Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 10

DEAD MAN IN DEDHAM

My mate Richard and I went walking in ‘Constable Country’ – Manningtree, Flatford, Dedham, that kind of thing – about 7 miles round trip with stops for coffee and a beer.

 

I didn’t imagine the landscape would look exactly like a Constable painting

 

and that was just as well

 

 

On the walk we discussed

 

the political situation in Brazil

the Atacama desert

Richard’s experience with a dodgy scout master

smoothies for breakfast

Keith Waterhouse and Billy Liar

Sheffield Wednesday

the consolations of fandom

our shared indifference to the coronation and the local elections

who would be our head of state if chosen by the electorate – my guess was Judy Dench

muscular Christianity

notions of agency in children’s fiction

JK Rowling

‘magic’ in the bible

LS Lowry

the only time I’ve ever been thrown out of a pub when I was 18 for snagging –

Constable said, 'Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her I look for fame.' It seems an odd thing to me, to look to your mistress for fame. 

RAGE WALKING

The picture above is of Reginald Farrer who I only found about from Nicola Shulman’s wonderful book, A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginald Farrer, gardener, writer and plant collector.

 

That subtitle doesn’t designate him as a walker per se, however as a young man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century he and his friends walked and occasionally climbed in the mountains of Italy, France and Switzerland, as men of a certain type and class did. On July 22 1908, he sent a letter to his mother from Rosenlaui in Switzerland, in which he wrote,

'It is extraordinarily pleasant to be in the mountains again, and I find that vigour has so increased upon me that toilsome expeditions of three years ago are now strolls as easy as our favourite walk to the kitchen garden.’

This was worth noting because Farrer had been a sickly child, born with a cleft palate, a hare-lip and what he himself described as ‘a pygmy body.’

 

After a patchy, short career as a novelist (I think 99% of novelists have patchy careers, though not necessarily short ones) he dedicated himself to gardening, horticultural writing, and expeditions on which he collected plants and seeds that could be brought back and grown in English rock and alpine gardens.  This was a commercial enterprise.

Later he writes, ‘It may come as a shock and a heresy to my fellow Ramblers when I make the confession that, to me, the mountains … exist simply as homes and backgrounds to their population of infinitesimal plants.  My enthusiasm halts ... with my feet, at the precise point where the climber’s energies are first called upon.’  So he was definitely a walker, not a climber, though he certainly found himself in some lofty places.

His travels took him to Ceylon (where he became a Buddhist), Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, China and ultimately Upper Burma, where he died of diphtheria aged 40.  EMH Cox, who was with Farrer on that last expedition, and didn’t get on especially well with him, wrote ‘His stocky form was clad in khaki shorts and shirt, tieless and collarless, a faded toupee on his head, old boots and stockings that gradually slipped down and clung about his ankles as the day wore on.’

 

You know, I’ve read a certain amount about those men, colonial adventurers I suppose we might call them, who ‘walked across Africa.’ And it’s surprising how often this ‘walking’ involved being carried or stretchered after they’d come down with some strange and devastating illness.  So they didn’t walk all the way, though their bearers did.  Some of Farrer’s travels involved variations on this.

 

Sometimes he traveled in a sedan chair, which enabled him to read as he travelled: he was a great fan of Jane Austen.  But this was problematic. The sedan carriers, walking on wildly uneven terrain, kept dropping the chair.  In his diary Farrer wrote; ‘Crash went the chair again and again, and out flew Northanger Abbey into the mud.’

      Such are the trails of the long distance reader, to say nothing of the walker.

 

 

LOST IN SPACES

 I know I’ve led a sheltered life but even so I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to find out that the line ‘Not all those who wander are lost,’which I think is a pretty good line, comes from Tolkein’s poem  "The Riddle of Strider," written for The Fellowship of The Ring.

 

I’ve always found Tolkien pretty much unreadable, but somehow his reputation has survived, and that quotation (with variations) has thrived on a lot of those ‘inspirational quotation’ sites around the Interwebs.  

Now, there’s nothing quite like an inspirational quotation to bring out the cynic in me, so you can imagine how pleased I was, while looking for something else, to find this, which I subsequently found in various other versions :

 

And finally, to prove, as if proof were needed, that not all who walk are noble, moral or decent, here is a picture of a walker, in fact power walker, whose name shall not be spoken.

 

WALKING THE WALK

 And so to Gray’s Inn Garden to see Sir Francis Bacon’s The Walks with my own eyes. It looked like this: 

As a “design feature” The Walks don’t look as though they took all that much designing, and the casual viewer might also observe that nobody’s actually walking in or on The Walks, but I suppose walking is not mandatory. Though there were was the couple in this picture, walking on the grass.

 

Also you’ll notice in the background that fine magnolia tree (at least I’m reasonably sure it’s a magnolia), and there was this splendid sculpture by Richard Renshaw called “The Bird Sculpture.” It was, apparently, presented to the Inn by Master Leighton Williams and installed at the end of 2022

And just around the corner was this statue of Sir Francis Bacon himself, but it’s not the best picture because there was a “keep off the grass sign” and although in general I’m not averse to a bit of light trespassing and rule breaking, I did think that being pursued by the lads from the Inns of Court might be more trouble than I could handle.

 

I was there with fellow flaneur Ashley Biles and as we walked around the area he took me to the Lincolns Inn Chapel which is a magnificent thing and looks like this from ground level (not my photo):

 

And at home later that very same day I watched the Persauders on TV, the episode titled “Take Seven” and I’m reasonably sure that some of it was filmed very close to the chapel.  Like this:

 

I mentioned this to Ashley and he wasn’t surprised. He said he used to work in that area and crews were filming there all the time and he said in an email “They still do a lot of filming in the area, particularly in and around Lincoln’s Inn. I have been told off before now, ignoring signs and impolite requests to not interrupt the filming. I did receive a broad grin once from Olivia Coleman, by the MI6 building for telling a ‘runner’ to fuck off. I was late for work and they had over run their license to film. A rather pointless act, but needs must.’

 

He added “she gives a good smile” - Just another reason to love Olivia Colman.

 

 

 

ABSTRACT WALKING

Willem de Kooning is not an open book to me but that’s him above, walking, and I just read this story, about him, from Bill Berkson’s memoir Since When.

  De Kooning was at dinner in East Hampton and somebody at the table said to him, ‘So, you take walks with your dogs.’

    And he answered, ‘No. I’m a man. MY dogs walk with me.’

  Sometimes I think those Abstract Expressionists weren’t all bad.

 

      I haven’t been able to find a picture of de Kooning and his dogs.  There’s this one of him on his bike with just one dog.  Doesn’t really count, does it?

WALKING ON ICY AIR

 

I’ve been thinking about Yoko, who turned 90 on February 18th. Towards the end of January, when she was just 89, she Tweeted 

I learned about this from the New York Post which isn’t the most universally reliable news source, but in this case the information seems accurate enough – the Tweet is right there on Yoko’s feed.

 

And I do happen to think Yoko’s walking cure for depression is a very good one, though by no means every walk in New York gives you a high.  And how far was she claiming to walk?  Well that’s tricky.  There are about 20 blocks to a mile running north-south, but east-west there are about 7 to a mile. You do the math; but Yoko couldn’t be doing less than 4 miles, which would be good for any 89 year old.  Here she was walking in New York in 2015.

The Post then pointed out, and again this seems accurate, that Yoko’s in poor health, and has mobility issues.  In 2017, her son Sean Lennon pushed her in a wheelchair to receive the National Music Publishers’ Association’s Centennial Song Award (whatever that is).  

In her acceptance speech she said, “I’ve learned so much from having this illness,” though she didn’t say what the illness was, and personally I’m rather opposed to the notion of illness as a ‘learning experience,’ but that’s just me.

Other sources say she has round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her apartment in the Dakota. So maybe she goes walking in her mind.

I was especially thinking about the song ‘Walking On Thin Ice,’ which  apparently she and Lennon were working on at the time of his murder.

The song contains the lyrics

I knew a girl
That tried to walk across the lake
'Course it was winter when all this was ice
That's a hell of a thing to do, you know
They say this lake is as big as the ocean
I wonder if she knew about it?

That’s is indeed a hell of a thing, a hell of lake, one helluva walk.

THE BOOKISH DESERT

  

I can’t tell you exactly how much of a walker Alberto Manguel is.  Most photographs of him, as above, show him sitting or standing surrounded by books. But we know he certainly walked in Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges, and he wrote a terrific piece for the Guardian about Ahasverus,the Wandering Jew. 

Even as a child, says Manguel, ‘The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I didn't feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly … above all, to be able to read any book that fell into your hands …

‘And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong … it is hard to believe that a merciful god would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting-room without reading material.’

Here is Manguel, not walking but at least photographed outdoors, so I suppose he must have walked to get there.

 

In his book The Library At Night Manguel talks about the way in which, unless you’re a wanderer, you never have enough shelving for your books.  You find you’ve too many books and so you buy a new bookcase but the moment you get the bookcase, it fills up and then you need to buy another one and so on and so on.

 

I never doubted this was true but the point has been driven home since I bought myself a shiny new, and I’m quoting here, ‘Vasagle Bookcase, Bookshelf, Ladder Shelf 4-Tier, Display Storage Rack Shelf, for Office, Living Room, Bedroom, 80 x 33 x 149 cm, Industrial, Rustic Brown’

 

I hoped this would give me loads of extra shelf space and free up some room in other bits of the house, and now of course it’s full.

 

    Manguel also talks about the problems of arrangement, or perhaps more correctly classification.   I have a lot of books about walking and a lot, though not as many, books about deserts, so I thought I’d put all my books about walking in the new bookcase, so that I could put my books about the desert in a smaller case on the other side of the room, but then the walking books more than filled the space I’d allotted to them, while the desert bookcase still had a bit of room in it.

 

    Now, it so happens that I own some books that are about walking in deserts, so these made a move across the room out of the walking bookcase into the desert bookcase, which doesn’t seem ideal but it’ll do for now.  Reclassification is always a possibility, in fact a necessity.

 

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about walking and deserts is because I’m not quite sure when I’ll next be walking in a real desert. But recently, mostly by chance, I did find a pretty fair simulacrum of the desert in Norfolk, in the garden of the Old Vicarage in East Ruston, the lifetime project of Alan Gray and Graham Robson.

 

It’s an area they call the Desert Wash designed to resemble parts of Arizona, a place neither of the gardeners has been, apparently.

 

This was my favourite spot: the sculpture is by Ben Southwell.

 

And there, in amidst the rocks the cacti and succulents, keeping his eye on things was (unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am) Graham Robson himself.  He was not chatty, but why should he be? 

     Of course it wasn’t a walk in a real desert, but on a damp and chilly day in Norfolk it wasn’t bad at all.  

I bought a guide book obviously – now, where to shelve it?

 

DISPROPORTIONATE WALKING

Spare a thought for Auriol Grey, the pedestrian who was recently jailed for manslaughter after the death of a cyclist she encountered on the pavement in  Huntingdon.

 

I have no information other than what I’ve read and seen in the media but the story seems to be that Gray, aged 49, who is partially sighted and suffers from cerebral palsy, was walking along what looks, from the not very good security footage, to have been a very narrow pavement when she saw 77-year-old cyclist Celia Ward riding towards her.

 

By all accounts Grey swore at Ward, told her to get off the pavement and according to the BBC ‘gestured in an "aggressive way” towards her.’  She didn’t assault her, didn’t push her, didn’t touch her, but Ward fell off the bike, off pavement, into the road, into the path of a car, and was killed.

 

Grey got three years, though she’s apparently appealing against the sentence.

 

After the trial one Detective Sergeant Dollard (I wonder what his nickname is) said: 'Everyone will have their own views of cyclists on pavements and cycleways, but what is clear is Grey's response to the presence of Celia on a pedal cycle was totally disproportionate and ultimately found to be unlawful.'

 

It’s a terrible and tragic case all round but the reason it stays with me is because on at least a couple of occasions I believe I may have sworn at cyclists who I thought were going to run into me.  Whether I’ve gestured at them I’m not sure, but I may well have.  Of course these cyclists didn’t fall off the bikes to their death, but who can say whether my swearing and gesturing was proportionate, disproportion or ‘totally disproportionate?’  I think some clarification might be necessary. 

Of course I have also been sworn at by cyclists.

 

Worst of all according to the BBC report,‘The trial was told that police could not "categorically" state whether the pavement was a shared cycleway.’  To which one might reasonably ask, ‘Why the hell not?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

 Did you know there’s an area of Norwich called Tombland?

I suppose a lot of people do, but I didn’t until I found myself in Norwich last weekend, having been to a disappointing exhibition, and was looking for entertainment.  And although I wasn’t expecting Tombland to be some sci-fi, horror, zombie theme park, I was still disappointed at first to find that Tombland is pretty much the public square in front of the Cathedral entrance. 

 

In fact Tombland is the Old English or possibly Viking (scholars differ) word for empty space, though of course it’s not as empty as it used to be.  And right there in the middle there’s an obelisk, and I think you already know about my mild but ongoing obelisk obsession.  This one is actually a drinking fountain.

 

So it hadn’t been a wasted afternoon, and then because I’d looked at a map earlier, I’d seen that Rosary Cemetery was nearby, and so (being something off a taphophile) it had to be investigated. We had to walk through Old Library Woods which was not much of a wood, though there was a wayside library and a 'community chatting bench,' and some fine bookish sculptures complete with real live, unsculpted, fungi.

       And then into Rosary Cemetery which was, OMG, obelisk central - far more than you see in these pictures – Obeliskland, if you will.

 

         It was established in 1819 by Thomas Drummond, and various sources say it was the first non-denominational burial ground in Britain, though I’d have thought Bunhill Fields – resting place of Bunyan, Blake and Defoe - first used as a burial ground in 1665 would have some claim on this.  Other sources simply say Rosary was the first private cemetery in England. 

         I like walking in cemeteries, I find it a pleasure, and I do spend a certain amount of time wondering what exactly is the nature of this pleasure.  I don’t think it’s a form of gloating.  I don’t walk around thinking how lucky I am to be alive when all these other folk are dead, because I know that my luck will run out and sooner or later I’ll be joining them.

Partly I enjoy the mysteries of cemeteries. The people in these graves all had complex and nuanced lives and you can only imagine what these were because even the most elaborate headstone never tells you much. And even though an obelisk doesn’t tell you any more, it does make a statement.

 

         In fact I’ve considered buying an obelisk so that I can have it my back garden now while I live, and then loved ones can move it to the cemetery when I’m gone, so that others can walk around the graveyard see my obelisk and think what a great man this Nicholson must have been.  

 

Or I suppose if these same loved ones set up the Nicholson Memorial Museum of Curiosities, 

we might have something like this:

 

Of course since I’ll be gone I won’t know whether the loved ones have actually done this or not.

 

HOLY WALKING

D.J. Waldie (that's him above) is a pedestrian and the author of Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir, an excellent book about growing up and living in the suburban hinterland of Los Angeles, in Lakewood.  In the interests of clarity it’s probably worth saying that he’s not an actual DJ.

Recently on his website he published a piece titled ‘Walking in LA: Los Angeles is the second-most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.’

 

Waldie is a pedestrian by default, and a non-driver. As he says in the article, and as he’s often written about elsewhere, he suffers from various sight problems which prevent him from driving, though as he also says in the piece, ‘If I could, of course I would drive.’

 

In fact you do meet a certain number of non-drivers in Los Angeles. There are various reasons – from environmental showboating to having been banned from driving, to simply being poor, though it always seemed to me that many of the poorest people in LA still found a way to scrape together the wherewithal to buy a car.

More often than not. non-drivers in L.A. aren’t so much pedestrians as people who want to cadge a lift.

 

I was taken by that sub-headline in the Waldie piece saying that LA is the second most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.  I’ve done some non-exhaustive research on this – looking at lists of ‘America’s most dangerous cities for pedestrians’ – not least because if LA is number 2, I wanted to know what was number one.

But it seems there’s no simple and agreed upon answer. I’ve found stastics where Los Angeles is number one, other statistics where it’s not even in the top 50.  

Still, the dangers are real enough for an LA walker. Waldie writes, ‘I’m a good pedestrian however, staying within the marked crosswalks and never jaywalking, even when the next crosswalk is a long walk away. Free-range pedestrianism is dangerous, Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin was struck and killed in 1994 while attempting to cut across Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The head of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, crossing the seven lanes of Olympic Boulevard, was killed.’

I do like that phrase, ‘Free-range pedestrianism.’

 

Then Waldie adds, and I thought this was the real kicker, ‘Fewer streets are marked by crosswalks today. The city has sandblasted away hundreds since the mid-1970s when traffic engineers showed, not surprisingly, that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than out of them. The engineers said the painted lines gave pedestrians a false sense of security, making them less attentive to danger. Risk managers had another reason to eliminate crosswalks. Their presence makes cities vulnerable if the city is sued by injured pedestrians or their survivors.’

 

Well that makes a lot of terrible and shocking yet all too predictable sense, doesn’t it?

 

Waldie’s website is here.