When was the last time we found ourselves lost in a city? I don’t mean turned around — unaware of which way is north. I mean, genuinely lost. It isn’t easy to lose ourselves anymore. Should most of us have the slightest inkling that we’ve ended up in the ‘wrong’ place, we reach into our pockets for our smartphones. Within minutes, we’re back on the right track, guided by our digital assistants. For some, the idea of being lost in a metropolis is the stuff of nightmares. But the nineteenth-century flâneur revelled in the experience. Finding themselves adrift in the city allowed them to stumble upon something new and exciting. So why, in the twenty-first century why does the idea of being lost feel so negative to so many of us?

Productivity could be one answer. Look at that smartphone again; somewhere in the usage statistics, it will reveal our daily productivity as a screen time percentage. We like to think of ourselves as being productive, whether online or in the real world. Being lost isn’t productive, or so we’re led to believe. It is wasting time. Few would consider the experience as an opportunity to learn more about our surroundings and ourselves. When we are lost, we begin to search. Ironically, aimless searching of the internet is now standard practice. But, searching a city, dawdling around for pleasure alone, seems outdated to some, maybe even quite strange. In the city, we seem to need a plan. We need to be going somewhere. We need to be shopping. Or going to work. Or walking to a restaurant or bar. To quote William Henry Davies, “We have no time to stand and stare.”

Yet, we do have time. The average internet user spends between two and two and a half hours viewing social media, per day. That’s over two days per month of solid Facebook, Instagram, and whatever else. Many of us are content to spend significant time browsing the content shared within our social network, but less inclined to wander the city for pleasure.

The act of flânerie could be considered a dying art. Another reason for this is related to safety and control. When browsing the internet, we have some authority over our online experience, mainly who we interact with. Furthermore, we often conduct our cyberflâneurie from the comfort of our own homes. When wandering the city, we open ourselves to the unpredictability and potential danger of every passing moment. Perhaps we retreat into virtual worlds because we can select the crowd within which we mingle and are not faced with the immediate possibility of physical threat.

The deeper we immerse ourselves in our online lives, the more selective we become. Look at all the pedestrians who navigate the city wearing noise-cancelling headphones. They are on the street, but they choose not to hear the random orchestra of city life. They want to hear their own selection of music and little more. Street noise may seem dull to them, irritating, overwhelming, or maybe even threatening, so wearing headphones allows them to control what they hear.

In social media marketing, we often hear the term ‘tailored personal experience’ referring to “personalised interactions and content designed to meet the unique preferences and needs of individual users.” This is another reason why we are prepared to devote significant time to our online world—the internet is evolving so that we see only the things in which we are interested.

The city cannot possibly function in this manner. When walking, our surroundings cannot be altered to suit us alone. And isn’t that a wonderful thing? We look down at our phone screens to slip into a world tailored for us. But, if we look outward into the city, we connect with a network that contains everyone. Flânerie has never been about the inward-looking self. On the contrary, it is about losing oneself in the crowd, observing and understanding the lives of others by watching how they move through the city. Flânerie is about not only tolerating but embracing the randomness of the city. It is about the individual accepting that the city does not exist for them alone.

As we become sensitive to the lives of those around us, rather than focusing narrowly on ourselves, our curiosity and empathy grow. We begin to make connections more powerful and surprising than any cyber flâneur could dream of. Interaction with the city emphasises a key aspect of being human: we all have our differences but are capable of existing together. For all its noise and chaos, the city is ultimately an emblem of tolerance and togetherness.

As editor of an online literary journal, it may appear ironic that I advocate spending significantly less time on the internet. The internet has undoubtedly become an indispensable tool for navigating contemporary life — but it should not become life itself. I spend less time online than most, but I still worry that I am spending too many hours looking at a screen each month. How much do we remember from our on-screen time? The experience melts away to nothing. Whereas, walking in cities forges unforgettable memories.

Reading the poetry and prose published in our 39th issue reminds us to devote more time to flânerie . The writing captures the delights, rhythms, and emotional experience of urban walking. After reading it, I hope you feel inspired to put away your phone, even for a few minutes, and go out for a stroll. We learn so much from walking and playing the flâneuse/flâneur. To quote Baudelaire, it is one of the ‘higher joys’ of life and one that is now so often overlooked.

Happy holidays,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

I’d been caught in one of those monumental East Anglian downpours. My feet were two blocks of ice. I sat hunched over my hot chocolate making puddles on the floor. I was only just starting to feel warm again when they said the café was closing but I wasn’t ready to leave. I couldn’t face my cold empty flat.

Jane Wilson-Howarth

It’s icy cold today
Possibly Himalayan. Must be snowing in Srinagar
And Shimla. White drops of light pouring.

The rains must have left
For the Andamans, for the Bay of Bengal.
The sun is out. It is calm

As my mind. New York.
I miss walking into New York rain, early hours
Rain mottling, a tear or two

Misting the rear view.
I miss it like sugar, a burger, my head’s bustle.
I like it where it is, this cold

Birds twittering. The slow swish swash of the wiper
The cabbie calling out: Where to?
And me walking on, with a smile: Nowhere.

Good luck brother. I am sure you will find it.
They find everything in New York.
On Wall Street the hustle begins anew:

Since your money is also mine
Why don’t you loan it to me
And I will lend it back?

And on Chelsea, someone asks
For directions to the nearest concert
In Bowery, where doors are open all night.

The pizza joint has no missing pieces
A puzzle long solved. Yet lines linger
Long as the street, wait patient as an immigrant.

Raindrops patter, thick, we are now well clad.
Not homeless but sheltered – inside our cold dreams.
Nothing seems beyond us.

We are not beyond anything – what we once asked. What we got.
In New York, they seethe rage into a smoothie.
Here, drink it. Good for your salad soul.

But it’s the raindrops on the pane that bother me.
Each one settles into a kind of reckoning.
Each, a lost soul, someone still seeking

That perfect bottle of sunset
And finding something else.
Maybe, a new recipe.

Tonight, there’s poetry on Bowery. Jazz in Fat Cat.
Someone’s reading the history of tomorrow
At the East St bookshop in the Village.

Patti Smith just passed by. We stop at the Japanese bar.
Order rice with chicken toppings. Sushi. Breathe in the clean
Whiskey air, ask for downtime. Think it’s Tokyo not New York.

They let us stay there, forever.
After the shops close, there’s still the last bar open
The guy who plays Curtis Mayfield all night.

Where we once painted the blank walls.
The art school is closed. The artists are singing
Lovelorn songs, full of tobacco and moonstone.

I grab a breakfast bagel, cinnamon and cream.
A dark, black coffee. Feel the breeze. Imagine I am
Still in Delhi. Where chicken roasts in the oven

And Salvador Dali has just melted the grandfather clock
Next to the dining table. The one that still chimes
The history of our love, in forty-five seconds.

Amlanjyoti Goswami

On pret-a-porter no-cars-please thronging boulevards, the occasional begging mother with babe-in-arms and kowtowing amputee beseech society with their screamed silence, neighbours to pret-a-manger random meat-skewer booths. Uniformed security periodically spit below stern metal-pole signs forbidding the same; begloved concierges defend faux marble gates to lush Philippe Starck amenities and free hotel washrooms with L’Occitane en Provence handwash and moisturiser. A thousand construction sites consume a tenfold can-do cement-mixers, ambitious cranes and militant pile-drivers, each pounding a register of the waking dragon long forgotten by the world.

Further off the beaten core, perhaps a million lives thrive within discreet alleys off a thousand mysterious streets, pockmarked by nouvelle art-décor home-furnishing boutiques the embassies of European industry magnates, and by emerging local pretenders gleefully dethroning them of the British India/Crate & Barrel/Pottery Barn ilk (and at a fraction of the cost too!)

Within towering glass-cased monumental exhibitions of the finest architecture and interior design humanity has to offer, studious practitioners of ultra-current molecular cuisine and Iron Chefdom sculpt monumental feats of gourmetdom, gulped down by one-part appreciative globe-trotting connoisseurs, one-part keen wannabe Ferragamo-wearing applicants to international citizenry.

Life below teems and seethes; up here the wind howls its nocturnal anthem. A city waits another day, and dreams its next dawn.

- Shanghai, the late 2000s.

Ping Yi

Jonathan Holland

David Capps

if these Teesside streets could speak

Julie Easley

We lived in Albion Street where men waltzed
into ‘The Albion’ bar, staggering out, balling at the sky.
As a bairn me da skelped me for hanging round its doors.
It was my doll’s house.

See me at fourteen-year-old on Jarrow’s Ferry,
crossing the river for work at Haggie’s Rope Works;
rivetters hammers had our voices a whisper
shouting in each other’s faces.

Feeling me fingers along the terracotta Baroque Jarrow Town Hall,
loving the satin-smooth brick and
never forgetting the marchers leaving in 1936, now cherished
in memories of hunger and pride.

‘The Borough’, our Victorian Gin Palace,
my husband drank in his neat as a pin navy-blue suit,
now I contend with silence.
Not for him beyond grave revelations.

I yearn for him to say, ‘I love you’. We married at Saint Bede’s church,
I go to Mass with Bridget every Sunday,
breathless with desire to hold her.
Dead of TB at thirteen.

The day’s silent as Bridget’s unmarked grave as I
long for her to squeeze me hand
heading to our Council three-bed-roomed heaven:
indoor toilet, garden front, back and near my Bridget.

I am still walking my bounds,
standing at me unmarked grave,
not for the first time yearning for love:
that has never died.

Tom Kelly

Far from the oft-photographed visitors’ sites, only the occasional lost tourist couple, furtively consulting an unfolded map, walked through the small square and over the bridge. The bridge and square were part of the Venetians’ Venice, the Dorsaduro.

At the foot of the bridge sat a traditional wood-fronted trattoria. In front of the restaurant, a leathery-skinned old man drank wine from a small water glass on his table. Next to the glass rested a purple-stained ceramic pitcher from which he refilled his glass at infrequent intervals. He nursed the wine in the glass, endeavoring to make it last. Across the square, twenty feet away from the old man, I sipped my espresso.

November in Venice can be a mixed affair. One day can be damp and cold with a clinging fog that rolls across the islands of the Laguna. Occasionally, on a winter afternoon, the sky may clear, with brilliant sun breaking through to light the outsides of the buildings with reflections bounced from the canals.

On the dark days, people hurry and scurry to their destinations, not seeking to linger outside. But on those rare warm November afternoons, people take their time strolling home, soaking in the sun, knowing it may be a while before they see it again.

On those days, the women break out their designer skirts and leather boots, their coats swinging open to reveal stylish sweaters and blouses. Dark sunglasses rest in jet-black hair. An artistically wound scarf adorns every neck.

All this the old man took in with each glance, his pale blue and rheumy eyes following each swishing skirt and scarf as their owner transited the square and climbed the stone bridge. “Bella,” he would say as each woman went past him.

“Bella” he sighed to a young woman in a pale-blue sweater and skin-tight jeans; “Bella” he nodded to a pierced twenty-something in a leather jacket, purple hose, and thick, black Doc Martens.

The old man’s deeply etched face reflected a life of hard labor; he could have been anywhere from a bad fifty to one-hundred years of age. His short white hair sat up in spikes through which one could see his tanned scalp. He wore dark-blue flannel pants and a brown corduroy jacket over a dark green army sweater and open-collared shirt. A red scarf wrapped around his neck, the ends of which disappeared into the jacket.

He sat at the outdoor table, his back to the brown wood-and-stucco building being warmed by the afternoon sun. Bells rang from a nearby church. If one listened carefully, they could hear the vaporettos on the Grand Canal.

“Bella, Bella,” came forth the soft exclamation for an elegant forty-something woman with large sunglasses towing a small white short-haired dog.

Do the women hear him? I wondered, as I sat at my table across the foot of the bridge.

But if I could hear him, so surely must the women as they walked between us. None looked angry; not one twirled on her heels to confront this “dirty old man.” Instead, each woman’s smile broadened as they continued across the bridge. My dispenser of “Bellas” was improving their day, confirming they still had style and grace. They would surely lose “it” one day but, for now, they still shone. Thanks to the old man’s acknowledgement, they truly felt “Bella.”

The square’s old man was a civic virtue, a man who kept an entire city’s women, or at least those in the Dorsaduro, looking and feeling more beautiful.

My espresso completed, I called my waitress over, and pointed at the old man. I ordered him another jug of wine, left a twenty Euro note on my saucer, and started my way back to the hotel.

As I skirted his table, I bent slightly in his direction and nodded. “Bella,” I whispered, then was on my way.

Bob Ellis

I fall in love with the buildings, language, the people:
Fountains, ornate and pristine, with clear
splash of water, sparkle in summer sunlight,
dot the two-mile stretch of pedestrianized culture,
ice-cream parlours, cafes, bars, divide its length.

Vendors on corners sell cobs of corn,
scorched over heat haze-obscured braziers
and at the gates, across tramlines, to Fortress Kalemegdan,
with its museum to past wars, its visitors shop, its restaurant:
I feel soaked in an awful, blighted history.

On through the fort to sprawling park,
to railings that overlook the confluence
of the Sava and Danube rivers,
distant banks lined with floating bars and nightclubs:
I will eat alone, drink alone, and think of you.

John Kenny