Poetry in motion: James Priestman takes his itinerant witness to Edinburgh

‘My name is James, I’m a travelling poet and I would like to recite a poem.’

I began day one (17 August) in Northamptonshire, for a lunch with my father (who is in residential care) and two of his cousins. One of those relatives took me to a service station on the A1, just north of Peterborough, and I began hitchhiking at 4pm. After an hour and a quarter, I was picked up by Philip in an electric Ford Mustang Mach-E. His opening comment was one I have heard before: ‘I never see hitchhikers these days.’ I explained that I was heading to Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival, and hoped to have an opportunity to perform some of my poems at the Friends Meeting House. Philip is just a few years younger than me (I am fifty-five) and works as a partner in a large accountancy firm. He had heard of the Quakers but not met one before. We had a wide-ranging discussion and at 8pm he dropped me at the Leeming Bar service station in North Yorkshire. I ate at McDonald’s and then walked into a wooded area where I took out my roll-mat, inflatable mattress, sleeping bag and bivvy bag and settled down. In the late evening the McDonald’s car park became a place for young people to meet, beep their horns, play music and occasionally try a handbrake turn. I looked up at the starry sky and got a good night’s sleep.

Day 2 (Thursday 18 August)
At just after 6am I emerged from the woods. A man picking up litter gave me a prolonged stare. I got a cup of tea and bacon bap and began hitchhiking. At around 8am I was picked up by Nick, who is a few years older than me. He had hitchhiked when he was in the navy and was really glad to help me out. He was going to Durham but suggested that Scotch Corner service station, although not as far north, would be a better place to drop me. He was right. I had to wait over an hour but then, at about 9.30am, Paul stopped: he was going to John o’Groats and was happy to drive me into the centre of Edinburgh. Paul is seventy years old and had left his home in East Anglia at 10.30pm the previous night after deciding that he and his wife could not live together. He thought John o’Groats might be a good place for him to start again, but couldn’t give much reason as to why. He told me that since departing he had had a ‘three-hour power nap’ but had spent the rest of the time at the wheel of his second-hand Land Rover Freelander, bought six years ago for £250. He seemed to be in the middle of an impulsive act, but agreed to my suggestion that we stop and have a snack and a cup of coffee. We chatted about his situation without going into it deeply. I told him about my plans and with his agreement I recited my poem about the prophet Job, which concludes (adapting the King James Bible), ‘Even through the closing eyelids of dusk, there is nowhere so dark that God’s love cannot find us’.

Paul drove sensibly and within the speed limit, and dropped me in the centre of Edinburgh at about 1.30pm. I walked to the Friends Meeting House and met Sue, Majk and Ken, who help run the premises. The elation I felt in meeting them was tempered by two realities: the Meeting House could only host performances by registered charities during the festival, so that ruled me out; and any accommodation in the city would have been booked up a long time ago. Fortunately, Majk was able to put me in touch with Cath and Richard, who offer bed and breakfast at their home in Falkirk, which is thirty minutes from Edinburgh on the train. Cath attends Polmont Meeting. She and Richard are retired GPs, now involved in a range of voluntary work and protest – they have criminal records as a result of their actions with Extinction Rebellion. They are kind, intelligent, proactive and unassuming people who have made a big impression on me.

Day 3 (Friday 19 August)
I sought out unofficial venues in Edinburgh in which to perform my poems. I began at the railway station but very few people paid me any attention, so I moved on to the monument to Walter Scott in Princes Park (the second largest monument to a writer in the world). Here I had more impact. Standing on the steps, I was able to recite my poems to people sitting on the benches below, or who just happened to be walking past. I got some positive comments, but it was rare for more than two people to be paying attention at any one time. The good news was that nobody jeered and the police, who were the other side of the monument, didn’t move me on. When I described my day to my hosts, Richard responded, ‘Yes, during the Festival, people are used to all sorts of weirdos popping up and doing strange things’. That was just the encouragement I needed!

Day 4 (Saturday 20 August)
Today I approached groups of people sitting in parks, on benches or on walls and made the following pitch: ‘My name is James, I’m a travelling poet and I would like to recite one poem to you and then I promise I will move on.’ The vast majority of people accepted the offer and I left a lot of them smiling. After reciting a poem, I would mention that I am a Quaker.

Day 5 (Sunday 21 August)
In the morning I went to the Edinburgh Meeting for Worship. The Meeting House is hosting an exhibition of textile panels entitled Stitches for Survival. Each panel has an environmental message. At Meeting I met an actor called Peter Singer who was performing a show on the Free Fringe (some people call this the Real Fringe) based around Shakespeare’s sonnets. I suggested we do an impromptu performance in the foyer to anyone who wanted to stick around after Meeting, and he agreed. I recited poems influenced by the prophets Isaiah and Job, and Peter then did a couple of the sonnets. In the evening I went to see Peter’s show. There were only five of us in the audience but we all loved it.

Day 6 (Monday 22 August)
I met Lari at Peter’s performance. I went to see Lari’s one-man show, in which he recites excerpts of The Gododdin, probably Scotland’s oldest known poem. Gododdin was a kingdom that existed in the sub-Roman period, covering south-east Scotland and some of Northumbria. The poem commemorates the soldiers who went to fight a rival kingdom at the town we now call Catterick (near the service station where I slept on day one). The poem is written in an old form of Welsh, probably because that was where the poet came from and possibly because that was the courtly language of the time. The soldiers prepared for war by spending a year drinking mead and boasting, which may go some way to explaining why only three of them returned from the battlefield. The existing manuscript dates from the thirteenth century, but some scholars think that large parts of it may have been composed soon after the battle in the early seventh. It occurred to me that humanity has produced many famous epic poems that describe acts of war (the Bhagavad Gita and The Iliad are other examples), but none that I can think of that describe acts of peace. There are poems that celebrate peace itself (such as Max Ehrmann’s ‘Desiderata’) but that’s not quite the same thing.

Day 7 (Tuesday 23 August)
I am finding time to enjoy the Festival – over nine days I will see twelve performances and three exhibitions. This morning I went to a talk on the Free Fringe by a man who had travelled across Europe, trying to sell copies of his debut novel to strangers. I spent the afternoon requesting permission from strangers to recite a poem. I was only turned down three times.

Day 8 (Wednesday 24 August)
This afternoon I went to a talk in the Quaker Meeting House by the actor, playwright and Quaker, Michael Mears. He was describing his new play, The Mistake, which is about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima. The play includes many different perspectives, including that of the pilot who flew the Enola Gay and one of the scientists in the Manhattan Project. Michael noted that opposing nuclear weapons is difficult at the moment because people are saying that if Ukraine had had nuclear weapons they would not have been invaded. I don’t think those people are right. If Ukraine had had nuclear weapons then they would have been tempted to launch them. Putin would then have had the perfect excuse to use his.

Day 9 (Thursday 25 August)
Today I took a break from the Festival in order to explore the town of Falkirk, where I have been staying. Falkirk used to be an industrial centre in Scotland, second only to Glasgow. I cycled along the Forth and Clyde canal to visit The Kelpies. These thirty-metre sculptures of horse heads commemorate the animals that pulled barges along the canals and also the pagan water spirits (kelpies) that would appear above the water as stallions. At the other end of town but still along the canal is the Falkirk Wheel, the world’s first and only rotating boat lift (completed in 2002). Using just the energy required to boil eight kettles, the wheel lifts canal boats up or down a twenty-seven metre gap.

Day 10 (Friday August 26)
The purpose of my itinerant witness has been to share the Quaker testimonies with people who would not otherwise hear them. On this day I decided to keep a record of how many people I have reached with my poetry. I started at 10.30am and by 6.40pm, 242 people had heard my poems over the course of seventy-two performances. Most of the performances were to people at tables outside bars, although I did perform ‘Job’ to three Jehovah’s Witnesses standing in the town centre (they were very polite about it).

Day 11 (Saturday 27 August)
This was my last day at the festival. In the morning I went to wee The Mistake. In the afternoon I performed my poems to a further eighty-five people outside bars and cafes. At tea-time, I reflected on the value of what I am doing. Being an itinerant witness is having a positive impact on me – I feel happy and relaxed – and it has been interesting to test out ways of communicating our testimonies. I think I have had a positive impact on more than 500 people, but I have no reason to believe that any of them have become Quakers. There is an opportunity cost to what I am doing – I could be back at my job in an understaffed community mental health team. I think there is value in what I am doing, but not to the extent that I would feel justified in giving up my paid employment, even if I could get funding in order to do so.

Day 12 (Sunday 28 August)
In the morning I attended Polmont Meeting with Cath. It was good to be able to reflect on a week that has provided so much stimulation for me as well as (I hope) others. At 12.20pm I was standing on the main road out of town, with a sign saying, ‘Edinburgh’. I waited for just under an hour before I was picked up by a 4x4 that was heading in the opposite direction. The three occupants all appeared to be in their thirties and one of the passengers was extremely drunk. I didn’t understand why they were going to go out of their way to take me to Edinburgh, so I said that I felt sick and asked the driver to stop the car. I got out and walked away. I think it most probable that they meant no harm but I wasn’t completely sure. I was now on a different road but after one and a half hours the 4x4 came past and the occupants made rude gestures. After another half hour a man picked me up and took me to a slip road onto an A road. I didn’t have much time to talk to him but his short lift was really helpful. After fifteen minutes I was picked up by a Polish man driving a van. He provided for his wife and children by refurbishing flats for a landlord. We discussed the potential impact of the energy crisis on small businesses that rely on vehicular transport. He got me close to the Edinburgh ring road but, as pedestrians are not allowed onto any of the slip roads, I had to walk a couple of hundred metres into a suburban area and hitch from there. As I was hitching, a man, who appeared to be in his thirties, called from his front garden, asking if I wanted a cup of tea. His name was Craig and I sat in his front garden with him and his father – who had, remarkably, worked in the 1970s as a psychiatric nurse in the same part of London where I am employed. We talked about what’s good about working in mental health services (helping patients to move on) and bad (claustrophobic in-patient wards and the perpetual restructuring of services in order to give each succeeding tranche of directors a project they can talk about at their next job interview). Craig is a software engineer and, like some other people I know who are IT savvy, he is not on Facebook or other forms of social media. He volunteered to take me to a service station at the junction of the ring road and the A1. There I got a lift with Richard, aged about thirty, who was driving back to Northumberland from Edinburgh airport. He had trained as a geneticist, but is now a paramedic. We discussed the similarities and differences between our jobs. Even if I could do his job, I wouldn’t like having to work the irregular hours. Richard didn’t fancy the ongoing responsibility of my job – if something goes wrong for one of my patients during the weekend or while I am away, the subsequent investigation will want to know what preventative plans I had put in place. Richard dropped me at a petrol station at Morpeth. I got something to eat and bedded down in a nearby field.

Day 13 (Monday 29 August)
I slept OK, breakfasted on food bought in the petrol station and started hitching at 6.45am with a sign saying ‘South’. After two hours, I asked the staff member in the station about the paucity of cars. She reminded me that it was a bank holiday and advised that a newly-built bypass had diverted much of the traffic. Eventually I got a lift with a couple, probably ten years older than me, who were going north. They suggested that a lay-by on the A697 would be a good place for a lift. They were wrong. At 10.45am I was still in the lay-by, so I walked into a nearby garden centre, had a cooked breakfast, used the washroom and then, just before noon, tried hitching at the garden centre’s exit. There was a lot of traffic going in and out, but for an hour and a half no one gave me a lift. I tried again at the lay-by for an hour and then did another half hour at the garden centre. Nothing. I went into the garden centre to have a toasted sandwich. At about 4.00pm, nine hours after I began hitchhiking, a couple aged in their early sixties said they could take me to Seaton Burn Service station (two service stations south of the one I had woken up at this morning). As is often the case with hitchhiking, it’s the short lifts that can really make a difference. Ten minutes after arriving at Seaton Burn, I got a lift from Chris. He seemed to have had a rather turbulent life and now worked as a cobbler for a high-street chain of stores. He was friendly and helpful and went out of his way to drop me at a service station that he thought would work (in Washington). I made a small financial contribution to thank him for this. Within fifteen minutes, I got a lift with Darren. Darren is a driving instructor, which made me feel very safe. We had a wide-ranging conversation and got onto the subject of gender transitioning. We noticed the difference between how we both feel about people transitioning (uneasy) with our actual experience of people who are transitioning. My only meaningful interaction with a transgender person (that I am aware of) has been with a paramedic who was taking one of my patients to hospital. The paramedic was extremely calm, caring and effective in what was a very emotional and complex situation. Darren told me that his partner’s son, who is twenty-two years old, is transitioning to female. Prior to the transitioning the child had expressed suicidal thoughts, regularly self-harmed and behaved unpredictably towards others. Since transitioning she has become a much more relaxed person. Life is better and less stressful for Darren and his partner. Darren dropped me at Guildford railway station at 10.15pm. In the first nine hours of today I went two miles in the wrong direction. In the following six hours I travelled 350 miles in the right direction. That is the unpredictability of hitchhiking. I took a train to Brentford via Clapham Junction and then got the E8 bus, arriving home at 00.45am. I intend to carry out the third and final instalment of my itinerant witness in the first week of October.

James is grateful to the Francis Camfield Trust for support. His poems can be found at www.whatthebiblecouldhavesaid.com. Michael Mears is hoping to take The Mistake on tour. Some of the names of people in this article have been changed.

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Comments

I usually think of travelling ministry as travel with ministry at the end of the travelling. But James makes the act travelling simultaneously the ministry. Wonderful!

By Ol Rappaport on 6th October 2022 - 14:28

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