Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 24

NOW, AND NOW AGAIN

I’ve said it before so it must be true – one of the best thing about walking is the way it sharpens up your perceptions – the more you walk the more you look the more you see.  Just basic rocket science.
And I suppose there’s an argument that if you go away from home you may in fact observe with less acuity, because you’re seeing things for the first time, and so you only notice what’s new and obvious.  Whereas if you stay in you own neighbourhood and walk variations of the same old route time after time, day after day, you end up looking at the same things with the different eyes.
And so the lockdown might be construed as some grand experiment in the nature of perception.
This being so, I’ve been walking while paying attention to three minor Nicholson obsessions: benches, arrows, and cars in gardens.  I’ve always looked at these things in various locations, and sometimes I’ve taken photographs of them, but right now I’m only looking at the ones within walking distance of home, although admittedly I’m also thinking about more distant examples I saw in the past.
This for example is a bench at a gibbon sanctuary somewhere up the Interstate 5 in California – pretty fancy:

but now I find myself looking at this one in the neighbourhood:

This is an arrow in the zoo in Tokyo:

and this is an arrow which has suddenly appeared on the road surface very close to where I live:

This is a car in a garden in Los Angeles:

and this is a car up the road by the (now open) garden centre:

And of course there is death with variations everywhere you go. These critters were shot dead in the desert somewhere near Yucca Valley:

and this is a swan on the shore of the River Stour.  I don’t know how it died, but it makes me realize that I never saw a dead swan before.

THE LONG WALK AWAY FROM HOME

As we celebrate hundred year old Captain, now Colonel, Tom Moore for his walking and charity fund raising efforts – 100 laps of his 82 foot garden, 30 million quid, do let’s, spare a thought for the heroic failure of Martin Echegaray Davies, a man who two years ago set off walking from to Patagonia to Alaska.  

         It was intended to be a walk of just under 19,000 miles, but after he’d completed 14,287 of them he arrived at the border between North Dakota and Canada, where Canadian officials, responding to Covid-19 fears, told him his travel was non-essential, and so they wouldn’t let him.Having sat in a motel for a week, weighing his options, he decided to go back home, and managed to get on a flight organized by the Argentinian government.



There are two unusual aspects to Davies’ walk as far as I’m concerned.  First that he took a trolley with him, containing camping equipment, weighing 140 kilogrammes, and flying Welsh and Argentinian flags, and secondly, that along the way he took 1,718 selfies with people he met along the way. He has a Facebook page where these are displayed.

He said he didn’t think he was likely ever to complete the walk, which of course reminds us of the great Sebastian Snow who planned to walk a similar route (though without trolley or selfies) from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska, but gave up when he reached Panama City.  He was sick and tired and he’d simply had enough.  That sometimes happens to walkers, you know.

THE BEARD AND I

A good few years back I interviewed Peter Beard ‘on stage’ in a bookshop in New York.  (Yes, yes, my life used to be far more glamorous than it is now). Beard was absolutely the easiest man to interview.  Any question, whether about Africa, or Andy Warhol, Karen Blixen or the elephant that gored him, produced a long, articulate and (naturally) highly opinionated answer.  I could just have held up flash cards.  I should have asked him about walking.
I didn’t walk with Beard but I often walked in SoHo and went into his gallery-cum-archive: The Time is Always Now.

But he was obviously something of a walker.  He was known to his friends as Walkabout for his tendency to wander off on adventures.
And when he wandered off from his home in Montauk a little while ago, and we know that wandering as a symptom of dementia, a number of us thought he might have decided to end it all by walking into the sea –a very brave and elegant way to go.  But in fact no, he walked into the woods, where he was found dead not so very much later, by a hunter.
But the thing I remember best about my Beard ‘conversation’ was when he said he’d been into a toy store in Manhattan, probably Toys-R-Us which was still in business at the time, and tried to find a toy animal that in any way resembled a real animal.  He had of course failed to find one because all the toy animals were cute or cuddly or anthropomorphic.  This made him very angry.  And as the years have gone by I’ve come more and more to think that his anger was very well justified.  And if an elephant gores well, that’s exactly the kind of occupational hazard an animal lover has to expect.          This is him, recently gored:

WHITE SANDMAN

As we try to fill our days by tidying up our lives, I was digging through the archive and I found this old picture of me, not looking my very cutest, at White Sands National Park in New Mexico.


I was walking there, as you do, and I found the thing that I’m holding, which I think is a piece of some experimental aircraft or rocket or missile, found among the dunes, and I only picked up for the photo op, although sometimes I wish I’d put it in my back checked luggage and brought it home to England.
After I’d done my walk, I called in at the Ranger Station to look at the postcards and souvenirs, and I said, casually, to the ranger behind the desk that I’d seen bits of aereonautical debris among the dunes, and the ranger said sternly, ‘Whatever you do don’t pick them up.’  He didn’t say way, but assuming it was because the debris had all kinds of weird and dangerous chemicals on it.
I said nothing but I’m still glad I got the picture.  I got this one too.  It's arty.  You can take the man out of the Volkswagen, but you can't take the Volkswagen out of the man.

DRIFTING STILL

Just so you know, I’m keeping on walking – in accordance with government guidelines, naturally.  There are lots of cats and birds just walking in the road – because there’s so little traffic.  There is also an increase in road kill – not cats, but pigeons, plus the occasional rabbit and hedgehog.
But how about this for a surprise – growing up in the road between the tarmac and the kerb – garlic!!


I don’t know if it’s wild garlic or an escapee from somebody’s garden.  It smells great, and in general I believe in foraging but somehow gutter garlic seems a bit unappealing.  Call me overdelicate.

AWAY FROM THE RABBLE IN WRABNESS

The weekend before the start of the lockdown (aka Final Countdown of possibly The Big Gundown) we walked from Wrabness to Manningtree, part of the Essex Way, though we strayed from that route from time to time.  We knew that we'd strayed, we just didn't know how to get back on it.



There was plenty of social isolating going on, though dogs still have to be walked, children too, apparently.




There was all kinds of cool stuff; flotsam and/or jetsam


and a shipwreck

And of course things were already getting a bit frantic in the supermarkets, but there on the beach at Wrabness you could pick up an oyster or two and take it home for domestic enjoyment. What’s a good walk without a bit of foraging?  And the thing about foraging is – you don’t have to stand in a queue.


The guys in the pub at Mistley were obviously a bit sour:




And it took a surprisingly long time – four hours to walk 6 and a half miles. But once home the oysters did the job they were supposed to do.

THE DOG WALKER

In these troubled, self-quarantined times, reading a book seems like a very good idea, and although War and Peace beckons, there’s also an urge to dig out something that you haven’t looked at in a good many years.  And so I’ve found myself rereading The Dog Chairman, a collection of writings, some of them very short indeed, by Robert Robinson.  It’s a book I used to keep in my loo.

Robinson doesn’t get much respect these days.  If people remember him at all it’s likely to be because of his bad comb-over (are there any good comb-overs) and his tendency to be a clever dick, on programmes such as Brain of Britain, Stop the Week, and Call My Bluff.  He was also anything but inimitable, and he has been much imitated by everyone from the Not the Nine O' Clock news mob, to Fry and Laurie (seen at the top of the post) to Mitchell and Webb.  But I like his book a lot.
Back in the day I used occasionally to see him walking in the streets around Broadcasting House, and he was always wearing a hat, whether to hide the comb over or because he worried that the wind might ruin his comb over.

Anyway there’s a piece in The Dog Chairman titled ‘Watch Your Step’ – it’s a nice bit of people watching, observing how people walk.  ‘Top end of the social scale, people walk as though they aren’t walking anywhere in particular, bottom end of the scale, people walk as though they only had one destination.  Bottom end, people walk as though the movement were being rented rather than outright owned, top-end walks are always freehold.’  I think this is more or less true and he continues, ‘You can no more disguise your walk than your handwriting: I knew a ballet critic who’d been a policeman, and he always walked up the aisle at Covent Garden as though he were going to take Giselle’s name and address.’         I like that.  But I do wonder who the policeman turned ballet critic was. How many can there be. Any ideas?  Or maybe just made it up.

WALKING THE IMMUNOLOGICAL SUPERHIGHWAY

And in further Covid-19 news (is there any other kind of news?) Dr Jenna Macciochi, an immunologist at Sussex University, says walking is good  because it ‘helps move our lymphatic fluid around the body.’ Who knew?  Well, no doubt a great many people, but not me.  

She adds, ‘Think of this like our immune cells superhighway enabling our immune cells to perform better surveillance.  And when you’re out walking … you are less likely to come into close contact with infected people.”
According to her website Dr. Macciochi  has over 20 years' experience 'as a scientist researching the impact of lifestyle on the immune system in health and disease.'  This is a picture on her website, it could well be her:

I think we can assume Dr Macchiochi is not a flaneuse, much less a woman of the crowd.

WALKING DANKLY

Walking in the rain is a funny business - sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric, sometimes imbued with pathetic fallacy, and definitely, apparently, a thing to write songs about.

The one I think of first is ‘Just Walkin in the Rain’ the one made famous by Johnny Ray, written by Johnny Bragg and Robert Riley while they were in Tennessee State Prison. Bragg supposedly said, "Here we are just walking in the rain, and wondering what the girls are doing." Riley thought there was a song in it, and he was right.Just walking in the rain
Getting soaking wet
Torturing my heart by trying to forget.


Then the Ronettes, ‘Walking in the Rain,’ later covered by Jay and the Americans and indeed the Walker Brothers.Though sometimes we'll fight, I won't really care
And I'll know it's gonna be alright 'cause we've got so much we share Like walking in the rain (like walking in the rain) 

The song is attributed to Barry Mann, Cynthia Weli and Phil Spector.  I don’t imagine Phil ever did very muchwalking in the rain, what with the wig and all, but like Briggs and Riley, as he currently sits or walks in jail, there must surely be moments when he wonders what the girls are doing, though I’m not sure which girls.
And of course, ‘The Sky is Crying’ – many, many versions  - but originally by Elmore JamesThe sky is crying,
Can you see the tears roll down the street. 
Well, yes, sometimes you can, and t’other day I did. For no very good reason, except my ongoing fascination with suburbia, I went off for a walk in Highams Park, in north east London, and to be honest a large part of the attraction was that I knew I’d have the pleasure of walking down Hollywood Way.


As you see, it was sunny when I started out – and of course there was plenty in the area to look at.
gnomes (well, one gnome)

topiary and yuccas
fine bungalows 

an equally fine concrete shed

streamlined bay windows, which are always a favorite of mine

But as you also see in that last picture, I hadn’t done much drifting before the rain came down (see ‘The Day The Rains Came’ made famous by the somewhat less famous Jane Morgan  ‘The day that the rains came down/ Mother Earth smiled again.’ Well yes and no.

From time to time it would pelt down and I’d run under a tree – no pennies from heaven there - then it would stop for a bit and I’d walk on and it’d pelt down again. If I’d had a specific destination in place I’d have continued but since I was just wandering it wasn’t long before I’d had enough.  My point of return was De La Warr Court.

Now obviously when you see the name De La Warr you think of the De La Warr Pavlion in  very vaguely resembles. 

The pavilion was named after Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, and the first hereditary peer to join the Labour Party.  If he has any connection with Highams Park, I’ve not been able to discover it.
Incidentally, Hollywood Way has one small point of interest, it was the childhood home of jazz man John Dankworth. There’s a plaque to that effect.


In the course of a long career he recorded plenty of songs about rain, including, many of them with Cleo Lane from ‘Come Rain or Come Shine,’ to ‘Singing in the Rain.’  Rather fewer songs about walking.  And I do hope this was his car, not just a prop for the album cover:

MY FAVOURITE WALKING MAP