Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 13

WALKING CRAZY

 I don’t say golf is ‘a good walk spoiled.’ I say it’s much, much worse than that, but I 

know that other views are possible. 

 

The earliest appearance of that ‘spoiled walk’ quip, according to Quote Investigator was in a newspaper article in Enniscorthy, Ireland in April 1901. The author was only identified as ‘a northern Gael.’ 

 

In 1905, they say, Henry Leon Wilson tweaked the expression and used it in his novel The Boss of Little Arcady.  No, of course I haven’t read it.  The line there apparently runs ‘This new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk.’  It’s a much better line.

 

However since golf dates back at least to the 15th century, and the first18 hole golf course was laid out in St Andrews in the 18th century it’s hard to understand how golf is ‘this new game,’ but perhaps it’s poetic license.

 

I’ve never play ‘proper’ golf and I know I’d be no good at it, but there was a short phase of my life when I had a taste for crazy golf.

 

Obviously the great thing about crazy golf is that it doesn’t spoil a walk because there’s really no walking in it to speak of, and there’s no real golf either, which is a real plus.

 

My idea, not one of my best, was that I’d turn my crazy golf interest into a TV format ‘Playing A Round With Geoff.’  We’d get Ian Botham or Helen Mirren or Salman Rushdie, and we’d putter around together and they’d be relaxed enough to lower their guard.

 

Well, you can imagine how well that went down.  But as ‘research’ I did play a certain amount of crazy golf, mostly in East Anglia, with anybody I could get interested. And I did take some photos – above and below.

 

And then a couple of weekends ago I went for a more or less proper walk in Felixstow, not at all in search of crazy golf, and if you’d asked me if I’d ever played crazy golf there I’d have said no, but it seems I did.  See below, Then and Now: the obelisk doesn’t lie.  Unless it’s been moved.

 

Which brings us to Bing Crosby who died on October 14th1977.  He’d finished a round of golf at the La Moraleja course in Spain, with three other golfers, and he said to his partners ‘That was a great game of golf, fellas, let’s go have a Coca Cola’ which sounds a little unlikely to me.  The picture below is obviously from a different time.

 

But anyway, he was walking back to the clubhouse, full of the joys of the links, had a heart attack, fell over and died.

 

It must really have really spoiled his walk.  It probably didn’t enhance the walk for the other guys he was playing with either.

 

 

WANDERING CLOUDILY

 Fresh over the transom comes a copy of the revised edition of the excellent The Art of 

Wandering by Merlin Coverley, subtitled ‘The Writer as Walker,’ published ten years after the 

first edition of 2012.

 

As yet I haven’t been through it all looking for changes and updates, but because of vanity and narcissism I obviously did check the index.  There you’ll find 8 references to Geoff Nicholson, as opposed to a mere 2 in the first edition. These are the small things that keep us writers going.

 

On the other hand there is no reason to be smug.  Wordsworth is in there with 12, up from 10; and Walter Benjamin is up from 4 to 8.  But best of all Lauren Elkin is there in with a bullet – 7 citation, up from not there at all in the first edition but that’s because her book Flaneuse wasn’t published until 2016.  So good for her.  Good for all of us.

 

         I can hardly wait to see the next edition of the Art of Wandering in 10 years time.

 

A WALK IS A WALK IS A WALK

 

This is new to me but it appeared in the Harvard Crimson in February 1959, written by one Alice P Albright under the Headline ‘Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe: Most Brilliant Women Student.’  Stein died in 1946.

In the article, which (you may be surprised to hear) does not display precisely the same attitudes that are current in Harvard today, Albright writes,

‘As an undergraduate, Gertrude spent her leisure time in argument ("the air I breathe"), at the theatre and opera, and in taking long walks. To the end of her life, she liked walking; someone has said that she moved like a souped-up glacier, or like a mass of primordial mud. Though young ladies did not usually walk alone at night in those days, Gertrude knew she was safe. In fact, she promised to climb a tree at the approach of a masher--then drop on him and squash him!’

 

I can well believe that Gertrude Stein was a walker, but I’m less sure that she was much of a tree climber.

 

Some of those deeply unauthoritative online quotation sites have a few good lines from Stein.  Like this:

 

And this, even better, I think:

 

I’ve not been able to find sources for those two quotations but I did find this in Stein’swhich you can read in Geography and Plays.

 

‘A walk is not where the door shows a light, a walk is where there is a request to describe a description. A walk is when a place is not to be exchanged. There is a respect in every walk.

‘There is a result in every walk and the turn is there, the foot and the boot have that union that there can be slippers. Talking of the return of that shows that there will not be an opening. There is no reason to exchange the joke.’

 

Words to live by, words to walk with.

A WINNER IN PINNER

 

So off we went to Pinner, primarily to visit the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial 

Park, but also for the chance to have a walk in Pinner, terra incognita, a place I’d never set 

foot, though Elton John, Michael Rosen and Ivy Compton Burnett had all been there before me.

 

It’s not much of a walk from Pinner tube to the museum, and I’m not sure that Heath Robinson was much of a walker but images of walking do feature in his work, both in his own fantastical creations:

 

and also in his illustrations for others.  Until I went to the museum I didn’t realize he’d done so much illustration for authors – Poe, Rabelais, Cervantes, Kipling, among them.

 

Actually I think the best part of the museum was probably the ceiling:

 

In Pinner we’re in Metroland – the tube opened in 1885.  Heath Robinson lived there from 1908 to 1918 and one assumes it was less suburban then than it is now, although Robinson’s House in Moss Lane, now with a blue plaque, and actually a fair hike from the tube station, looked plenty suburban, as did many of the other (perhaps later) houses in the street.  

Robinson and family left Pinner in 1918 to move to Cranleigh in Surrey.

 

Finally a word to the wise, if you type Heath Robinson into a search engine there’s a reasonable chance it will autocorrect as Death Robinson, which has its appeal but doesn’t really fit the man himself.

SHAKEN IN WANSTEAD

 I was in Wanstead, being an author, doing a double act with fellow drifter and 

psychogeographer Travis Elborough, at a great venue in a railway arch, The Wanstead Tap.  

So of course I tried to have a short exploratory walk on the way there:

 

Wanstead is on my mental map of London, but only just – in the past I’ve walked across Wanstead Flats but it was some time ago.  And it seems to me the topographical delineations get a bit convoluted out in those parts.  You don’t have to walk very far to may be in East Ham, West Ham, Forest Gate, Newham, and at times you may be in at least two of these places at once.

 

I’m always fascinated by the hows and whys of the naming of streets and getting to the venue involved walking up Dames Road, from which Anna Neagle Close and Vera Lynn Close, named after a couple of great dames and local lasses.  Anna Neagle was born in Forest Gate, Vera Lynn was born in East Ham.

 

Parked in Anna Neagle Close was this very cool Ford Capri.  You know, if there’s one thing brightens up the average urban drift, it’s the presence cool classic cars.  I wish there were more of them:

There was also a bit of leaseable ruin:

 

 And a cat - which I think always adds to the tone of a place:

Come the Q and A at the event, an audience member (Fiona, if I remember correctly) mention Dubai, where the two side of the street looked like a mirror images of each other.

 

I promised to look this up when I got home and I have done, and although I’m not 100% sure that I’ve found the place she was talking about, I did find this, Sheik Zayed Road: 

 

I certainly doesn’t look pedestrian-friendly though it seems that parts of it are walkable (there are Youtube videos if you want to see them).

 

This was Sheik Zayed (I think I’ve got the right one):

 

I mean, he had his moments, but he was no Vera Lynn.

LOST

 

This has been floating around the interwebs.  I thought it sounded like an urban myth, or perhaps wishful thinking, but it seems real enough.  Apparently it happened on Mount Elbert, about a year ago and the guy eventually found his way back to his car after 24 hours.

According to the New York Post, the rescue team posted on Facebook 'If you’re overdue according to your itinerary, and you start getting repeated calls from an unknown number, please answer the phone; it may be a [search and rescue] team trying to confirm you’re safe!”  Which has the implication, of course, that it may not.

But they didn't name the hiker.  I'd have named him. But maybe they didn't know his name, only his number.

STONE WALKING

 In the current issue of The Wire magazine the very wonderful Carl Stone is interviewed by 

the very wonderful Emily Bick.  This is one of the pictures accompanying the article.

 

Carl Stone

I can’t describe Carl Stone’s work any better than Emily Bick does: ‘snatches of sound sampled and looped, layered and time-shifted, decontextualized and transformed … The results are as mind-melting as you’d expect if you fed tape loops through a psychedelic Cuisinart, followed by a hacker-modified replicator from Star Trek.’

 

I also happen to know, because I follow him on Instagram that Stone something of walker and he takes photographs as he goes, and since he divides his time between Tokyo and Los Angeles this produces some very interesting results.

 

In Tokyo this kind of thing:

In Los Angeles this kind of thing:

 

Since both these places are his home I don’t suppose this counts as ‘traveling’ but I found this interesting remark of his from a 2016 interview with the magazine LA Record from 2016

‘When I travel, unlike tourists who might have a camera strapped on, I walk around with a portable recorder looking for interesting sounds. I don’t necessarily have a goal in mind. Sometimes there are certain places that I know should have interesting sounds. I’m very attracted to marketplaces and things like that. And I especially like urban soundscapes, so when I go to a city, I will always have my recorder handy. I think I mentioned earlier that I lived in Tokyo for six months back in the late 80s, and at that time, I had a portable digital recorder. It’s what’s called a DAT recorder and a stereo microphone and a pair of headphones, just walking around soaking up the sounds.’

 

There are two photographs accompanying The Wire article, the one at the top of this post and also this one:

 

It does not strike me as the most flattering picture of Mr. Stone, and then I saw that the photographer was Michael Schmelling who is a top photographer, but I too have been photographed by him, and flattery is really not what he does.  We can live with that.  We have to.

 

 

INCANDESCENT WALKING

 As you may have worked out by now, I like walking in the desert, and I like deserts even 

when I’m not walking in them, and I have a tendency to buy books about the desert and 

then leave them unread on the shelf for a few years.

 

And so, very belatedly, I’ve been reading my copy of The Desert Is No Ladysubtitled ‘Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art,’ edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk.  It’s great.

 

There’s a chapter in it about about Nancy Newhall titled ‘Walking on the Desert in the Sky’ – you can see why I was drawn to it.

 

Wikipedia says Nancy Newhall is best known for writing texts to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, which is fair enough, though she was also a critic, designer, editor, and a very good photographer in her own right.  These are a few of her photographs:

 

The texts that accompanied Adams’ and Weston’s works weren’t just prefaces or introductory essays but poetic utterances.  Some of the pages look like this:

 

The perfect balance between words and images always seems like a great idea but offhand I can’t think of many (OK, any) books where the text and the photographs have equal weight and importance. And the proof of the pudding may be: Adams and Weston are still regarded as great photographers. Nancy Newhall is not regarded as a great writer.  I don’t think this is entirely the fault of patriarchy.

 

Still, I find myself fascinated by some lines of Newhall’s This Is The American Eartha book she did with Adams:

‘you are shut in by distances of light.  You walk in the focus of the sun’s rays.  You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones feel incandescent. …

‘Night clings, paling to your body, until once more day is limited, and you are walking in the desert in the sky.’

 

I alternate between thinking this is a bit too artsy fartsy, and then thinking this is a very wonderful description of walking in the desert.

I shall continue to think about this, sometimes while walking.

WALKING WITH STATUES

 When a person walks through the world he or she inevitably sees other people walking 

through the world, and it seems this is a suitable subject for art.

 

More often than you might imagine you see sculptures of people walking through the world.

 

This is Giacometti's Walking Man:

And this is Giacometti's Walking Woman, which would probably be cancelled if more people knew about it:

You’re seldom just walking along and suddenly come upon a work by Giacometti – you tend to be in an art gallery - but I realized that in my walking, without looking for them, I’ve come across a certain number of sculptures of people walking.

 

Just a week or two back, walking in Holland Park I came across this walking man by Sean Henry. The statue is painted bronze but the path is genuine concrete:

 

And I was reminded of the walking man I probably know best, this one in Sheffield by George Fullard, positioned outside what is now called the Winter Garden.

 

I feel that most Sheffield walkers aren’t quite as lean as that – but let’s call it artistic license.

 

And I was also reminded of this statue at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis by George Segal.  People stopped walking in order to stand and stare at it.

Naturally there are some interesting ironies in all this.  The viewer is walking, but even though the statue shows somebody walking the art work is perfectly still, frozen in time and space.

 

And then it clicked that Sean Henry, the artist who made the walking man in Holland Park  was also responsible for this Walking Woman in Colchester, which I know quite well and like a very great deal.  

Apparently there are different versions in different locations, often in snowy climes.  Frankly she doesn’t really look dressed for it.­

WALKING IN HOUSES

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has the fantasy that some time after I’m dead my home 

will be turned into a small private museum.  Visitors will come from all over the world to see 

how the great man lived, and to walk from room to room looking at my cool stuff, 

preserved and displayed in cabinets and vitrines. This goes along with the notion that in the 

end everybody’s home becomes a kind of museum of the self.

 

         This has been on my mind because I’ve recently walked in Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and in Charles Jencks’ Cosmic House in Lansdowne Walk, Holland Park.  These, you’d have to say, were severely constrained walks, like walking in an art gallery but more so.  

         Soane (1753-1837) was a ‘proper’ architect who designed the Bank of England, the Royal Chelsea Hospital and much more besides.  His museum consists of three houses that he bought, demolished and rebuilt.

I think you could say Jencks (1939-2019) was more of an architectural theorist that an architect, and a post-modeernist at that.  He designed the Cosmic House in collaboration with Terry Farrell, modifying a house built in the 1840s - John Soane’s era more or less.

 

         Both houses are fantastic in several senses, and (it may surprise you) both Soane and Jencks had a great deal more cool stuff than I do. Soane’s is full of antiquities, including a sarcophagus.  

 

Jencks’ is full of cosmic symbols and symbolism including an Eduardo Paolozzi mosaic of a black hole.

 

Both seem to have had a taste for obelisks.

 

In both houses as I walked around I lived in fear that I might turn suddenly and accidentally knock over some prize artifact.  I didn’t but I easily could have.

 

There are of course some houses where you can actually have a good walk inside. Hardwick Hall, for instance has a Long Gallery that’s 162 feet from end to end, but if you lived there I bet you’d spend a lot of time looking for your misplaced cellphone and wallet.