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Coke Adds Life! Thirst-quenching, effervescing, lip-smacking, excreting, breathing, moving, eating. That’s life! But many such properties are either present in machines that nobody is willing to call alive, or absent from organisms that everybody is willing to call alive. A visitor from another planet, judging from the enormous numbers of automobiles on the Earth and the way in which cities and landscapes have been designed for the special benefit of motorcars, might well believe that automobiles are not only alive but are the dominant life form on the planet. Excreting, breathing, moving, eating. That’s life! And remembering? Brimming with radical intent, [he] presents a startling vision of the countryside in decline, marginalised and repackaged for the tourist industry. There are the voices of those mid-seventeenth century political and religious radicals who considered the poorest beggars, even ‘rogues, thieves, whores, and cut purses’ as ‘every whit as good’ as the great ones of the earth. The books and pamphlets published by the Ranters have in their titles a MacSweeney ring: ‘A Single Eye all Light, no Darkness’, ‘The Smoke of the Bottomlesse Pit’, ‘Copps Return to the wayes of Truth’, ‘Strange Newes from Newgate and the Old-Baily’. The road cuts through the South Downs , and the cars, seemingly endless all the long summer’s day, drown out the skylarks and meadow pipits. Drovers’ tracks, footpaths, ley lines. The possibility of walking away from the world of ‘coercion, violence, property, triviality’. Walking was seen as an aid to the recovery of memory, creative expression and connecting to the divine.