X marks the spot

Well it did, when I was a child, and was encouraged to be more observant, through countless treasure hunt games. In the news, is the change of Twitter's brand from a blue bird to white cross on a black background. It may become like "The artist known as Prince" - all I know is that, of the social media platforms, Twitter or X as I suppose I should call it, was the one I found to be the most enjoyable and valuable to use. Not least as it enabled me to discover interesting walkers for my Talking Walking podcasts.

Earlier in July, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elena Biserna, who has authored a couple of huge compendia of sound walks and walking scores. As she was in Marseille, we had to resort to using Zoom as the means to conduct and record the interview. One of the walking artists who came up in conversation was Yoko Ono. I had not associated Yoko with walking, apart from a song she wrote and performed called "Walking on Thin Ice", sometime in the early 1980s. However Yoko was inspired by the Dada movement, and worked with Fluxus in New York in the early 1960s producing several walking art scores. One of which would be of keen interest to my colleague Babak, as it was encouraging people to draw a map to get lost. A case of the reverse of 'X marks the spot'.

What other treasures might one uncover beneath an X? Certainly we have uncovered a fair few through our regular monthly Walking Detective meet-ups - we have a a rough and ready Google spreadsheet that now has more than 100 entries, and as and when we have the time, following up these discoveries, getting in touch with other walking artists and uncovering long forgotten walking pieces or scores. Why not chip in your two-penneth worth of clues? It is a free, informal event, and the next is tomorrow evening at 7pm BST- you can book a spot from here.

We also want to pop in a reminder that we are just over two weeks from the deadline for our current writing competition, on the theme of "Walking A/way" - of which I might be doing from the platform that used to be called Twitter - however, I am sure you can find more interesting things to write about than turning your back on X. How to submit and more details on the competition are here. You could win the accolade of our Writer-in-residence, plus a whole bunch of other more tangible prizes. Our story Writer-in-residence and last year's winner, Cheryl Markosky, is contributing occasional blog pieces, you can read them here.

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