I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Walking in UK As Missing Persons famously did not sing, 'Nobody Walks in UK', because in fact, lots of people walk quite a bit in the UK. There was a news story not too long ago on the BBC about how some landowners would like to reroute the public footpaths around some of their fields, and what a complicated issue that is given 'Ancient Rights of Way,' 'Public Footpaths,' 'Bridleways,' and such like, and the resistance they are getting from groups like Ramblers. Public footpaths in the country aside, there are all these twisty little paths in the cities that mean that you almost always have multiple ways to get from place to place. That makes sense, of course, when you think about how the older cities grew up without much in the way of formal planning. Naturally there will be alleys and lanes and courts and little pedestrian walkways from street to street. But it's more than that. There seems to be a commitment to making sure that new developments are also friendly to walkers and to a lesser extent bike-riders. I grew up in the suburbs near Denver, and now I'm living in a suburban village near York. In Colorado, we had yards and we had streets, and we odd little bits of public green space here and there, but we had no footpaths as such. (We created one, sort of, as children, by slipping into the area between the two fences that property owners had put up back to back, but to get access at either end you had to cut through someone's yard.) Here in Strensall, in a fairly modern development, there is a maze of footpaths and hidden fields, which I'm getting the hang of, bit by bit. Furthermore, I went to a going away party for a student who just finished here at the CMS (Centre for Medieval Studies), and decided the best route was to take a bus down to roughly the correct latitude, and then walk west. There appeared to be a footpath for part of the way, and there was. But what a footpath! With no exceptional fanfare or signage, not as part of a park, just as a means of getting from place to place, there was this green refuge from the city which was only a few steps away. And nature, or semi-rural nature at least, never seems to be more than a few steps away. The river Foss, a river of a size with which I am comfortable, having grown up in a desert - that is to say, 'not very big', runs down along the edge of Strensall and into York. It's just a couple of minutes' walk, and then you can look and see country and trees and nothing else. Well, almost nothing else. There's a path along the river, that you can follow north to the Haxby Moor Road or south to the Towthorpe road. There always seems to be path that you can follow if you don't want to walk in or along the road. And there is, or seems to be, a concerted effort to make sure that this persists, that it is important for people to be able to walk in pleasant surroundings. Preferably without having to drive to get there. I wonder how much the lack of this attitude in the US can be attributed to 'car culture.' Even in NYC, which is very mass transit and walker friendly, cars are ubiquitous in a way that they don't seem to be here in the UK. Or maybe it's just the lack of parking on this small island. Luddite'sLog, 29 September 2013 © 2013 Jeff Berry

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