to the
monologue in his head. Forcing his
consciousness out of his blisters and into the
fields and moors he’s passing through. The
road stretching two miles ahead, vehicles
shimmering in the distance like the demon’s
truck in Jeepers Creepers. He enjoys the
space of this place. On top of the Gap he’d
looked back and seen the rusting shape of a
barn he’d passed, like a monopoly hotel, a
piece of geometry on a rucked carpet of
green. Things spread out, thoughts disperse.

…And all the time he was looking for a sign, a

symbol on the skyline: the shape of three
trees planted as a Trinity, spaced equal
distances apart, and then four trees planted
together to make a mutant atrocity of
tangled trunks. Somewhere out there. On a
hill with a view of C-----------.

He stops for a plate of

duck and two
Franciskaner
Hefeweissbiers at the
newly refurbished
Highwayman at E----
moor. There had been a
time when the taste of
this beer had meant he
had arrived, fully and completely, in Munich.
It was the taste of that place. Now it is part of
the flux, of the globalised flow.
The food and drink are good, but this is not a
pub. The customers sit at separate tables,
the smiling staff repeatedly check “Is
everything OK?” but each time they are
already walking away before the Crab can
answer. It is a place that is not a place, a
motorway for the transportation of imagery,
a conduit for the flow of commodities.

At I-- and J----’s this morning the Crab realised

that the paintings in his rented room were for
sale, a catalogue sat on the dressing table.
He had been sleeping, partly, in a retail
opportunity.

A small party of elderly ladies, perhaps

regulars under the previous regime, enter
The Highwayman, gingerly. They look, shrink
and leave.

The Crab walks on and is inspired!! The road

seems mythic now!
He sees something like a human brain in the
verge. It puffs up dust when booted
- an old wasps’ nest! A dead cat
suns itself on a wall beside a
strapped bottle of water, the
crumbling edifice of a Texas
Chainsaw Massacre farm matches
the yellowed out light all around, it
is as if he is being filmed on 1970s
grindhouse movie stock. Fifty or
more Special Brew cans are crashed
out on a short verge. More than halfway
through his 20 mile day and his knees are
fine. “Iron Man!” he shouts and waves at the
sky. He is bingeing on isolation. A discarded
mattress reminds him of a dream. Each
infrequent little tin of loneliness – neeeeow! –
whizzing by, only heightens his happy
exposure to sun and wind.