Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 20

FUN WITH RICHARD AND GEOFF

My oldest mate Richard, oldest in terms of years we’ve known each other, not in terms of 

how long he’s been on the planet, came up to Essex and we walked by the shore of the 

River Stour. It was good.  Richard has become quite the walker and drifter.

 

Richard had an app on his phone for identify wild plants and flowers.  Now, I’ve had some trouble with these things in the past, and we used it first on a plant that I could actually identify - the teasel - and the app seemed to know what it was doing.

 

Here’s Richard about to identify some Serbian Bellflower, which I definitely wouldn’t have known.

 

Along the roadside we found some jetsam – just waiting to be clutched and upcycled.  We thought clutching but then decided that neither of us really needed a lampshade or a glass vase, and we left them for others, but we were glad of the opportunity.

 

But as a fan of agit prop (if that terms still gets used) our greatest find was this – an anti-mask sticker.  

 

I’d have peeled it off so I could have added it to the archive but pulling would have torn it so I left it where it was, so it could continue to deliver its subversive and frankly not all that lucid message. 

 

A LITTLE SPACE WALKING HUMOUR

 

WILES WALKING

 

I’ve been reading Will Wiles’ novel Plume which acknowledges the attractions of what we 

might as well call psychogeography while also mocking it.  Wiles puts the chief objections 

into the mouth of a fictional writer, Oliver Pierce, who’s complaining about his career and 

his lot, and says ‘I was lumped in with all that psychogeography lot, Iain Sinclair and Will Self 

and so on, and I ... well, I didn’t like that.  There are so many people doing that shit now.  

All the fucking lost rivers, ghost Tube stations, all that shit … - I’m just so fucking sick of 

that.  It makes me want to puke.  It was getting boring ten years ago, it’s just intolerable 

now.’

It’s hard to tell from the novel whether Wiles completely agrees with his creation, but really, what’s to argue about?

Then, with the scent of psychogeography in my nostrils, I read an article online by Wiles, at Aeon.com titled ‘Walk the Lines’ which of course is also the title of a book by Mark Mason about walking the London Tube map above ground, in which I make a brief but honourable appearance.

         Wiles doesn’t echo Pierce word for word but they obviously have a lot in common. A pull quote from the article runs, ‘You read Sinclair, Sebald and Self, and wanted to do the same? Get in line with the others, Mr. Original.’  Ouch all round.

And in the article itself Wiles writes, ‘Meanwhile, walking was being rediscovered as a tool useful to journalists writing about architecture and the city. There’s a similarly long tradition of this, in which the presiding saint of urban studies, Jane Jacobs, plays a prominent role. Her descriptions of pavement life in ‘unslumming’ parts of New York and Boston have become a ubiquitous model. Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (2009) and Sharon Zukin’s Naked City (2010) are both bound in shoe-leather.’ He also cites, approvingly, Owen Hatherley, Rowan Moore and Jonathan Meades, heirs of Ian Nairn.   

He continues ‘Also, being necessarily introspective and subjective, the genre is equally prone to accusations of pretension. Assuming you are still reading (you are, aren’t you?) you might well have spent the last couple of paragraphs rolling your eyes at the conformist quality of my young non-conformism.’ 

Self-referential, self-hating ouch.

In the end, slightly more positively, he writes, ‘Walking is an aid to thought and will always be an aid to writing – all three happen at the same time. But in London, the dérive has come adrift. A form of writing that I once aspired to has expired.’

Is the psychogeographical party really over?  I suspect so, and it wasn’t a party I was ever really invited to, and yet like many parties it kind of drags on.  There are always a few lingerers who won’t go home.

I haven’t exactly gone home but I have left London. When a man’s tired of drifting round London, it’s time to move drift into Essex.

EARLY WALKING SYSTEM

 Look, I don’t know much about Nadiya Hussein but I gather she’s a lovely woman, famous 

for baking cakes.  Beyond that I remained in happy ignorance until I saw this headline in the 

Times, ‘I make my kids go on 6 am walks.’  

 

This strikes me as both cruel and unusual, but that isn't the half of it.  If you read the article you discover the line ‘The family wakes each morning just before 5am to pray.’  'For me,' she says, 'it's about making the most of the day.' -  I mean, really?

 

Naturally I was reminded of the blessed Christopher Hitchens’ remark that he thought teaching religious knowledge in schools was a very good thing because it guaranteed an ongoing supply of atheists.  I assume much the same can be said about waking children at 5am for prayers. 

But I do worry that waking children at 6am, and making them go for a walk is most likely
guaranteed to create an ongoing supply of pedestrians and couch potatoes.


        Christopher Hitchens didn't look like a man who ever willingly went for a walk, but I 
could be wrong. Nice bookshelves.

IT WAS THE NAZE, WITH GOD-GIVEN WHATEVER

 We went to the Essex seaside, specifically Walton-on-the-Naze.  

 

I like the seaside, though I only like a doing a certain number of the things people are supposed to do at the seaside.  Eating fish and chips is OK, swimming’s OK too though I don’t do it very often and in Walton neither do many others – I saw exactly two people in the water.  And I absolutely hate sitting on the sand getting a suntan.  

 

Mostly I just like to walk around looking at things and people.  The fact that many seaside towns have a main street named the Promenade suggests that walking is what most people do there.  The road along Walton’s seafront is named the Parade, though it becomes Southcliff Promenade at the southern end, and Prince’s Esplanade at the other.  Good names.

 

Walton is full of good stuff, such as this seat carved from the trunk of a dead tree, for those who aren’t too wide in the hip.

 

This I think is one of the most substantial public toilets I’ve ever seen:

 

And then there was this abandoned ice cream:

 

My immediate thought was that it was the symbol of a kind of tragedy – somebody, possibly a child, dropped their ice cream and that ruined their day.  But maybe the owner of the ice cream wasn’t really enjoying it and therefore tossed it aside to make a still life, something to do with transience and vanitas.

 

But finally what made it all worthwhile was this shop with its gorgeously punctuated sign.  No, I have no idea.

WALKING STRANDED

 

Look, I find this whole renunciation of the gender specific pronoun thing as perplexing as 

anyone else does, and this headline on the BBC website didn’t help much:

 

The first confusion here is obviously whether it was one person or several people, but as you read on it becomes apparent it was just one, which was a partial clarification, and then the sub headline read: ‘A walker who was left stranded on a sandbank had not heard warnings from lifeguards because they were wearing headphones,' - so far so gender-neutral but then, 'his rescuers said.’

         ‘They’ suggests multitudes, ‘his rescuers’ confirms it was one bloke.  

The report in the Telegraph, which didn’t doubt that it was a dude, reported an RNLI spokesman (NB) as saying ‘Please be aware of the tide when visiting the beach.’

         Given that the RNLI had been called out to rescue this (male) walking fool who was too busy grooving on his playlist to notice that the effin tide was coming in, I think the spokesman might have said something a bit gamier.  But he, or possibly they, is or are, a model, or models, of restraint.  

          That’s a good thing, right?

 

JUST LIKE CROSSING OVER

I wouldn’t say I ever had serious ambitions to be a ‘real’ photographer, but I did used to 
fantasize about it once in a while.  I suppose I still do. I never wanted to be a fashion 
photographer or a war photographer or a landscape photographer: I wanted to be a street 
photographer, you  know like Winogrand, Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Gilden.  It’s a genre that 
allows, in fact demands, the photographer does a lot of walking.

 

Susan Sontag backs me up on this. ‘The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque".’

 

Well that’s good enough for me, although over the years people have come to disapprove of the term ‘shooting’ to describe taking pictures so lord knows how we’re supposed to feel about being ‘armed.’

 

Therefore, given the previous post about Rainbow crossings, I thought you might like to see some street photography of people crossing the road, in some cases waiting to cross the road.

CROSSING THE CROSSING

  

What better way of celebrating International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia than by painting a pedestrian crossing blue, white and pink?  

Councillor Jake Short, lead member for Equalities, said: ‘I’m delighted to see this celebration of the richness and diversity that our transgender community brings to Sutton.  Our hope is that this trans crossing will pave the way for more trans crossings around the UK which in turn would lead to more inclusivity in our society at large.’  Pave the way – you see what he did there.

In fact Sutton already had a Rainbow Crossing in St Nicholas Way:

 

There are a few of them around the place – this one’s in Nottingham:

I don’t know much about Sutton but I do know that the Rolling Stones were ‘spotted’ there by the legendary Giorgio Gomelsky.  Yes, they walked diversely:

And I know that Sutton was the birthplace or temporary home of Sally Bercow, Joan Armatrading, Noel Coward and Quentin Crisp.  What a rainbow of talent!

   I haven’t been able to find a photograph of Quentin Crisp crossing the road, in Sutton or anywhere else, but I dare say he didn’t need a special crossing – he took a rainbow with him everywhere he went. 

 

 

I 

 

 

BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE

 

Does everybody but me know the term ‘backshot’? I took the photograph below, in 

London, somewhere near Limehouse, thinking it was the name of a ‘street artist,’ and I 

suppose it may be, but I now understand it’s also the word for a sexual practice, not an 

especially unfamiliar one, but I had no idea there was a word for it.  Ah London – always an 

education.

Yes I was back in London last week, after (OMG!!!) a 9 month absence.  The best thing I can say is that apart from people wearing masks it didn’t look or feel very different from pre-Lockdown days.  Yes, the pubs offer table service only, but I reckon that’s an improvement.

 

I wasn’t on a walking trip per se but of course I ended up walking all over the place, through Soho to the Photographers Gallery to see two exhibitions, again neither of them specifically about walking, although walking featured in both.  One was titled From Here to Eternity by Sunil Gupta, about being gay in India – apparently it’s a lot easier than it used to be, 

 

though not as easy as it was in New York in the 70s:

 

There was also Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea – Stories from the Russian Arctic which was just fabulous.  I think there’s only a limited amount of walking to be done in those parts, but when you get out there it’s pretty spectacular:

Then a walk with an old mate from Sheffield who took us to the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.  Is it a cemetery?  Is it a park?  It's BOTH!!

    You want obelisks?  They got obelisks.

 

And the next day a walk along the King’s Road to the Chelsea Physic Garden - I had a coupon.  There was a plant sale (if you like that kind of thing). There was also a bloke standing next to a speaker.  

 

I think he had a microphone, but there were no turntables, which was a shame in some ways.  In other ways perhaps not.

 

WALKING THE SOIL

 I was doing some idle googling along the lines of ‘What makes a good walk?’ ‘What do 

people look for in a walk?’ and so on, because I’m not certain that I really know.  Growth, 

good mental healthy, inspiration, enlightenment, communion with nature, all seem to be in 

the frame, and I’m not so crass as to belittle these things, but other people’s absolute 

certainty about walking does worry me a bit.  Isn’t there room for ambivalence and doubt?

 

In my googling I found a 2016 article by Kevin Rushby in the Guardian headlined  ‘What makes a great walk.’  Kevin is not trouble by uncertainty. He writes, ‘What makes a great walk remains the gift of nature: the subtle alchemy of landscape, elements and path that is transformed into a dramatic stage for your pleasure and experience by the magical spell of your own tramping feet.’

 

Well, I dunno. What I currently look for in a walk, as I pursue two of my ongoing minor obsessions, are obelisks and bunkers.  So imagine my delight when I discovered that Great Oakley in Essex has one of each.  My amanuensis and I set off on a field trip.

 

The obelisk, as I discovered, is part of a war memorial right in the center of the village, in the middle of a very small car park.  It’s solid and a bit stubby but it’s most definitely an obelisk.  A plaque on it says it was originally dedicated in 1920, then restored and rededicate in 2009, which seems rather a long time.  It was wet when I was there.  It used to look like this, when it was dry:

 

 

I read on the Imperial War Museum site that it was designed by an architect name of Vincent Brown about whom I can find no information

 

The ‘bunker’ is in fact a World War 2 pillbox, a fortification against the possible invading German troops. According to a notice board on the side of the structure, there were steel cables running across the road from the pillbox to a couple of concrete posts (which must really have thrilled the local farmers), and there were also barrels of petrol buried in the ground nearby. The inside looks like this

 

But what makes this pillbox special, as you may have spotted, it’s in somebody's front garden.  I think I’d like to have a pillbox or bunker in my garden.  Think of the photo-shoots, the parties, the ‘sound experiments’ with Theremins and drone machines, the war reenactments, the Sadean high jinx.

 

You might have to put up with people staring into your garden but that’d be a small price to pay.

 

Of course any good walk contains a mystery.  Walking east along the main road, past a new stretch of suburbia you come to a sign for The Soils.  Again, my research has failed me.  I don’t know is this refers to the earth, as in the Parable of the Soil, or whether it’s as in ‘I soiled myself’ and might be the site of a former dung heap of midden.

 

Nearby there is Soils Wood, so maybe it’s the name of a local grandee.  

 

Back in the village, should you need an encounter with nature (and agriculture) there was a big field of rape, with mud that looked like it would have swallowed you up to the knees.  That’s some subtle alchemy all right.

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