So earlier this week, I wrote a piece for my Medium account about playing Sniper Elite 5 when I learned that my mother had died. In the process I draw a - perhaps somewhat stretched - analogy between the process of moving through maps in SE5 and the process of finding your way through Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's five stages of grief. But what I want to write about here is something else which occurred to me about the ways in which my life has come to resemble one of Karl Fairburne's peregrinations across enemy territory, and that's something I alluded to in my second Medium article this past week, which is otherwise mostly about genitals: my recently acquired disability.
Here's how I described the process of maneuvering about in the Sniper Elite series:
The first thing you’re going to want to do at the start of a level is crouch: the next thing is to look through your binoculars. You will spend way more time looking through these than through your rifle’s scope, because they allow you to tag opponents, vehicles and other salient features of the environment. Only then, when you’re satisfied no-one has line-of-sight on you, can you think about moving — and even then, most of that will be at a crouch if not a crawl, hugging the shadows, staying behind cover and creeping into tall grass at every opportunity. Move, stop, scan, and move again. And, when an enemy comes between you and one of the mission’s objectives, a fourth step: kill.
And as soon as I finished typing that, I thought: well, shit. With the exception of crouching down, hiding in tall grass, and killin' Nazis (though as I observed in the Medium piece, someday soon it might be our duty to try and fit as much Nazi-killing into our schedule as possible), that kinda sounds like the approach I've been forced to take when walking anywhere these days. Let me explain.
During the first lockdown, I came down with what I thought of, at the time, as the worst 'flu I'd had in my damn life, and which I now think was probably a mild case of COVID-19. And one of the reasons I suspect it of being that is what happened to me after I recovered from my illness: simply put, I get out of breath a lot more easily these days, to the extent that, after a brief attempt at mounting a post-covid comeback, I stopped going to the gym, and began taking walks instead. And then even the walks started getting harder, to the extent that I began using a cane, which helped mitigate pain in my lower back and hips (gettin' old, kids: as much as it might be preferable to the alternative, it still fucking sucks). And then I began to have to stop during walks to take rests. And I began having to take rests sooner, and sooner, and sooner. To the extent that I can now only walk a few yards before getting out of breath, and have to rest frequently in the course of walking anywhere.
And, because, especially currently, I hate, and have always hated, having to acknowledge the infirmity of my own body instead of enjoying its capacity to exhilarate, I have developed a habit of walking back from places. Not always all the way: the other week, after I had been into Newcastle to take a look at the RMT picket at Central Station (great turnout, at least one cute doggo, lots of passing motorists honking in support) I decided to walk back from Central Station to my usual bus stop for civicentric excursions, near Old Eldon Square. Not much of a walk, but I had made a crucial mistake: the route I had decided to follow took me up Pink Lane and along the length of Clayton Street, a route which, for long sessions, offered nothing on which to sit except iron traffic bollards and, for one terrible, extended stretch, didn't even offer those.
By the time I hobbled into Burger King, bought a drink I can only describe as some kind of dehydrated slush (
would not recommend) and collapsed into a chair I felt like I'd ran a marathon. Students of Newcastle's urban geography will of course have realised that by this point I was nowhere near the end of my planned walk, though fortunately the remainder of the route offered more municipal benches and plenty of opportunities for rest.
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| Such students will also notice this is nowhere on the route described, but I needed a picture here to break things up. |
So you see, like Karl Fairburne, I progress over terrain in slow fragments, pausing frequently, and always scanning. But I'm not scanning for gun-toting Nazis - actually no, scratch that, I am paranoid enough and have led the kind of life which means one does, in fact, scan for gun-toting Nazis, as well as feds, spies of various descriptions and certain entities which do not in the strictest interpretation of the word actually exist, but in recent times all of these have taken a back seat to park benches, low walls, wide steps, bollards and anywhere else a fat sick old dyke can park her arse.
As the odyssey detailed above makes clear, one of the things this state of affairs has made me acutely conscious of is the paucity of these opportunities even in our city centres, especially if one doesn't want to pay for the privilege with the purchase of a coffee or other beverage. This quite simply must change. I don't say this only for myself: I am, after all, not the only person in this city, never mind this country, never mind our pandemically-imperilled planet, who is finding it harder to get around. It cannot be repeated enough that we have all just experienced a mass disabling event. There are a lot more of us these days who do not do as well with walking as we used to, and if we are going to participate fully in the public sphere, we are going to need somewhere to sit down.
Otherwise, who knows? Some of us are going to have to lie down somewhere sometime, and reach out to our indolent legislators with what Jim Morrison once called injurious vision. And then, once we've domed those bastards, we can track down the shit who invented that horrific iced Fanta drink. And actually, while we're on the subject of Fanta...
Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed this! If you did, and want to show your appreciation, I'm always grateful for tips to my ko-fi page if you can spare the bread. If not, shares and all that sort of thing are good too. Comments, you know what I mean, etc, though if you're an asshole you'll just get deleted so don't be an arsehole. This sign-off bit has gone on longer than I intended. Peace!
