Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 18

THE KATE WALK

 Sometimes I wonder if we may have reached peak Pedestrianism.

 

Kate Garraway has made a programme for BBC 2 titled, uncompromisingly Walking With Kate Garraway.  The BBC describe it like this ‘Kate Garraway walks through the Cotswold countryside and describes the joy and solace that nature brings as she takes in the inspiring views of Gloucestershire.’I thought at first that Joy and Solace might be the names of her two dogs, but no.

 

The Sunday Times managed to make it sound even less appealing, ‘This programme features Kate Garraway alone with a 360-degree camera.  It is, she says, the first day she has had to herself since her partner, Derek Draper was struck by long Covid, and her gentle hike allows her to meditate on the difference between being alone and lonely.’  It goes on to use the word mindfulness, which always gives me conniptions.

 

         Of course I’m very sorry that her husband was struck down with long Covid, and I’m sure that kind of thing puts great stress on a partner, and yes we know that walking is a great way to relieve stress.  Even so, I think it takes a special kind of person who, when she finally has a day to herself, goes for a walk and turns it into a TV programme. 

 

Here’s Kate and Derek walking in happier times.

WALKING (NOT EXACTLY) WITH MICHAEL AND JOHN

 

I first came across the work of Michael Landy while walking along Oxford Street 

sometime in 2001.  There, in a vacated C&A shop, Landry was having all his 

worldly goods, including a car, destroyed and put in bin sacks. The work was 

titled Break Down.

 

It was a wonderful and extraordinary idea.  As John Lennon didn’t quite say, it’s not all that hard to imagine having no possessions, but it’s very hard indeed to imagine destroying the ones you’ve got. And even if some of us have thought about doing it, it takes a very brave man to actually do it.

 

Right now if you find yourself walking into the Firstsite Gallery in Colchester you’ll see a giant piece of wall art (it’s not exactly a mural) by Landy, that was part of an exhibition titled ‘Michael Landy’s Welcome to Essex.’

        

The piece, essentially a map collage, was apparently inspired by Essex walks that Landy did with people such as Gillian Darley, Elsa James and Pam Cox, who are respectively a writer, an artist and a sociologist. 

 

It was the map of course that drew me in, but I keep thinking about that part that says ‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’ – (also available as a postcard).  I’d have thought that was Norfolk (as in ‘normal for Norfolk’).  But then again as a Yorkshireman I’d say very few people ‘get’ Yorkshire. Or maybe that’s the nature of the beast – wherever you’re from, you think people don’t understand you.

 

One person who apparently does get Essex, is John Cooper Clark, who in my ignorance I always assumed still lived in Manchester.  But it’s there in my copy of the free magazine Colchester and Manningtree Life, that he lives in, or close to, Colchester and is a great booster for the place. He says, ‘That’s the great thing about Colchester really.  If you walk in any direction for twenty minutes, you’re actually in the countryside. Plus it’s not too far from Clacton, Walton and Winton on Sea, splendid staycation sites there.  Almost within walking distance.’  

 

Of course ‘almost within walking distance’ usually means notwithin walking distance.  But it depends on who’s doing the walking.

 

JCC’s third album (on clear vinyl!) was titled Walking Back to Happiness.  

 

WALKING WITH WEIWEI

Ai Weiwei depicted in a mural in the L.A. Art District:

I've tried and failed to find who the artist is.  I guess that's how it is with street art.  

Somebody might tell me.

The Sunday Times just had an extract from Ai Weiwei’s memoir 1000 Years of Joys and 

Sorrows, about his 81-day incarceration in Beijing in 2011, having been deemed a ‘national 

security risk.’

 

It’s grim and disturbing stuff, and of course he was treated appallingly by the Chinese authorities, and yet I wonder why they didn’t treat him worse. They could certainly have given him a life sentence, for instance. The only obvious reason I can think of for this comparative leniency is international opinion and fear that they might turn him into a martyr.  Today he seems to be allowed to travel anywhere in the world.

 

Weiwei’s work S.A.C.R.E.D. features dioramas depicting his incarceration including this one:

 

The memoir describes what he calls a room rather than a cell, ' some 280 square feet and the floor was laid with brown ceramic tiles, each 2 ft by 2ft, six tiles across and 12 tiles down.  I could exercise only on the six square in the middle of the room: after walking seven steps I had to turn around and go back in the other direction.'

    Then later: ‘From 6.50 to 7.40 am was reserved for exercise, which consisted of walking back and forth on the six permitted tiles.  The guards accompanied me on either side, walking and turning just as I did, maintaining their position and adjusting their distance as necessary, to make sure I didn’t suffer some mishap – however unlikely that might be.  Together we made up the world’s smallest drill team, but in time we reached a high level of wordless co-ordination, sensitive to the slightest changes in rhythm.’

 

         I was left wondering whether it was always the same two guards. Presumably not.  Even in China prison guards must get a day off.  So were some guards better than others at walking with him? I don’t know.

 

Now Weiwei’s free to walk more or less where he likes, such as below, where he’s seen with Anish Kapoor, walking from the Royal Academy to Stratford. The blanket shows solidarity with refugees.  (photo by Mat Smith)  

QUEENLY WALKING

 Want to see the queen with a walking stick, photographed last week?

Want to see the queen with a walking stick 17 years ago after she had a knee operation?

WALKING WITH FELINES

 I was walking in the neighborhood and came across a man taking his cat for a walk.  

The man is named Steve.  The cat is named Boris the Bold.  I’d have thought that most cats would resist violently being put on a lead, but Steve explained, ‘He’s never known anything different.’

 

I was of course reminded of this picture of Cary Grant and his cat, or at least somebody’s cat, walking in L.A..

 

And of course there are these familiar leashed black cats, also in Los Angeles, attending an open casting call.

 

A little digging around also revealed this photo of Dr Ava Cadell, the founder of Loveology University.  Before she was a doctor she was an actress starring in such movies as Lunch Box, and Not of This Earth.  And yes, she is a genuine cat lover.

 

And finally there's this faked picture (not faked by me) of Barry Obama.  I think it’s supposed to make him look weak, like somebody who can be pulled around by felines, but in fact I think it makes him look very human, and also as though he's enjoying himself.

 

WALKING STILL

It's true that I've not been spending a lot of time worrying about this woman I saw walking in the street in Colchester a couple of years back.  She is after all just a bronze statue, an artwork by Sean Henry, and able to take care of herself.

And yet looking at her yesterday, she was surrounding by a sea of road works, or perhaps earthworks, and that did seem somehow troubling:

But maybe I was being oversensitive.  I mean, she was still upright, and still walking, though admittedly still not getting anywhere

WALKING AND DISAPPEARING

         Sometime over the weekend, in the morass of media silt I was absorbing, I came across an online article about Mel Giedroyc with the picture you see below and the headline ‘My Fantasy?  A walking holiday.’

 

I think this was supposed to be a surprise to somebody, as though Mel G was far too cool to go on a walking holiday, but I can’t say it surprised me, and I can’t believe it surprised anybody else. I like Mel G but she’s always struck me as exactly the kind of woman who goes on walking holidays.

 

And I do quite like the shoes she’s wearing in the above pic.  I assume she wouldn’t be doing much walking in them, but they’d be just fine for posing around the boudoir at the end of the day.

 

Later I was reading an extract from David Sedaris's book of diaries.   In this extract, dated July 17 2011, he'd been watching an episode of The Tyra Banks Show featuring a woman named Donna who weighed 600 pounds but would have liked to weigh 1000.  ‘I guess I'm a sort of reverse anorexia.'

People on the show tried to reason with Donna.  Tyra Banks said, 'But you can hardly walk.  If you keep this up, you won't be able to move.' And Donna replied coolly that she thought walking was overrated.  

I'm sure she's not alone in thinking that.

 

And then I was reading a back issue of the London Review of Books and there was a review by Colm Toibin of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: An Experimental Life.  Part of it runs, ‘The French translatorand scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933 remembered leaving a café with Pessoa and walking with him for a few blocks.  Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, “this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he had disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him.”’

         I think that’s a great way to end a walk, any walk.

AND THERE'S THIS

An extract from Walking On Thin Air, a work in progress (and crowdfunding exercise), to be found at Caught By The River

link below

https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2021/09/walking-on-thin-air-geoff-nicholson-extract/

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, INNIT

 About half a mile up the hill from where I live there’s a sort of public, not quite 

orchard, by which I mean there are a few apple trees apparently growing wild, and 

when they bear fruit nobody’s going to stop you walking in and taking a few apples.

 

So I was up bright and early and was out before the binmen came, and walked up, and there was not a single apple to be found – neither on the trees nor on the ground.  Gotta say I’m not totally in touch with the cycles of apple production but I thought I found a lot this time last year.

 

Still, an early walk is never to be despised and there was still some nature to be seen, if not of the malus variety.

 

There were spider webs in the apple trees:

 

Mushrooms on the ground:

 

And cats.  Yes, there are always cats.

WEEKEND WALKING

     You might like this – it’s Robert Benchley in a piece titled ”The Tortures of Week-end 

Visiting, First published in Vanity Fair, February 1917.  Who'd have thought there was a war 

on?

 

 

After dinner the host says to himself: "Something must be done. I wonder if he likes to walk." Aloud, he says: "Well, Bill, how about a little hike in the country?"

A hike in the country being the last thing in the world that Bill wants, he says, "Right-o! Anything you say." And so, although walking is a tremendous trial to the host, who has weak ankles, he bundles up with a great show of heartiness and grabs his stick as if this were the one thing he lived for.

After about a mile of hobbling along the country-road the host says, hopefully: "Don't let me tire you out, old man. Any time you want to turn back, just say the word."

The guest, thinking longingly of the fireside, scoffs at the idea of turning back, insisting that if there is one thing in all the world that he likes better than walking it is running. So on they jog, hippity-hop, hippity-hop, each wishing that it would rain so that they could turn about and go home.

    Here again the thing may go to almost tragic lengths. Suppose neither has the courage to suggest the return move. They might walk on into Canada, or they might become exhausted and have to be taken into a roadhouse and eat a "$2 old-fashioned Southern dinner of fried chicken and waffles." The imagination revolts at a further contemplation of the possibilities of this lack of coöperation between guest and host.