Nº58 I’m just going out for a walk…

Or can you hold the line, caller?

Apr 05, 2026

An open letter to my 58th Subscriber…

Dear ****

I was thinking just recently of how you sign off your letters with that old fisherman’s phrase, Tight lines, and how well it works for poets too. We need our lines to be tight, both in their construction and then, when we cast them off, how we hope a reader might bite. Tight lines, that’s what we’re after.

I can sense spring is knocking. It is an unsettling season and after a long hibernation I find that I return to opening lines like, “April is the cruelest month…” and “The trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said…” 1

Often, tho, the most potent or poetic lines don’t come from poems at all but are found in films, lines we repeat, mimic in the voices in which they were delivered. How else can you say, “I’ll be back”, without borrowing Arnie’s blunt Austrian monosyllable? You may even assume positions in front of the mirror, give it the Travis Bickle jiggle, come on all Bobby De Nero with a threatening “You talkin’ to me?” And only Jack Nicholson can roar, “You can’t handle the truth!” like, well like Jack Nicholson.

Other lines become signatures, single lines that evoke the entire movie: “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” “I’ll have what she’s having”, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” And then there are the lines that, over time, have been rewritten, adapted, modified, adjusted. Some of the most famous movie quotes don’t even appear in the films you think they’re from. “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?”2, “Play it again, Sam.”3, “Houston, we’ve got a problem,”4 are lines that were never actually spoken, are not quite as you remember them. Lines are fluid, movable, interchangeable, corruptible.

Some of the most memorable lines weren’t even written down, lines that have been attributed, recorded, overheard. A line that haunts me, one I find myself repeating, misquoting, dropping into conversations is, “I am just going outside and may be some time.”

This is the alleged last line of Captain Lawrence Edward Grace “Titus” Oates who accompanied Robert Falcon Scott on the British Antarctic Expedition of 1911. You may be familiar with the story. It is one of misguided and miserable failure recast as gallantry and heroic endeavour - as so many of our stories are. Essentially a race to the South Pole, Scott’s team arrived five weeks late to find the Norwegians had already beaten them to it. The Norwegians had preferred sleds and dogs to haul their supplies, while the Brits favoured ponies - nice on Blackpool beach but not perhaps as useful in the driving ice and howling snow. On their return to base Oates recognised that he was becoming a burden, his frost bitten foot impairing their progress, slowing the team down. With dwindling supplies he realised it was likely they’d not make it back alive. So he sacrificed himself, walked out into a blizzard to die, according to Scott’s diary, uttering his immortal line before he went to meet his fate.

Today it can be used with comic effect, you can say it when you’re popping out to the shops for a pint of milk. It is a line encumbered with tragedy but you must know the story in order for it to have any value. It means nothing at all on its own. The line is only poetic in context. It is the story that supports it. A line can tow a poem as much as a poem can toe a line.

We mark a line between two points, think of the line cast out or cast off, consider the line fastened to its anchor, the stern line dragging in the water. There’s a line in the sand, a line you cross, a line you draw. Can you see what’s coming down the line? Have we come to the end of the line? Is it all falling into line? Let me lay it on the line, it’s something along these lines, I’m going to take a firm line, walk a fine line, open up a line of communication.

Last April I walked a length of the Via Francigena, a stretch of the old pilgrim path that passed close to the Golfo dei Poeti, a kind of walking / talking tour of the Romantic poets in Italy.5 I’m feeling a similar looseness in my boots, a need re-trace old routes, follow new lines of enquiry and so this is what I’m going to do:

I’m going to walk around London, circumnavigating the entire city. Not all at once but in sections, between interconnecting points of poetic interest, in episodes that I’ll broadcast, live, every Sunday at five.

I’m going to begin at the Keats statue behind the Globe pub in Moorgate6 then I’ll walk a straight line North, to Blake’s grave. The following week I’ll walk from Blake’s grave to the site of the first purpose built theatre in London and Shakespeare’s statue in Shoreditch and then… and then I don’t know. But slowly, weekly, poetically, mile by mile I will find my way back to the starting line. It will take a while. It will begin later today. Right now I’m going outside. I may be some time.

Until then, tight lines.