Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 27
October 10, 2019
AND DID THOSE FEET?
‘Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheldThe Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah’
Well, it could happen to anybody, couldn’t it?
Yes, I went to the blockbuster William Blake show at Tate Britain – that quotation from ‘Milton a Poem’ can be found on a wall of the exhibition.
As I staggered out after 90 minutes or so, I’m pretty sure I was displaying marks of weakness, marks of woe. It seems I have a bit of blind spot for Blake. I mean, yes some of the paintings and engravings are OK, some of the poetry is fine, it’s just is his personal mythology that really gets me down. I mean I have enough trouble with the convolutions of basic Christian mythology, but when I’m confronted with Orc and Los and Urizen and Nobodaddy and indeed the Daughters of Beulah, and all the other stuff he just you know made up, I want to say enough already.
Clearly this is a minority view, my own failing no doubt, and one not shared by the throng packing into the Tate.
But really, did Albion have to be quite so effete?
And in the illustration below from ‘Paradise Lost,’ what exactly is Adam doing? Saying ‘Hello clouds, hello trees’? And what's with the jazz hands? One thing he’s not doing is paying attention:
And as for what Eve has in her mouth – well I think we know what it’s supposed to be, but I think we also know what it very much looks like.
Incidentally, should you ever find yourself in Manningtree, in Essex and you feel the need for the lineaments of gratified desire, you can always to walk up to Blake close: the walk will do you good.
October 8, 2019
STROLLING AROUND THE GROUND, FEELING AT HOME IS OPTIONAL
As you know, I like looking at the ground when I walk. I also like looking at the sky – I’m versatile that way – but I’m working on a probably doomed project to be called Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground, and so the ground often takes precedence.
A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.
They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock. Perhaps they had to. Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.They’d done this.
I was disappointed. I’d wanted more.
Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste.
A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.
They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock. Perhaps they had to. Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.They’d done this.
I was disappointed. I’d wanted more.
Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste.
STROLLING AROUND THE GROUNDS
As you know, I like looking at the ground when I walk. I also like looking at the sky – I’m versatile that way – but I’m working on a probably doomed project to be called Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground, and so the ground often takes precedence.
A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.
They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock. Perhaps they had to. Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.They’d done this.
I was disappointed. I’d wanted more.
Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste.
A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.
They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock. Perhaps they had to. Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.They’d done this.
I was disappointed. I’d wanted more.
Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste.
September 27, 2019
SORDID, DOMESTIC WALKING
S.J. Perelman was walking home one night in New York, and when he got to Washington Square Park he ran into poet E.E. Cummings, whom he knew a little.
They walked along together and came to an apartment building on the edge of the square. Cummings suddenly stopped and stared up at the building and said, ‘What scenes of sordid domesticity do you think are being played out behind those lighted windows?” Perelman protested, ‘Why, that’s my apartment.”And Cummings said, “I know.’
September 26, 2019
WALKING WITH SHOES
“A man’s gotta liveA man’s gotta eatA man’s gotta have shoes to walk out on the street.”
How true those lyrics are. And it applies to women too. But you know, when I’m on my walking travels it’s strange just how many abandoned women’s shoes I see. Mostly it’s just one, though not always
It leads to all kinds of speculation about the circumstances in which the shoe (or occasionally shoes) was abandoned: accidentally, deliberately, in high jinks, in disgust. I just think about the Cinderalla–like possibilities, and take a photograph.
I’m often surprised how elegant some of the shoes look but I suppose that’s the whole thing – the fancier the shoes, the harder they are to walk in, the more uncomfortable they are and therefore more likely to be cast aside.
When I lived in Los Angeles I happened to walk past the house that I knew belonged to Vince Vaughn on the day he was moving out. There were a pair of his sneakers sitting out by the garbage can, and I did wonder whether I should take them and try to sell them on eBay. But I didn’t – I thought that would have been sick. If they’d belonged to an actress it might have been a different story.
How true those lyrics are. And it applies to women too. But you know, when I’m on my walking travels it’s strange just how many abandoned women’s shoes I see. Mostly it’s just one, though not always
It leads to all kinds of speculation about the circumstances in which the shoe (or occasionally shoes) was abandoned: accidentally, deliberately, in high jinks, in disgust. I just think about the Cinderalla–like possibilities, and take a photograph.
I’m often surprised how elegant some of the shoes look but I suppose that’s the whole thing – the fancier the shoes, the harder they are to walk in, the more uncomfortable they are and therefore more likely to be cast aside.
When I lived in Los Angeles I happened to walk past the house that I knew belonged to Vince Vaughn on the day he was moving out. There were a pair of his sneakers sitting out by the garbage can, and I did wonder whether I should take them and try to sell them on eBay. But I didn’t – I thought that would have been sick. If they’d belonged to an actress it might have been a different story.
September 15, 2019
"HAS ABSENCE EVER SOUNDED SO ELOQUENT, SO SAD?" Beats me.
There are all kinds of good reasons to go walking in Sudbury, in Suffolk. The water meadows:
The wildlife:
The achingly quaint archtecture, including silk weavers’ houses.
There are pill boxes – and I’m not sure if that mushroom-shped thing is a warning against nuclear attack, or an indication that some shrooming has been going in:
There are many passion fruits:
and VW campers, at least one of them for sale (18 grand seems to be about the going rate)
It may all seem a little bucolic, a little green and pleasant, but there's something that might make the journey to Sudbury a different proposition, if you’re a fan of Guy Debord’s psychogeography,
or of Scott Wallker’s later work,
is this house sign:
You couldn’t make it up. You don’t have to.
The wildlife:
The achingly quaint archtecture, including silk weavers’ houses.
There are pill boxes – and I’m not sure if that mushroom-shped thing is a warning against nuclear attack, or an indication that some shrooming has been going in:
There are many passion fruits:
and VW campers, at least one of them for sale (18 grand seems to be about the going rate)
It may all seem a little bucolic, a little green and pleasant, but there's something that might make the journey to Sudbury a different proposition, if you’re a fan of Guy Debord’s psychogeography,
or of Scott Wallker’s later work,
is this house sign:
You couldn’t make it up. You don’t have to.
September 4, 2019
FREUD FEVER
The first volume of William Feaver’s The Lives of Lucian Freud has just been published. That's Lucian below, walking:
A very minor part of Feaver's book describes, in 1948, Freud being invited to Cecil Beaton’s home at Reddish House in Wiltshire. When he gets there he’s delighted to find that Greta Garbo is a fellow guest.
Now, the ‘affair’ or whatever it was, between Beaton and Garbo has always been a matter for speculation and mystery, and Freud’s account doesn’t clarify matters much.
Feaver writes:I thought she was wonderful he (Freud) recalled. “She said, ‘Comm and sit ‘ere,’ and it was a chair for one, not two and I squeezed in. She looked marvelous. She drove Cecil mad and he’d become gruff and manly and say, ‘We must go for a walk,’ and she’d say, ‘I’ve left my shoes in New York.’
Now, I can totally believe this would the kind of thing Garbo would say and do, but it’s quite a stretch to imagine Beaton being ‘gruff and manly.’
Still, here are Cecil and Greta walking together on some occasion when she’d remembered her shoes.
And here she is walking alone. Boy, I love that battered car behind her:
September 1, 2019
WALKING IN BUNKERS
Of course I don’t actually walk IN bunkers. I walk to and from bunkers, or past bunkers, and occasionally I go into one one, but many of them are too small to stand up in, let alone walk in. And I admit that I'm using the term loosely, some of the things I call bunkers are no doubt actually pillboxes and observation posts, along other things, but then, I’m a layman.
This one, which is I think the most extraordinary bunker I’ve ever seen, was somewhere near San Diego on the Pacific Coast, though nobody was allowed in.
There is no shortage of bunkers and such along that coastline. This is part of a series just north of San Francisco, and you could poke around there to your heart’s content:
There’s a great pleasure in going for a walk and suddenly coming across a bunker when you least expect it, like this one by a recreation ground in Saxmundham.
This one is near Walton-on-the-Naze:
This one I did go inside this one – as had others before me – hence the phallic graffiti.
And here’s one that’s local to me, by the river Stour, in Essex, well dug into the earth, located between Manningtree and Cattawade.
The council just sent somebody just cut all the tall weeds around it so you can walk down and peer in through the gun holes, or embrasures, though I couldn’t see much of anything in there. And you could go inside if you really wanted to, but you’d have to crawl through broken glass and who knows what else:
And last weekend in Hackney Wick, which is generally ‘street art central’ there was this rather well decorated one.
And I did wonder for a moment whether decoration this was in some way ‘a bad thing’ but actually it reinforced the idea of how surprisingly (not completely) untouched so many of the similar structures are. Why is that? Respect for wartime ‘monuments’? Maybe, though it seems unlikely.
But if you really want to bunker down, you could do worse that head for Harwich, in general.
And specifically for the Beacon Hill Fort with shelters, gun emplacements, underground magazines, petrol and oil stores, and some things called spigot mortars. Paul Virilio would have had a field day, as did I.
And if you just wanted to walk, there’s always the Squirrel Trail.
Our hero amid the bunker ruins:
This one, which is I think the most extraordinary bunker I’ve ever seen, was somewhere near San Diego on the Pacific Coast, though nobody was allowed in.
There is no shortage of bunkers and such along that coastline. This is part of a series just north of San Francisco, and you could poke around there to your heart’s content:
There’s a great pleasure in going for a walk and suddenly coming across a bunker when you least expect it, like this one by a recreation ground in Saxmundham.
This one is near Walton-on-the-Naze:
This one I did go inside this one – as had others before me – hence the phallic graffiti.
And here’s one that’s local to me, by the river Stour, in Essex, well dug into the earth, located between Manningtree and Cattawade.
The council just sent somebody just cut all the tall weeds around it so you can walk down and peer in through the gun holes, or embrasures, though I couldn’t see much of anything in there. And you could go inside if you really wanted to, but you’d have to crawl through broken glass and who knows what else:
And last weekend in Hackney Wick, which is generally ‘street art central’ there was this rather well decorated one.
And I did wonder for a moment whether decoration this was in some way ‘a bad thing’ but actually it reinforced the idea of how surprisingly (not completely) untouched so many of the similar structures are. Why is that? Respect for wartime ‘monuments’? Maybe, though it seems unlikely.
But if you really want to bunker down, you could do worse that head for Harwich, in general.
And specifically for the Beacon Hill Fort with shelters, gun emplacements, underground magazines, petrol and oil stores, and some things called spigot mortars. Paul Virilio would have had a field day, as did I.
And if you just wanted to walk, there’s always the Squirrel Trail.
Our hero amid the bunker ruins:
August 25, 2019
THE PERMISSIVE PATH NOT TAKEN
Two roads (actually paths) diverged on a flat bit of grassy land near Flatford, in Constable Country, in Essex. One of them had a sign saying Public Footpath, the other said Permissive Path, which (I now know) is just a way or saying, ‘Ok you can walk along here for now but don’t get any fancy ideas about it becoming a public right of way.’
I’m telling this with a sigh, obviously, but not ages and ages hence: I took the public footpath which was in fact ‘the one less traveled by,’ since the other one was the tourist route to Flatford Mill and then Dedham, where apparently lots of people want to go.
And it did make a bit of a difference, because the public footpath less traveled by was heading to Manningtree where I wanted to go, as opposed to the permissive path which led back to Flatford where I’d already been.
I am of course pastiching Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Less Travelled,’ possibly the second most misunderstood poem in the English language. I’d say Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ is themost misunderstood. (I know you’ll scarcely believe this, but some people apparently think it’s about daffodils). What is it about walking and poetry and incomprehension?
But thinking again about the Robert Frost poem, paths being as they are, it’s perfectly possible to take one path one day and then go back another day and take the other one. Which in fact is what I did with the public footpath and the permissive path between Flatford and Manningtree. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
On the other hand, should you find yourself in Hackney Wick, you might come to the conclusion that all roads are equal.
I’m telling this with a sigh, obviously, but not ages and ages hence: I took the public footpath which was in fact ‘the one less traveled by,’ since the other one was the tourist route to Flatford Mill and then Dedham, where apparently lots of people want to go.
And it did make a bit of a difference, because the public footpath less traveled by was heading to Manningtree where I wanted to go, as opposed to the permissive path which led back to Flatford where I’d already been.
I am of course pastiching Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Less Travelled,’ possibly the second most misunderstood poem in the English language. I’d say Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ is themost misunderstood. (I know you’ll scarcely believe this, but some people apparently think it’s about daffodils). What is it about walking and poetry and incomprehension?
But thinking again about the Robert Frost poem, paths being as they are, it’s perfectly possible to take one path one day and then go back another day and take the other one. Which in fact is what I did with the public footpath and the permissive path between Flatford and Manningtree. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
On the other hand, should you find yourself in Hackney Wick, you might come to the conclusion that all roads are equal.
August 15, 2019
WIDE OPEN FOR BUSINESS
Of course I enjoy walking in the wide open spaces. What kind of fool doesn’t?
And yet I realize, all else being equal (and I also realize that in this context all else is never equal), that given the choice between walking in open spaces or taking a turn down some potentially claustrophobic, potentially threatening alleyway, most of the time I’d take the latter.
I also realize that in the greater scheme of things we may all have bigger, more pressing, choices that need to be made.
Even so, finding myself in London, more or less in the City, t’other week I started walking down and photographing a few narrow constricted alleyways, as seen above.
Did I think of Tony Christie singing ‘Avenues and Alleyways?’ Yes, I’m afraid I did.
And what is it about constricted spaces? Does it have something to do with the birth canal, or does it have something to do with pretending to be the kInd of guy who can comfortably walk down mean streets, and damn the risk of being mugged or blackjacked? A little of both, I'm guessing.
Above is the (or at least a) bridge in Silverlake, in LA. which I used to think was sung about by Red Hot Chilli Peppers in ‘Under the Bridge’ but various sources place that bridge in many different locations all over LA.
This I thinks is in Chelmsford but I wouldn't swear to that:
This is definitely in Berkeley:
And this I'm reasonably sure is Tinderbox Alley in Mortlake (I had to walk down it because of the name), and here it’s made somewhat more constricted by somebody parking a car in it.
And back home in Manningtree, I found this amazingly constricted space between two garden fences.
Again I felt I had to walk down it, and at the end there was an undergrowth or perhaps overgrowth of nettles – and I broke on through to the other side and found I was on a dangerous stretch of road with no pavement or grass verge, where any passing car might run me down.Friends, it made me feel ALIVE.
And yet I realize, all else being equal (and I also realize that in this context all else is never equal), that given the choice between walking in open spaces or taking a turn down some potentially claustrophobic, potentially threatening alleyway, most of the time I’d take the latter. 
I also realize that in the greater scheme of things we may all have bigger, more pressing, choices that need to be made.
Even so, finding myself in London, more or less in the City, t’other week I started walking down and photographing a few narrow constricted alleyways, as seen above.
Did I think of Tony Christie singing ‘Avenues and Alleyways?’ Yes, I’m afraid I did.
And what is it about constricted spaces? Does it have something to do with the birth canal, or does it have something to do with pretending to be the kInd of guy who can comfortably walk down mean streets, and damn the risk of being mugged or blackjacked? A little of both, I'm guessing.
Above is the (or at least a) bridge in Silverlake, in LA. which I used to think was sung about by Red Hot Chilli Peppers in ‘Under the Bridge’ but various sources place that bridge in many different locations all over LA.
This I thinks is in Chelmsford but I wouldn't swear to that:
This is definitely in Berkeley:
And this I'm reasonably sure is Tinderbox Alley in Mortlake (I had to walk down it because of the name), and here it’s made somewhat more constricted by somebody parking a car in it.
And back home in Manningtree, I found this amazingly constricted space between two garden fences.
Again I felt I had to walk down it, and at the end there was an undergrowth or perhaps overgrowth of nettles – and I broke on through to the other side and found I was on a dangerous stretch of road with no pavement or grass verge, where any passing car might run me down.Friends, it made me feel ALIVE.
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