Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 21

WALKING AND SUPINITY

 I’ve been reading Jonathan Meades’s Pedro and Ricky Come Again, Selected Writing 1988-

2000. I think it’s great.  

 

Admittedly it’s rather light on references to walking though there is this, ‘Our cities are full of people hurrying, their narrow pavements are not made for promenades at snail's pace; they are for getting from A to B rather than civic recreation. Walking for its own sake may be further discouraged by the climate and, equally, by the work 'ethic'. This week I put in several hours' sterling loitering interspersed with energy-saving bouts of farniente supinity. Observant sloth is its own reward. Just hanging around and seeing what happens …’  Fair enough.

 

And there’s a piece, not in the book, from the Quietus by John Doran, which describes Meades as ‘the slowest strolling human being I've ever met, even manages to be a flâneur at 380 feet above Tottenham Court Road, pointing out buildings and an amazing sunset to me as we head at snail's pace from our table towards the lifts.’  

 

And perhaps I’m getting a little obsessed with the man, because since I was walking across my local supermarket carpark yesterday and there walking alongside me was a man who looked very much indeed like Jonathan Meades.  The man guy did look a bit wiskery but it seemed perfectly possible that Meades might let the beard grow between public appearances.

 

This is a picture of the car park (for obvious reasons I didn’t photograph the man):

 

Now, it was obviously surprising that Jonathan Meades would be heading into my local supermarket, since we know he lives in Marseille in Le Corbusier’sCité Radieuse – that’s the picture at the top.  On the other hand he has written and made films about Essex, so his presence wasn’t completely inconceivable, especially in these confused, socially disrupted times. Here’s a still from The Joy of Essex  (yes, you can see the joy in his face):

 

I still couldn’t quite believe it was him but I looked again and the fellow looked SO much like Mr. Meades that I found myself saying, ‘Excuse me, do I know you?  Is your name Jonathan?’

He seemed surprised by this though not offended and he said with a smile, ‘Oh, I’m Robert’s father,’ as though that solved everything, which it did not.

Once we’d made eye contact, it that he looked considerably less like Jonathan Meades, but will note that he didn’t say he WASN’T.

 

 

 

WALKING WITH CARS

 Motorists versus pedestrians: it’s a false opposition if you ask me.  I enjoy both driving and 

walking.  When I’m walking I try not to hate drivers.  When I’m driving I try not to hate 

walkers.  Sometimes it takes a bit of effort, but on balance I manage to stay tolerant.

 

The fact is I do like cars very much, the stranger and cooler and more patinated, the better.  I’ve lived with one or two ‘interesting’ cars in my life, but I’ve concluded that the more interesting a car is, the more trouble it’s likely to be. I still like cool cars, I just don’t wish to own one.  And when I’m out walking and I see one, then I go across the street and have a look, and in some circumstances take a picture.  As vicarious pleasures go, I think it’s harmless enough.

 

Naturally there was more scope for this when I lived in Southern California. Old cars last longer there because of the lack of rain and snow, and only high in the mountains do roads get gritted and salted. 

And cars there continue to be driven even when they look like absolute wrecks.  These are things magnificent and if I found myself by some chance driving one of them I’d be perfectly happy, but I wouldn’t seek one out, I wouldn’t deliberately buy one.  I just like to look.

Meanwhile here in England ... 

 

.... interesting cars are fewer and further between but they’re not completely absent.  They do a lot to make me happy when I’m walking.  Here’s one I saw earlier (Texas plate, I know, but it was in Mistley, Essex):

 

 

 

 

 

TALKING ‘BOUT MONROE AND WALKIN’ ON SNOW WHITE

 “When at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind’s heaven.’

That’s Jean Genet, in The Thief’s Journals.  Good stuff, I’d say

 

Genet makes an appearance in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.

    Of course that isn’t Kathy Acker on the cover – it’s Peggy Moffat, photographed by Bill Claxton. 

I don’t know if Kathy Acker was much of a walker.  There’s some footage of her walking in the lower East Side that appeared in a 1984 South Banks Show, but far more pictures show her in the gym or on a motorcycle.  

Still, walking crops up in more or less interesting ways in the book, when for instance, in Manhattan, Janey the book’s heroine and, I suppose, Acker’s alter ego, ‘walks up and down the same street as the hookers walk only the hookers make some money.’

 

    Then Janey is in Tangier and, lo and behold, she sees Jean Genet walking along the street.  Despite being warned that he has a reputation for being aloof and difficult, she decides she MUST talk to him, which she does and Genet is charmed by her.

She quotes him in her diary ‘Loneliness and poverty made me not walk but fly.’

 

In fact it appears that Acker did meet Genet, introduced by William Burroughs, though that doesn’t have much to do with what happens in the book.

Janey sees Genet again, ‘He walks along the white dust slowly, like he did yesterday.  I lift my hand.  His eyes light up and he smiles.  I stand up.  We shake hands for a long time.’

 

They travel together and after many difficulties and much experimental prose they end up in the desert outside Alexandria. ‘The desert is absolutely brilliant’ says Janey, who’s a sharp observer.

 

Genet tells her to get some sleep. ‘Sleep, she says ‘If I’m walking across rocks … it’s murder to my everlasting sleep 

 

When they get to Luxor, Genet gives her money and goes off to see a production of one if his plays.  Literary result:  ‘She dies.’

 

I don’t know that Genet was much of a pedestrian either, though here he is in the company of some literary flaneurs:

But I do know he was briefly besotted with an 18 yeartightrope walker, Abdallah Bentaga, and eventually wrote a short piece titled The Tightrope Walker (Le Funambule). 

It contains the lines ‘I would not be surprised, when you walk on the earth, if you fall and sprain something.  The wire will carry you better, more surely that a road.’

 

This is irony.  Genet paid for Bentaga to have high wire lessons but Bentaga fell and destroyed his knee, ending his tightrope walking career. Genet then bought him, what’s referred to in sources as a ‘small circus,’ the way you do.  But then Genet started seeing somebody else, so Bentaga killed himself.  How different from the home life of … well, of anybody you care to mention.

 

I did once spend an afternoon in Tangier, Genet having been dead for some years by the time I got there, and I remember almost nothing about it, but I know that I did do some walking and I also bought a postcard.

WALKING WITH JOE

OK, so as I understand it, poor hikers will remain untaxed.

 

WALKING BOOSTED

 Look, I’m not saying that anyone thinks Metro, the London-centric free newspaper, is an 

unimpeachable source of wisdom about walking, or anything else, but the other day there in 

‘Travel News’ (which is in fact provided by Transport For London) was the sub headline 

TAKE A LOCAL WALK AND GIVE A BOOST TO YOUR PHYSICAL AND MENTAL WELLBEING. 

And this worried me a little.

 

 

Essentially it’s good advice, but I would say that given the amount of walking I’ve done in my life, locally and otherwise, my physical and mental wellbeing should have been boosted right off the charts. But you know as well as I do, that this isn’t the case.  Pedestrians (you may have noticed) do not walk around in a state of fitness and bliss.  The only consolation may be to tell yourself that however bad you feel, you’d be a whole lot worse if you hadn’t done all that walking. 

 

                                                        (Photo by Luna Yearwood-Smith)

Yesterday I got my second Covid shot – and yes indeed, I do now feel smug and immortal.

 

I walked up from the station to the Primary Care Centre – a steepish fifteen minute slog, got my jab in no time, and felt fit enough to go for a stroll in Highwoods Country Park, the entrance to which is right opposite the hospital.

 

The park contains some grand sounding locations: Yovone’s Pond, Old Ley Field, Friars Grove, Squirrels’ Field.  I think we’ve already discussed the joys of walking in places with cool names: Tinderbox Alley (Mortlake), Butt Hole Road (Sheffield), Rest and Aspiration Alley (Ventura, Ca.).

 

In fact I didn’t walk very far in the park because I was slightly anxious that I might find myself in the middle of, say, Farthing Bottom, and suddenly come over all wobbly from the injection, but I was very pleased to be greeted at the entrance by this chap.  

 

Yes, he looks as though somebody’s taken a chain saw to his head but he’s still smiling, albeit in a crooked way.

 

WALKING WITH SKULLS

 Mortality marches on.  Each step reveals our new infirmities and takes us that much closer 

to the grave.

    But, on the bright side, my local antiques emporium has just reopened and I was able to 

buy this spiffy walking stick with a skull handle:

 

I don’t need it at the moment but no doubt I’ll grow into it

 

When I bought my stick I was well aware that Darwin had one (very slightly) similar, though his was made out of whalebone and ivory.  David Attenborough weeps.

 

But it took me longer than it should have before I recalled this 1998 self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe. 

 

When I next see you, remind me to tell you the story about Robert Mapplethorpe having lunch at Sardi’s in New York, and the cocaine and the screens.

SOME AFRICAN WALKING

The caricature below, by ‘Ape’ from Vanity Fair, shows Verney Lovett Cameron (1844 

1894) and is captioned (if you can make it out) ‘He walked across Africa.’

 

And you know, he more of less did, in 1874-5.  In fact he arrived in Africa intending to assist Dr. Livingstone, but by the time he got there Livingstone was dead, so Cameron pressed on, intending to explore the main stream of the Congo river but he couldn’t obtain canoes on acceptable terms so he continued on foot.  

He was certainly the first European to cross Equatorial Africa from sea to shining sea – Zanzibar in the east to Benguella in the west (sometimes spelled Benguela).  However, it wasn’t absolutely straightforward.  His diary from April 1873, extracted in his book Across Africa,  reads as follows, ‘I was suffering such pain, that I could neither walk nor ride but was carried in a hammock.’  In other words he didn’t absolutely walk all the way across Africa.

 

Thinking about Cameron, leads a person also to think about Ewart Scott Grogan, born 1874, who, newly graduated from Cambridge, fell in love and wanted to marry Gertrude Watt, the sister of a Cambridge friend.  But Gertrude’s stepfather wasn’t sure that Grogan had the right stuff.  So Grogan said, ‘What if I walked from Cape Town to Cairo?’ a thing nobody had ever done, and the stepfather said, ‘All all right then.' So off he went, in 1898, looking like this:

         He made it, but again he needed some help.  In his book From The Cape to Cairo he 

writes,

‘I was suffering from slight fever, and …the fever brought on a very bad foot; I had rubbed all the skin off the heel with elephant-hunting, and had been walking on it ever since; and owing to the poisonous influence of the fever, it swelled to a great size, and was in such an unhealthy condition that when I pushed my finger into the swelling it left a cavity which did not swell out again for some minutes. As it was impossible to stop in the country, I had to make arrangements to be carried, and all the time that I was in camp, sat with my foot in a basin filled with a strong solution of permanganate of potash, applying a poultice of Elliman's Embrocation at night.’

 

 

I first read about Grogan in photographer Peter Beard’s book, The End of the Gamepublished in 1965 -  and it contains this image of Grogan - strange how a man can change his look over 60 odd years:

 

Grogan lived until 1967.  It’s even stranger to think that a man who fought in the Matabele Wars, lived long enough that he could have listened to Sgt Pepper, though I can’t swear that he did.

 

       Somewhere I have a photograph or two of me walking, not across Africa, but definitely in Africa, in Egypt and Morocco.  Having failed to find them, here’s a photo I took, in which you can, just about, see a man walking somewhere in Africa, not far from the pyramids.  No hammock or carriers – but one or two cars.  

And here, for people who like that kind of thing, are some walking maps:

SIMPLY WALKING SIMPLY

 

Some people say that all great ideas are simple.  Obviously this isn’t literally true.  Some 

great ideas are incredibly complicated.  And of course not all simple ideas are great.

 

But one great, simple idea is exemplified by a piece of art title Walking by the Chinese artist Deng Tai.

 

It was shown at the Hammer Museum in LA in 2015, at a time when I was living in LA and could have gone to see it but I’m only reading about it now

 

The description from the Hammer runs as follows.

“Walking is a series of photos made over a three to four year period of time, in different cities, always at night, using only the street and shop lights for illumination. It is simply the recording of a journey, walking an endless road, without a map, to some distant and undefined destination “  

 

The description goes on for a while getting a bit artspeak-ish, but concludes more or less sanely with the words 

“Walking is a simple travellers (sic) passage down streets, over bridges, up stairs, around corners, past buildings, glass, trees, and lights. Each photo, or each frame, is a painting of a day in the life, but all together it is a bigger story, a journey without beginning and without end.’

 

In other words it’s a video of a couple of thousand blurry photographs of some bloke’s feet.

And not only is this a simple idea, but it leads me to the thought – I COULD HAVE DONE THAT!!

 

But of course I didn’t.

 

However the most telling line on the website is “Music for Walking video by William Basinski.”  Now, getting William Basinski to do the music for your art is a great idea, but I’m sure making it a reality is not at all simple.  

SLINKING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM

I’ve long thought that Jay Rayner is a top writer and very decent man (he showed great 

kindness to a friend of mine who was stricken with cancer).  

 

Having said, that, I’ve never thought that Rayner’s life and mine resembled each other much, but now I discover that he and I both suffer from the curse of osteoarthritis.  Just like John Cage, as I said in a blog post a couple of weeks back.

Whereas my own version is in the knee, Rayner’s is in the hip, which may or may not be worse, but at least his gives him the opportunity to make a good wise crack, when, in the Observer a couple of weekends back, he described his own walking as ‘limping about the place, like a broken slinky.’  

 

But even in our pain, our lives diverge again.  My own osteoarthritis revelation didn’t cause much of a reaction (though one person did recommend turmeric), whereas young Rayner has been deluged with unsolicited wisom wanted advice from ‘concerned readers,’ a lot of it about plant-based diets. One of them also told him to lose weight.  This is in fact fairly standard advice for arthritis sufferers but as Rayner asks ‘Who reads about somebody else’s injury and thinks, “You know, what I really need to do now is send this stranger an email telling them they’re fat”?’  Well, who indeed? 

He did however receive an offer of a 20 per cent discount for surgery at a private hospital. He wasn’t tempted by this, but you know, I think I might have been.

SUNDAY MUDDY SUNDAY

I was going to say, ‘Before we finish with John Cage ..’ but I think I’m never really going to be finished with John Cage, so there’s this.  We were walking in the mud yesterday, following the footpath along the south side of the River Stour, right across the water from the Cattawade Nature Reserve, which has no public access, which I think is very cool.  It wasn’t meant to be an expedition, just a Sunday afternoon walk, and that’s what it was until we hit the mud.

 

         I mean, I knew it had been raining, I knew that the footpaths in these parts had muddy patches here and there, but I wasn’t expecting the full Glastonbury–Woodstock-Somme experience.  And as a matter of fact it was actually far worse than it looks in these pictures.

 

         It was hard work, walking through this stuff, but after a while, as Billy Shakespeare almost said, ‘I was in mud, stepp’d in so far that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o'er.’

Thinking of Shakespeare helped a bit, and also thinking that John Cage had written a book on the subject, with Lois Long, one of his collaborators on The Mushroom Book. This one was The Mud Book.  I’ve never seen a copy 'in the flesh,' but apparently it looks like this: 

 To be honest, I wasn't really in the mood for making 'pies and cakes.'