Geoff Nicholson's Blog, page 8

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

 I don’t imagine this is the worst ever description in a novel of a woman’s walk, but it’ll do for now:

 

“You walk with a headlong rush, there is an electric energy in you, a rhythm that gushes from your mouth in a broken Bronx college-girl jargon, that tilts your narrow hips, that drives the blossoming female bulge of you, full and achingly free beneath the black skirt."

 

It’s from Evan Hunter’s Buddwing, a novel that in general I’m inclined to like, not least because it has a fair amount of walking in it, but even so I mean really.

 

Others must have liked the book too. It was made into a film as Mister Buddwing, starring James Garner (who hated the end result), with Jean Simmons, Suzanne Pleshette, Angela Lansbury and Katherine Ross.  The description above describes a character named Janet, played by Katharine Ross.

 

It has not been easy to find a good picture of Katherine Ross walking.  Here she is in Mister Buddwing with Garner:

 

and here she is shopping in Malibu (during Covid, I imagine) with her husband Sam Elliott:

 

And here she is some time ago by herself.  I’ll leave you to decide about the blossoming female bulge.

AIRY BUT NOT FAIRY

 Just so that the blog is current

herewith the new Nicholson tome, well its cover image anyway.

It's 'available' from today, though the official publication date is August 28th

Go on, you know you want to

WALK, DON'T WALK

 

A headline in yesterday’s Sunday Times asks ‘Do I really need to take 10,000 steps a day?’

 

Now, we know that journalists don’t usually write their own headlines, but surely somebody at the Times has heard of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines which states, ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.’

 

In this case you might also answer, ‘No of course it doesn’t ya bloody fool. That whole 10,000 steps a day thing was a gimmick put out by Japanese pedometer company Tamasa Tokei Keiki trying to flog its wares around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.’

 

To be fair the article does acknowledge this, while not quite accepting what any ‘fule kno’ that you should walk the way you want to walk and not let some silly bugger tell you you’re doing it all wrong.

 

The very best thing about the 1964 Olympics was that it gave rise to the 1966 movie Walk, Don’t Run, a rom-com avant la lettre, starring Cary Grant with a slightly torturous McGuffin about flat-sharing in Tokyo and featuring an American Olympian played by Jim Hutton, an actor I’ve never seen in any other movie although apparently he did a lot of work including The Green Berets) .  

 

Because it’s a comedy they obviously couldn’t make the Jim Hutton character a serious athlete so they made him a contestant in the most absurd event they could think of – the 50 kilometre walk, which is a lot of steps.

 

Hilarity ensued.

In the interests of you history might like to know that the real 1964 Olympics 50 kilometer walk was won by Abdon Pamich of Italy who clocked in at 4 hours, 11 minutes, 12.4 seconds.  This is him:

PERMITTED WASTED WALKING

 

You’ll no doubt be wanting to hear more about my flaneuring in Swansea, and no, that isn’t me in the picture above, though I do like his style.  He was just one of the walkers I saw.

 There was a lot of interesting architecture, the old rubbing shoulders with the new, as TV documentarians sometimes used to say.

 

I do love metal buildings of any kind but a chapel or in the two cases below, a former chapel, really floats my corrugated boat. 



I always wonder what it must be like being inside in the rain.  Reassuring or scary?  And of course there’s no shortage of rain in Wales, as I discovered.
On a rainy Saturday morning it seemed necessary to get out there and not be a fair-weather drifter.  So first there was this fine structure supporting a road bridge, not far from Harry Secombe Court (honestly).

And then, and this is the beauty part, there was the Danygraig Cemetery with its many, many obelisks.  Below is just a small sample.

You know, flaneurship may have a few things to offer that are more fun and frolicsome that wandering around a cemetery in the rain looking at obelisks, but not so very many, I think.

 

Oh yes, and probably you knew this already; but those Welsh have a different word for everything:

BARDIC WALKING

 Need I say that, being of sound mind, I haven’t read Prince Harry’s Spare, but an article in the New Yorker by Parul Sehgal about the nature of narrative quotes a passage from the book that runs, ‘I considered all of the previous challenging walks of my life – the North Pole, the Army exercises, following Mummy’s coffin to the grave – and while the memories were painful, they also provided continuity, structure, a kind of narrative spine that I’d never suspected.  Life was one long walk.’  Yeah, metaphors are hard.

 

Elsewhere, at Phillips in London, Damien Hirst has a new exhibition titled Where the Land Meets the Sea, yeah, titles are hard too, but maybe it’s an allusion to Clare Leighton:

 

The Hirst exhibition consists of Coast Paintings, Sea Paintings, and Seascapes,and in the exhibition notes Hirst says, ‘Where the Land Meets the Sea is an exploration inspired by the seaside in gray British winters; I grew up in Leeds in West Yorkshire and often holidayed in Scarborough, Filey, Whitby, where Count Dracula landed, Robin Hood’s Bay, and Skegness. I have always spent a lot of time walking and thinking on the beach and watching the sea, witnessing the powerful action of the crashing waves in winter. It gives me a feeling of unimportance and vastness and inevitability, that this whole world and everything in it will eventually wear out to nothing.’

I’m not sure I ever pictured Hirst walking on the beach, walking into the Groucho Club sure,

 but there’s no argument about the general principle, and as a Yorkshire lad from Sheffield I’ve had similar holiday experiences walking in two of those places:  Filey and Skegness, though not the others.  

 

This is me and my mum on the beach at Lytham St Annes – I think she thought Blackpool was a bit common. The land is very definitely meeting the sea, and admittedly neither of us is walking, but we definitely walked to get there.

 

And then having recently been in Swansea, where Dylan Thomas is ubiquitous, 

 

I got back and dug out one of his poems titled ‘Poem In October’ which contains the lines

 

‘And I rose in a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days’

 

Sounds a bit like a day at the seaside.  And later in the same poem: 

‘And I saw in the turning, so clearly, a child's forgotten mornings
When he walked with his mother through the parables of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels.’

 

Now obviously I’m not saying that only artists and poets should be allowed to write about walking but maybe princes and/or their ghost writers should hold back.

 

 

 

 

MOVING OUR FEET, LESS EXCITED BY TRAVEL

 I was taught (actually the word used was ‘supervised’) at university by J.H. Prynne, where he was known universally as Jeremy,  and I often used to see him walking across Caius Court where he had his study.  In my memory I see him with a black gown flapping behind him but that may a distortion.

 

At other times, various Chinese men in Mao suits could also be seen walking through the court.  The master of the college was Joseph Needham, a Sinologist among other things, and a "friend" of Mao, with all the difficulties and contradictions that implies.  Here are Needham and Mao.

 

Prynne was a friend of Needham, and he’s spent a fair amount of time in China, and in his interview with the Paris Review he professes himself to be a fan of Mao’s 1937 essay ‘On Contradiction.’  Sample sentence, ‘But the struggle of opposites is ceaseless, it goes on both when the opposites are coexisting and when they are transforming themselves into each other, and becomes especially conspicuous when they are transforming themselves into one another.’

 

Also to be seen in the college, not walking but being pushed (as I remember it, though I could be wrong about that too and the chair may already have been motorized), was a poor afflicted soul in a wheelchair, and people would say, ‘That’s the most brilliant man in England.’  At the time we were inclined to be skeptical but it was, of course Stephen Hawking.

These things come to mind, obliquely, because I’ve been reading an essay by Bill Symes titled “Subject/object Amphiboly in (mostly) English Poetry from Gray to Prynne.”  On the off chance that you’re not familiar with the term amphiboly, I can tell you it may be defined as “verbal ambiguity, especially from uncertainty of the grammatical construction.” Wikipedia offers an example from Ray Davies. “I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola.”

 

I don’t read a lot of academic essays about poetry but this seems a pretty good one, jumping off from Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity but it also references poetry and poets I’m actually familiar with, some of them who mention walking.

 

There’s a reference to Gary Snyder’s poem “A Walk” – discussed elsewhere in this blog, and also to Frank O’Hara – who I know best as the author of Standing Still and Walking in New York.

 

The O’Hara poem is “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems.

 

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun


and have a hamburger and a malted and buy


an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days 

 

This is the kind of poem that makes me think I understand and love poetry but then we come to Prynne, whose work I love without ever claiming to understand, specifically his poem “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance,” from Kitchen Poems, the first work of his I ever read or bought.  To before fair this is probably Prynne for beginners, and I love the opening:

As you drag your feet or simply being
Tired, the ground is suddenly interesting;
Not as metaphysic but the grave maybe
That area which claims its place like
A shoe.

 

After that it gets trickier. Here is a shoe on the ground – I think it may have something to do with what I think Prynne might have had it mind.  

And here is my one piece of Prynne-iana, a typed thank you note. He didn’t just dole out signatures in those days, at least not to the likes of me.

NICHOLSON ON NICHOLSONS

Let us again consider the concept of the Nicholson – which as regular readers will know is defined as a manmade object, preferably a single vertical – a street lamp, a telegraph pole, a fence post - that has been taken over by natural growth, so that a plant is using the manmade object as a climbing frame and support.

This is not my invention (obviously), but I came up with the name, you know the way Adam came up with names in the Garden of Eden

 

Some things, once you start looking, you see them everywhere, but in my experience this isn’t true of the Nicholson. As I walk through the world looking for them they’re just uncommon enough to be interesting but not so uncommon as to be frustrating.

 

Of course some Nicholsons are purer than others.  In some cases a plant may climb a manmade post and then get tangled up in nature, like these below, but I think they still fit the definition.  Purity isn’t everything.

 

And this has become one of my very favourite Nicholsons – greenery climbing up a graveyard obelisk – two of my milder obsessions combined.

Below I think is definitely a Nicholson because the ivy (or whatever) is climbing up the fence posts but then it’s also climbing along chain link which isn’t quite as impressive as climbing a single upright, but you can’t have everything.

 

And I would love this to count as a Nicholson: greenery climbing up a bridge, which is certainly a manmade object - but on balance I’m really not sure it fits the bill.

 

 

And here for your viewing pleasure is a photograph of Nicholson photographing some Nicholsons.

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon.
 

COME SAID THE BIRD

So we went for a walk in Harwich, where the ‘Secret Gardens of Harwich’ were open and in some sense ‘walkable.’

 

It so happens that the Nicholson horticultural bookshelf contains three books with ‘secret garden’ in the title - The Secret Gardens of Hollywood – but honey ALL gardens are secret in Hollywood; The Secret Gardens of East Anglia – at least some of which have open days, and one book simply called Secret Gardens, which contains at least one garden I’ve walked in. I know there are plenty of other ‘secret garden’ books.

The weekend walk in Harwich consisted mostly of strolling from one small domestic garden to another – private rather than secret I’d have said - but it was possible to clock up a mile or two on the streets.  None of the gardens was large and some were very small, so that once inside visitors shuffled rather than walked.  It was fine, though I can’t imagine Iain Sinclair much less Baudelaire, doing this kind of thing.

 

There is something strange but very appealing about finding yourself in other people’s garden, in their personal space as it were. Obviously you’re not trespassing because they’ve opened their garden to the public, revealed their secrets, but nevertheless there is some mild sense of intrusion. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want a bunch of strangers traipsing around my own garden, though I’m equally sure that not many would want to, not even for charity.

 

Every garden had something of interest

 

But the best, if you asked me, was the sunken garden at Quayside court, attached to a block of flats rather than a house.  It had a slight Alice in Wonderland theme.

Afterwards as went back to the car, you couldn’t say we’d had ‘a good walk’ however defined, but the day had got very hot by then and we were knackered from all the mooching about; since mooching can at least as exhausting as actually walking.

 

Of course there are things in Harwich that aren’t secret and aren’t gardens but are still interesting, especially to wanderers like me.  Hell, I even found a Thomasson:

 

THE AMBLING ASSASSINS

 Perhaps like me you’ve been reading some alarming stuff about walking among cows.  The Sunday Times mag a couple of weeks back had a cover article titled ‘Natural Born Killers’ and inside the shout line was, ‘Ramblers beware: there’s a new killer in the countryside.’  The article was by Sian Boyle.

Now, as you know, I’m all for asserting that walking is not an entirely safe and cozy activity, that there are risks and dangers, and that’s all part of the appeal, but of the various things I worry about while walking, until now cows haven't been one of them.

 

The deal is that whereas you and I might think cows are benign, indeed bovine, creatures, apparently they kill and injure a significant number of walkers in Britain.  According to the Health and Safety Executive,  9 members of the public were killed between 2017 and 2022, along with 23 farm workers, and in the years 2020/1 31 people received cow-related ‘non-fatal injuries’.  This doesn’t seem a huge number, but it’s far more than most of us would have imagined, and according to Sian Boyle ‘Campaigners believe this doesn’t tell the whole story.’  There's a website (see below) called killercows.co.uk which reports and publicizes incidents.

 

Some of these incidents involve dog walkers, where the hound comes between a cow and her calf, and sometimes it’s people who don’t understand the basic common sense rules of walking through fields, but it still seems a lot of deaths and injuries.  That Times article does admit 'there’s something comical about the idea of a herd of cows on the rampage,’ but I do have a friend of a friend who was out walking and had a cow sit on him.  I don't know the precise details but I gather he’s never been the same since.

 

So I’ve been reviewing my own walking practice regarding cows and although I’ve never had any trouble, I’m always  wary and I try not to bother them.

 

A commenter on Killer Cows advises, ‘Make a lot of noise, clap your hands and charge at them – but don’t get too close to them when you do i.e. always stay out of kicking range. They always stop in their tracks and if you keep it up they will stay away from you while you get out of their way.’  I hope I won’t have to put that to the test.  A letter in the Times suggested sticking your fingers up the cow's nostrils.

 

I suppose you could avoid trouble by being an urban flaneur rather than a country rambler, but avoiding the countryside altogether seems a bit defeatist.

 

The pics scattered throughout this post were taken in my own wanderings among cows.  I never felt scared, but maybe I should have.

 

This last pictures shows a bull seen while it and I were walking in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It looks, and indeed proved to be, harmless, but I know that doesn’t prove anything.

 

The online group/blog Killer Cows can be found here at https://killercows.co.uk

SHIFTING SANDS

 I was saddened, though hardly surprised, when authorities in California confirmed that the remains found last weekend by a couple of hikers on Mount Baldy were those of the actor Julian Sands.

 

He had set off on a solo hike on January 13, in severe weather conditions and hadn’t returned. 

 

Media reports seem to say Sands was both a walker and a climber, and although of course you can be both, I think people are generally one or the other.  Some of the paths on Mount Baldy look pretty terrifying to me but it does look like 

hard walking rather than full on mountaineering.

 

Conflating the climbing/walking dichotomy still further, Sands once said in an interview, ‘Climbing mountains, a lot of time people who don't climb mountains assume is about this great heroic sprint for the summit. And somehow this great ego-driven ambition. But actually it's the reverse. It's about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It's not so much a celebration of oneself but the eradication of one's self consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony hopefully with your environment.’

 

I suppose in the end we all become one with the environment, Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,  With rocks, and stones, and trees.