Confessional

So the walk isn't finished and the blog feels incomplete. The methodology was flawed and physical ailments can no longer be ignored. Not to get too down about this though as what we've done has come out well enough. 

I think some of the text, especially about Stoke-on-Trent, suffers from having been written when ill and hacking through the job and lacks something of the energy and feel required for this sort of investigation. Why weren't we speaking to more people, for example? Because I was feeling antisocial, hardly the right frame of mind in which to approach this sort of study. 

And I was struck by a wave of something approaching despair but curiously resembling euphoria on reaching Stoke-on-Trent bus station, overwhelmed by the overlapping failures of the day: of the town's history, of the architecture, of public health, of my health. This confession only runs on because it seems to link in to Orwell's work as set out below.

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Once you discover Orwell was dying of TB during the writing of 1984 the book's paranoid atmosphere begins to make a lot of sense. Utterly disenchanted with ideological thinking after his experiences in Spain and appalled by the Second World War, 1984 begins to read as a description of a worst-case scenario. Conceived and executed in ill health during his self-imposed exile on the Scottish island of Jura, the book reads as a document of political and personal disappointments. 

Orwell was shot through the neck whilst fighting in Spain and nearly died in hospital there as well as having been critically ill with pneumonia in 1933. He seems to have ignored his steadily deteriorating health, writing (and smoking) all the while. It was a disastrous end when it came. Here is some of what he wrote about his suffering in what turned out to be his final notebook. It is not for the faint hearted:

'At first, though the streptomycin [the first real hope of a cure for TB of the lungs] seemed to produce an almost immediate improvement in my health, there were no secondary symptoms, except that a sort of discoloration appeared at the base of my fingers & toe nails. Then my face became noticeably redder & the skin had a tendency to flake off, & a sort of rash appeared all over my body, especially down my back. There was no itching associated with this. After about 3 weeks I got a severe sore throat, which did not go away & was not affected by sucking penicillin lozenges. It was very painful to swallow & I had to have a special diet for some weeks. There was now ulceration with blisters in my throat & in the insides of my cheeks, & the blood kept coming up into little blisters on my lips. At night these burst & bled considerably, so that in the morning my lips were always stuck together with blood & I had to bathe them before I could open my mouth. Meanwhile my nails had disintegrated at the roots & the disintegration grew, as it were, up the nail, new nails forming beneath meanwhile. My hair began to come out, & one or two patches of quite white hair appeared at the back (previously it was only speckled with grey).' 

http://www.jameslindlibrary.org/trial_records/20th_Century/1940s/MRC_bmj/bastian.html

Orwell seems to have contracted TB during his time in Burma and long cultivated it living in poor conditions, whether the trenches in Spain or common lodging houses in Paris, Wigan or the East End. 

This terminal illness can be read as Orwell's Eton penance, his final act of solidarity with the working class. Like van Gogh, Orwell discovered that there's a time when a reckless disregard for your physical health catches up with you, when living on bread and water and everyday exposure to cold and damp in the name of your truth does you in. For van Gogh this meant his teeth falling out; for Orwell it meant TB. Both continued to be lucid and produced their seminal work at the end of their lives: in retrospect, as John Berger says of van Gogh, these lives seem to have an arrow-straight trajectory. 

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Orwell certainly did a better job of living his journalism than we have aspired to in this recent project. Travellodges and B&Bs are too detached from the way people live and this mode suggests the sort of superficial engagement so many travel guides encourage. We want to avoid this; but maybe we also are trying to sell places. How to get the most out of places we visit?

We discussed this when planning the job and were nervous about getting the tone and the terms correct. I'm not sure Orwell always employed the correct methodology:

'From a vantage-point of relative security, he made the odd foray into the lives of the blighted and dispossessed, partly to keep his political nose to the ground and partly because such trips furnished him with precious journalistic copy.'

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n12/terry-eagleton/reach-me-down-romantic 

So partly cynical but also political: you get as close as you can to your subject but you also write. We certainly have ideas for improving future projects and increasing our exposure in a number of novel ways so watch this space.