Desborough Road

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in the morning.*

“Desborough Road has, in recent times, become a mythical place to me. Though often empty of humans, its pavements are occasionally trodden by those who realize that walking is the only way to know the world; and by those who have never heard of the Tao, but nevertheless follow it instinctively. They walk, shamble, or shuffle along, stopping from time to time in order to peer over a tumbledown garden fence, at nothing in particular. Or get curiously waylaid by a trail left by yesterday’s snail or slug. They are also cognizant of how events in life are often beyond their immediate control, and willingly bow to the unknown’s greater power. An ageing cat appears from beneath a stationary car and demands attention by winding itself around the Desborough wanderer. Or the fellow from number ten pops out to buy his loaf of bread, and tells anyone within earshot about the state of the skies, his wife’s sore throat, and the price of potatoes.

“Please don’t tell me that the ‘real’ Desborough Road is nothing like that. Although, in all honesty, I won’t mind too much………”

This was from a fellow-blogger who shall remain nameless. I’d like everything I write to add brush-strokes to a great mythical panorama, interpreted variously by each of the few souls who find their way to this secluded and part-fictional place.

I like the idea that creativity resides in the soul of artist and viewer/reader/listener. It may be inspired by what the senses perceive in the real world, but there is a transformation.

Art which is directly produced for the Community can never have the same withdrawn quality as that which is made out of the artist’s solitude. For this possesses the integrity and bleak exhilaration that are to be gained only from the absence of an audience and from communion with the primal sources of an unconscious life.*

Is there a ‘real’ Dseborough Road? Google Street View thinks there may be something similar. Distortion from its van-mounted cameras sometimes makes narrow streets look wider.

Each of the photos below can be enlarged.
The wayfarer steps out from here, goes east toward the horizon
Then a short footpath to the street behind
“ I spotted a couple of Taoist sages standing and talking beneath a tree in one of the pictures. I say that, but who is to predict what a Taoist sage will look like?”—Too right. I could count up to six candidates in this pic aloneDesborough Road proper starts here. The Second hand Furniture Centre used to be an “International Club”, whereby hangs a tale
. . . now it does indeed sell used furniture, as does the white building next door, for charity
at left, the computer shop which helped me lose my data, and find it again

here you can get a chapel of rest, car spares, fireworks, hardware & ironmongery

The Step-in Café begs loiterers to stay away, but they spill over from the congregations outside Mo’Fro barbers & the Coral betting shop bus Station & shopping mall in background. Buildings in the middle still await redevelopment—pic enlarged below

this is the eastern end. After a multi-storey car park, you go past the new university, police station, municipal offices and thence to a public park which will take you via the pedestrian route I’ve christened “the Valley Path” to Loudwater

From now on specialize; never again make any concession to the ninety-nine percent of you which is like everybody else at the expense of the one percent which is unique. Never listen to the False Self talking. Le néant d’avoir quarante ans* [on attaining his 40th birthday]

*excerpts from The Unquiet Grave, by Cyril Connolly (1944)

Postscript October 2018: Desborough Road has changed since these Google street view pictures were taken. It will go on changing, like everything else.