GEOFF NICHOLSON: THE LONG LOST WALKER

YOHJI, BARE

2025-01-13T00:55:00.000-08:00

This is Yohji Yamamoto 81 year old Japanese ‘master of fashion’ (I’m quoting the Financial Times).

And in an interview in that paper he says, ‘Today my meditation happens when my son visits me in Tokyo and we walk the dog together. It’s my happiest moment. I wake up naturally at five in the morning and wait for my son who wakes up at six. Then we walk for one hour. There’s the push and pull of the lead in my hand. As my dog leads I follow. In that moment I meditate.’

Well OK. Meditation, we know comes I many, many forms.

Elsewhere he says, ‘I have travelled all around the world, mostly walking around, looking at landscapes, rocky sceneries, and plants and flowers. Nature is incredibly strong. I have said to myself that I will never be able to design such beauty.’

What took you so long, Yohji?

This is a pair of sneakers he designed. 429 quid to you.

EVERY LITTLE STEP YOU TAKE

2025-01-10T03:19:00.000-08:00

“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.” ― John Buchan.

I’ve been waiting for this. The 39th step moment.

I have a very, very poor step counting app on my phone. I’ve always thought that the whole business of having to do a certain number of steps each day was pretty bogus, but I admit there’s a certain pleasure in seeing the numbers rising, or there would be if you could believe in them.

My own very, very poor step counting app seems to pluck numbers out of the ether that have little relation to anything, certainly not to any distance I’ve actually walked.

Worse still, the inamorata has the same app on her phone, and there have been days when we’ve walked exactly the same routes and she’s clocked up a couple of thousand steps while I’ve clocked up a couple of hundred.

Since I think the whole thing is bogus I can’t get very upset about it and I wouldn’t say that on the day that my app told me I’d walked 39 steps I actually had but it is just about possible. I’d scarcely left the house that day since it’s been so bloody cold out there. And accurate or not there was pleasure to be had in seeing that magical number of 39 appear on my screen.

Just as there was in this sight in Harwich, a set of steps with the number 39 painted on the nearby wall.

The world is full of small pleasures. Am I right, sir?

Quite right, old chap.

DISLODGED

2025-01-05T04:09:00.000-08:00

It was sad to read last week of the death of David Lodge. He had a significant, if oblique, influence on my life, although needless to say I had no influence on his.

When I was in my early teens and had just started to read ‘grown up’ books (whatever that might mean) I borrowed a copy of The British Museum is Falling Down from the local library. It’s a book about PhD students at London University. At the time I had no idea what people did at universities and if I’d even heard the term PhD I certainly didn’t know what it meant.

However from reading the book I learned that there were people in the world who spent all their days in libraries, reading and writing, while working on a thesis. This came as a huge surprise. It seemed as improbable as the wildest science fiction.

Anyway, I eventually got the hang of that. And a few decades later I was at a literary festival at Dartington College, on a panel with David Lodge. We were in a lecture theatre that had a balcony, and although the balcony wasn’t being used for spectators, about halfway through the event a solitary figure appeared in the empty seats up there. It was Malcolm Bradbury!!

It felt like a visit from a deity and it concentrated the mind no end.

After the event I was standing around talking to Lodge and Bradbury and their partners and one of them (alas I forget which one) said, “Geoff, we’re all going for a walk. Will you come with us?”

And I had to say no, because I’d organized for a friend to come and give me a lift to the place I was staying overnight and I didn’t think I could say to him, just hang on for a couple of hours while I go for a walk with these literary luminaries.

It was one of the greatest walking regrets I’ve ever had.

Photo by Gunter Glucklich

WALKERS INCARNATE

2024-12-30T03:33:00.000-08:00

It was Boxing Day and I was leafing through Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, you know the way you do, and I came upon one of his observations that I’d never noticed before. Benjamin writes, “The sandwich-man is the last incarnation of the flaneur.”

Of course Benjamin isn’t talking about a man who walks the street with a handcart full of BLTs and chip butties, but rather the type of man who historically walked the streets with advertising boards strapped to his back and front. This kind of thing.

In fact that’s a still from The Sandwich Man, a 1966 film starring Michael Bentine, who also co-wrote, and featuring a panoramic cast of British comedy troopers, Dora Bryan, Bernard Cribbins, Harry H Corbett, Diana Dors, Stanley Holloway, Wilfred Hyde White, Terry Thomas, Ron Moody, Norman Wisdom, Suzi Kendall, among many others.

Imdb describes the plot as: “A man with a sandwich-board (advert) wanders around London meeting many strange characters.”

Having now watched the film, I can tell you this isn’t a very accurate description, and it makes it sound rather more fun that it is. Yes, Michael Bentine walks the streets of London advertising the wares of a tailor on his boards, and things do happen around him, rather weary comedy routines mostly, but he tends to be just standing there watching and smirking.

It’s impossible to think of him as a flaneur, but he certainly does get around. We see him in Croydon, Piccadilly, at Tower Bridge, the London Palladium, in Surbiton, in Trafalgar Square, at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, even in Dulwich Park. Of course it’s best not to ask how he gets to all these places on foot in a single day, but that’s movie magic for you. And London does look wonderful in the film – very sixties, i.e. very modern in some sense, very old fashioned in others, both very familiar and very alien.

There aren’t many reflections on walking, flaneurism or anything else, although the wonderful John Le Mesurier makes a very brief appearance as ‘religious sandwich man’ - (and is the best thing in the film by miles if you ask me), and he tells us the sandwich man’s motto is “A fair day’s walk for a fair day’s pay ... If you’ll take the advice of an elderly sandwich man, see it all happen but never get involved … And never wander from the path of righteousness, brother.” Words to live by.

I’m not saying that The Sandwich Man is a Christmas substitute for Die Hard or It’s a Wonderful Life, but I’m glad I saw it. And as I watched I couldn’t help thinking about Anthony Newley in The Strange World of Gurney Slade – which was a short TV made six years earlier, but it feels like a much more ‘sixties’ creation than The Sandwich Man – genuinely strange and surreal, sometimes experimental, sometimes downright Theatre of the Absurd. And with a lot of walking.

WALKING SOMEWHERE ELSE

2024-12-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

Here's a thing that popped up on Instagram a little while ago

- a quotation (and pic) from Buckminster Fuller “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”

To which I suppose you might ask, “Well yes, but how often exactly?”

Anyway, it did make me think, in a way that I’d never quite thought before, that one of the great and comparatively rare pleasures of walking, is to be strolling along, going nowhere in particular, and suddenly to come across a geodesic dome.

In Los Angeles you can do it just by walking along Sunset Boulevard and seeing the Arclight cinema.

And if you walk further you might see them in some unexpected places – not a million miles away from the Hollywood sign:

And in Glendale you might once have walked by this dry cleaner, which I’m pretty sure was abandoned despite the Open sign on the door.

Or you might walk down a suburban street and think, who on earth lives in a house like this?

The experience can be even better if you’re walking in the desert. You crest a hill and look down, and boom there it is:

Or here:

Or here in Arizona:

Inevitably the experience happens rather more often in the United States that it does in old England but it’s not completely unknown. There were these belonging to restaurant in Gloucestershire named (I think) The Ragged Cot:

Photo by Caroline Gannon

And there are these bad boys in Victoria Park,

the kind of backdrop that a lad might use for an author portrait:

Photo by Travis Elborough

As for the question of whether Buckminster Fuller was much of a walker, well, his 1981 book The Critical Path certainly makes some mention of walking, as when he writes, “We walk right foot, left foot, not right foot, wrong foot.” Though I’d say we surely all put a foot wrong once in a while.

And here he writes later in the book, “As I have mentioned before and now repeat in a more comprehensive manner, in 1800 the average human being was walking an annually cumulative distance of 1,100 miles and riding ten additional annual miles. By 1900 the average human being was yet walking a total of yearly distance of 1,100miles but the average U.S.A. citizen's annual vehicle-ridden miles had increased to 400. All humanity is as yet in 1980 walking an annual average of 1,100 miles but in the U.S.A., Europe, and parts of the Near East, Asia, Africa, and Australia, all men, women, and youngsters free to travel, are averaging over 20,000 annual miles of vehicular travel.”

I’ve no idea how accurate his numbers are, though the general principle seems reasonable. I know a good many people who walk more than 1,100 miles a year; as for the 20,000 vehicular miles, I suppose much depends on whether you’re frequent flyer.

But here’s a thing. During World War One, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, daughter of an architect, and when the war was over he started a company with his father-in-law, making bricks out of wood shavings. Things didn’t go well, and on the verge of bankruptcy, they sold the business 1927. At much the same time, Anne gave birth to a baby daughter. As a jobless new dad Fuller was deeply depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, and by his own account, contemplating suicide. But suddenly when he found himself floating a few feet above the ground, bathed in sparkling light; which I suppose is walking of a sort. He felt time standing still and he heard a voice say, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.” Note the capitalization and absence of definite article.

WANDERING LOST

2024-12-06T11:00:00.000-08:00

Pic from RCMP

It was old man Tolkien who said “Not all who wander are lost,” and how true that is. Some of them are psychogeographers, and some are following their GPS not realising it’s leading them astray. But then again some of them really are lost, like this this guy, twenty year old, Sam Benastick who went missing on a ten day solo fishing and hiking trip in Redfern-Keily Park in the northern Rockies, British Columbia.

When he failed to return at the expected time, and as temperatures dropped to -20C (-4F) there was an official search, but failing to find him, the authorities called it off fearing the worst.

And then 5 weeks later he turned up alive, even if not exactly well. He was found by two trail workers heading for Redfern Lake. They knew exactly who he was. He’d sliced up his sleeping bag and wrapped it around his legs to stay warm.He was suffering from frostbite and also, get this, smoke inhalation caused when the makeshift shelter he’d built for himself burned down. An ambulance was called to take him to hospital, and Benastick was said to be in “rough shape.”

It’s not clear how much walking he did while he was missing - one account said he was chased by a wolf, although the BBC did manage to come up with what must be one of the most bathetic captions in their history, "Sam Benastick is an avid hiker."

Avid hiker indeed! I wonder if he's less avid than he used to be.

Benastick apparently told police he stayed in his car for a couple of days and then walked to a creek where he camped for 10 to 15 days. He was carrying a tarp, a backpack and some camping supplies. He also had a dirt bike, and according to his mother a lot of peanut butter. And eventually he made his way to the area where he flagged down his rescuers. A very happy ending

Anyway here he is, in and out of hospital

I do hope Taylor Swift sends him some love).

The BBC quotes Adam Hawkins, the search manager, as saying he’s ‘intensely curious’ to learn more about the area where Mr. Benastick was found and what he was doing while missing. It’s a curiosity many of us share, in a good way.

SOURCES OF WALKING

2024-11-25T02:06:00.000-08:00

I bought a copy of Journey to the Source of the Nile by Christopher Ondaatje. It was in the local charity shop, and I bought it mostly because the index contains 60 odd references to Sir Richard Francis Burton. This is Mr Ondaatje:

He tells us, among many other things, that “the Swahili word for ‘white man’ is mzungu which comes from mzungu katimeaning ‘wandering around in circles, going nowhere.’” I think that’s worth knowing.

Also, if Ondaatje is to be believed (and why would you doubt him?), walking home from dinner in Zanzibar can be a scary business. He eats at a Goan restaurant called Chit Chat which he finds to be “a fabulous treat,” … “However walking back … through the dark shadowy streets of Stone Town was far from pleasant. As the evening darkened, the lanes of Stone Town became really claustrophobic. Figures lurked in every archway and we were studied very closely as we walked quickly back to the safety of our small hotel. I would certainly not have liked to make the journey across town on my own.” People said much the same to me about walking at night in Dublin.

Meanwhile, in tandem, I’ve been rereading Nabokov’s Lectures on Literatureand here he is writing about Joyce’s Ulysses, “If you have ever tried to stand and bend your head so as to look back between your knees with your face turned upside down, you will see the world in a totally different light. Try it on the beach: it is very funny to see people walking when you look at them upside down. They seem to be, with each step, disengaging their feet from the glue of gravitation without losing their dignity. Well, this trick of changing the vista, of changing the prism and the viewpoint, can be compared to Joyce’s new literary technique.”

Well yes, I’m sure it can, and I know that Nabokov is one of the greats, even so I never imagined he was a man who’d look back between his knees with his face turned upside down, but apparently he did, and again that seems to be something worth knowing.

And then one day in the Times last week, under the headline “Can’t Sleep? Don’t panic – here’s how to cope” we were told “A BMJ study showed gentle 30-minute morning walks were enough to improve memory and executive function.”

Honey, I didn’t even know I had an executive function but apparently I do, and so do most other people. A little research tells me “Executive function is a set of mental skills. It includes working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control.” Well OK – and this gentle 30 minute morning walk – is that a version of wandering around in circles, going nowhere? If so, that’s OK by me.

WALKING WITH SEMI-DERELICTION

2024-11-07T04:58:00.000-08:00

I was walking in Stratford, the one in London, not the one upon Avon. I had my reasons. Stratford is usually just a place I just pass through on the train but this time I walked its streets and I was glad I did.

Stratford shows the world a face that is shiny, glossy, modern, sky-scraperish, zestily architectural, and the buildings have names like The Stratosphere Tower, the Unex Tower, the Legacy Tower, and many more besides, some still in the process of being built.

At this point I couldn’t tell you which building is which but collectively they make for some elegantly dramatic backgrounds for the urban pedestrian. And nearby of course there are towers that are less shiny and glossy – for example the Carpenters Estate, old style council housing, though (as is the way of these things) it’s currently being restored and regenerated: a billion pound rebuild delivering 2022 homes. You do the maths.

And I found myself walking past James Riley Point, part of the Carpenters Estate, which was in an elegant state of decay. It’s described by the architects currently working on it as a “23-storey semi-derelict residential tower” – and this one, they say, is not only being restored and regenerated, but actually reinvented. Oh boy.

I was able to meander around the tower at ground level – I love a bit of ruin, or indeed semi-dereliction - and saw these curious and mysterious objects set into the ground. Can anybody tell me what they are/were?

And I was able to look up at the pebble dashing on the building (I don’t think we’d call it cladding but I could be wrong) – some of which was obviously falling off and there were big lumps of it lying on the ground nearby.

Now being a scavenger, curator, collector and occasional recycler I was keen to pick up a lump of the stuff and take it back to the Nicholson Archive. But the lump I wanted was too big and heavy. and I was on foot and had somewhere else to be. If I’d had a car with me it might all have been very different.

And as night drew in I wandered a little further, and I think you know that much as I love a good tower block, I enjoy a good obelisk even more. And there on the Broadway was/is the Samuel Gurney Memorial, strangely out of place in its current surroundings but nothing wrong with that:

Now, need I say that I had never heard of Samuel Gurney but it turns out he was a banker, philanthropist, and MP, pro-penal reform, anti-slavery, anti-capital punishment, and apparently an all round good egg. He died in 1856 and the obelisk was erected in 1861, it’s also a drinking fountain.

Now, I imagine the billion pound rebuild may contain the odd "hydration station," but I’ll bet it doesn’t contain any new obelisks. I’d love to be proved wrong.

THE WELL WORN WALKER

2024-11-04T01:10:00.000-08:00

A.E. Housman is not an open book to me, and much of what I know about him comes from an essay I read by Alan Bennett. And the most interesting thing in that essay runs as follows, “At Cambridge, where he was professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear – a habit he shared with Swinburne.”

The curious part of that sentence is the word “all.” Just how much, how many kinds, of underwear did he (or they) wear? More than just vest and underpants? Combinations? Drawers? Something more exotic? This kind of thing?

If a work of statuary can be believed, Housman did look like a walker.

Swinburne on the other hand looks like a man who’s got his knickers in a twist.

Though this is how Swinburne looks in a portrait by Robert M.B. Paxton, at the National Portrait Gallery, which is much more persuasive.

Alan Bennett does look convincingly like a walker.

His underwear arrangements, to date, must remain a private matter, and personally I prefer it that way.

GONE FOR A BURTON

2024-10-25T05:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve been walking in Dublin. I was there for the 7^thSir Richard Francis Burton Conference, where my pal Anthony Miller and I were presenting a paper (possibly just having an on stage conversation) under the title “Burton as Psychogeographer and Walker.” We looked like this:

PHOTO BY CAROLINE GANNON

I don’t think there was anything controversial about this paper. Most travelers are psychogeographers to the extent that they “study (or at least experience) the effects of the geographical environment, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” And one way or another they often end up doing a fair amount of walking, when the car breaks down, when the bus drops you off in the wrong place, or in Burton’s case when the camel dies under you. This is Burton walking in his own garden in Trieste - I guess he had to hold still for the camera.

I’d thought there must be some connection to be made between Burton and Joyce, and no doubt there is, but as part of my research I tracked down an entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary dated 30^thJuly 1931. Nicolson was lunching with a group of literati including his publisher from Putnam, in order to meet James Joyce. Joyce was “not a very convenient guest at luncheon” and they struggled for conversation.

Knowing that Joyce had lived in Trieste where Burton had once been consul, one of the guests, Desmond McCarthy, asked Joyce, “Are you interested in Burton?”

“Not in the very least,” Joyce replied.

Still, the conference gave me, and everyone else, plenty of time for walking around the city, and it seems hard to go anywhere without getting the feeling that you’re walking in Joyce’s footsteps, which is no bad thing.

A walker doesn’t necessarily need a project but, I found myself noticing and photographing various “establishments,” whether in business or abandoned or somewhere in between, and in some cases I managed to photograph other walkers, walking past these places. This kind of thing:

Of course we psychogeographers do love a good map and it was easy to find free maps in Dublin, offered by various tourist attractions but this one, not free, and very hard to slip into your pocket, is one of the best 3-D maps I’ve even seen, metal and stone, about two feet across, depicting (unless I'm mistaken) the outline of Dublin Castle. I mean you probably wouldn’t use it to get anywhere but as a topographical object it’s hard to beat.

Oh and here’s a thing you might like. As discussed earlier elsewhere, if you go to the Burton archive at Orleans House in Richmond you’ll see a plaster caster of one of Burton’s hands and one of his feet.

And if you were drifting around the Dublin streets up by the Glasnevin Cemetery, you might well see this cast of a foot in the window of a shop called Crafty Studio.

Coincidence? Synchronicity? The universe sending me a message? Nah, there’s no such thing.

WALKING AND DIFFERENCE

2024-10-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

This is a photograph of Jaques Derrida walking:

Derrida has been on my mind, well, more than usual, because I just read a review in the LRB, 10 October 2024, by Jonathan Rée, discussing the recent translations of Derrida’s Hospitality, Volumes 1 and 2.

Rée writes “Derrida had a marvellous literary range, and a sharp eye for details that might elude the rest of us. (Reading him reminds me of taking a walk with a friend who will spot a ghost orchid, a heath fritillary and an alpine swift while I am just enjoying a companionable stroll.”

This is a ghost orchid:

This is a heath fritillary:

This is an alpine swift:

Speaking as someone who couldn’t identify any of those things, I do wonder whether it might not be rather annoying to walk with somebody who was constantly pointing out things that I didn’t recognize.

Though I suppose being with Derrida might create other irritations, such as his obvious vulnerability outside off stump.

WALKING WITH ADDITIONS

2024-10-04T08:13:00.000-07:00

A note comes over the transom from Jane Freeman, one of my regular correspondents, also walker and top artist (she did some extraordinary pictures inspired by Jane Eyre) like this,

“Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.”

I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he tried.

Jane reminds me about William Burroughs' ‘psychogeographic practice’ described as ‘Walking on Colours.’

Let Old Bill explain,“Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness. I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.” This is James Arness:

(The Thing of course is a Volkswagen Type 181, and if you think that sucker is amphibious, well good luck)

A lot the time I think I’m ‘over’ Burroughs, but then I reread something like that I think I’m not so over him after all. That passage is from “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” and appears in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985. This is a man with an actual Burroughs adding machine:

I’ve never done the walking on colours thing and I suppose I’m unlikely to, being red/green colour blind. I’d be following what I thought was a red fire engine and then I’d suddenly realize, or somebody would tell me, I was actually following a green bus. I exaggerate, but only a little.

Admittedly blue and yellow should be less of a problem.

WHEREAS I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WOULD BE THE BEST PART

2024-09-14T23:01:00.000-07:00

WALKING WITH ARCHITECTURE (AND CARS)

2024-09-03T02:59:00.000-07:00

And so we went to Frinton on Sea, in Essex, and not for the first time.

Like many people I usually go there to walk around and stare at the modernist architecture in the Frinton Park Estate and although we certainly did do that, I thought I needed a new angle, or at least variation on an old one. So I continued my comparatively recent obsession with circular windows, of which there was no shortage.

That was fine, but then I noticed there were also quite a few cool old cars on the street, which I hadn’t been expecting.

It’s an odd thing isn’t it, any walk, every walk, is improved by the presence of interesting or curious architecture and any street is improved by the presence of cool old cars

This is why American Street Photographers of the 1960s and 70s, most of them walkers by necessities, had life so easy in one sense. Point your camera towards a mid of mine-period architecture or even a garage, and include a car with fins, and it’s hard to go wrong.

Winogrand

Maier

But times change, I find modern architecture, whether good or bad, infinitely fascinating, whereas modern cars rarely look like anything at all. And it must be said that in Frinton I never found a cool car and a cool piece of architecture in the same frame, unless a marquee counts as architecture.

And I see there’s also a new book forthcoming from the modernist titled A Time ⋅ A Place, a book in which 'every "Car of the Year" (1964-1982) is paired with a building completed in the same year' - photographed by Daniel Hopkinson, researched and written by John Piercy Holroyd.

OMG, I can barely imagine the amount of work that went into that and I certainly didn’t put that amount of work into a day trip to Frinton, obviously.

There used to be a trope that said ‘Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the Incontinent’ a sneer directed at old and weak-bladdered Essex holidaymakers. But insult or not, I found Frinton to be very well supplied with toilets, and just as important, very well signposted.

And the architecture of the main toilet on the sea front is understatedly epic – though you do have to pay 20 pence to get in there. A small price to pay.

TO BE A WALKING PILGRIM

2024-08-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

Some folks walk the Camino de Santiago:

Some folks walk the Great Wall of China:

Some folks head for the deep north, like our pal Basho:

Me, I went to Walthamstow and walked from the tube station to see the Banksy mural on the side of Bonners Fish Bar (no apostrophe). It looked just like this – protective Perspex in place.

The shop was closed, and obviously had been for a while, perhaps for an annual summer holiday, and a great pile of mail had been pushed through the letterbox and was lying all over the floor.

It was a great missed commercial opportunity, I’d have thought – ‘Get your Banksy chip butty right here!’

But Banksy wasn’t the only artist whose work could be seen as you walked the streets of Walthamstow. Here for example is the Walthamstow Sculpture Park, in somebody’s front window:

And here’s whatever this is:

Sometimes it feels good to be a pilgrim.

THE PERFUMED CASCADE

2024-08-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) may remember that about a year ago I agreed to lead a literary walk based in Richmond, and I had the idea of doing a route that took in the school where Sir Richard Francis Burton was educated (or at least taught), and ended at the Orleans House Gallery which houses the Burton Collection, an archive which among other gems contains plaster casts of one of Burton’s hands, and one of his feet – the left in both cases. I thought it would be a fitting climax to a walk if we ended up staring at a plaster cast of someone’s foot. The case looks like this on the Orleans House website.

The idea didn’t come off because although the Burton Collection could, and can, be seen on request, the gallery at that time, they told me, was in the process of changing curators so things were ‘a bit chaotic’ and there’d be no chance of seeing it for a few months. So I led a different walk.

For some of us, Burton is a fascinating though paradoxical and contested figure, on the one hand an intrepid explorer, a proto-anthropologist and sexologist; on the other a man with some less than enlightened views on race and sex. I couldn’t have said that Burton had been ‘cancelled’ by Orleans House, but it certainly seemed he’d been sidelined.

Still, thanks to the good people involved with the Sir Richard Francis Burton Society, chiefly Martin Norris, a small group of us went into the collection recently and we were allowed an hour to look at, though not touch, items from the collection. These included, among other things, writing implements, a sword, photograph albums, a cigar case and a fez.

And there, sure enough, were the casts of Burton’s hand and foot. I took a photo - not a very good one because of the overhead lighting and all reflections - but at least it proves I was actually there.

I’m still working out how much of a walker Burton was, but one of the great things about our archive visit was a chance to look at some of Burton’s shoes. I’m sure you can tell a lot by looking at a dead man’s shoes. I recall being horrified as a kid when my grandfather died and various male relatives started trying on his shoes to see if they fitted and whether they could use them. Now it seems a perfectly reasonable and rather touching thing to do. There was definitely no trying on of Burton’s footwear, obviously.

There were fencing shoes, slippers, a wooden clog, some very fine boots. The patterns of wear were interesting, at least one pair looked as though it might have been reheeled.

It was a great afternoon. The visit wasn’t exactly a walking expedition but we did walk to Orleans House from the pub where we met near Twickenham station, and on the way we saw a pair of marble buttocks peeping out at us over a wall and behind railings. So on the way back we took a closer look.

The buttocks belong to one of a number of Carrera marble statues, the Oceanides, part of the York House Cascade, in York House Gardens.

Like Burton himself these do have a convoluted history. As I understand it, they were carved somewhere near the turn of the 19^thto the 20^thcentury by Oscar Spalmach, and they passed through the hands of Whitaker Wright, who intended to use them at his estate in Surrey. However, in 1904 Wright was found guilty of fraud, and committed suicide by swallowing cyanide in an anteroom of the Royal Courts of Justice.

York House belonged to Sir Ratanji Tata, described by some sources as ‘an Indian merchant prince’ and he bought the statues in 1909, still in packing cases, to adorn his property. Tata died in 1918, and when his wife returned to India she sold York House to Twickenham Urban District Council for use as municipal offices, and the statues were part of the deal. After many decades of neglect and vandalism the statues were eventually saved and restored.

And there they are today, naked, shameless, uncancelled. Sir Richard Francis Burton would surely have loved them. The Oceanides – not a pair of shoes between them.

TIME OF THE SIGNS

2024-08-08T08:49:00.000-07:00

I enjoy a good sign while I’m walking. Who doesn’t? They can be informative, decorative, perplexing, absurd, and no doubt many other things too.

Suppose you were walking in Myland (it’s part of Colchester) and you saw this one ‘Myland Welcomes Careful Drivers,’

Would you think,

a) that they don’t welcome careful walkers?

b) that you can walk as carelessly as you like, and you’re still welcome?

Or would you have better things to think about?

Signs with missing letters are always fun and in this case there’s no doubt what the sign means, but it does make me wonder how many letters a sign can lose before it becomes utterly incomprehensible.

That temporary bus stop sign had obviously seen a lot of use but nearby was this absolutely pristine sign telling me that the crossing was out of use. I suppose time will take its toll.

Not so far away was this, a signal, rather than a sign.

And here’s a sign from the company in charge of the discarded lights, temporary bus stops and out of order crossings, and no doubt much else:

I didn’t even know there was any such thing as the ‘Traffic Industry.’ ‘What you doing these days Bob?’ ‘Oh I’m working in the Traffic Industry, you know, supporting it.’

Of course it’s always good for a walker to be warned when the footpath (or indeed footway) ahead is closed:

but it’s a little disappointing when you get there and find it’s not so much closed as very slightly diverted:

Now, if you’re looking for the ‘site compound’, it’s no doubt very useful to have a sign directing you there, though this one does seem to be up in the sky.

As for parking regulations – forget about it:

And finally in the Asda car park, at the end of my walk, there was a sign telling me to have a safe journey, which I’d already had, but no doubt there are other journeys ahead, which I hope will be safe, and maybe signs will play their part.

BRIGHTER THAN DORIS DAY? WELL NO, DON'T BE RIDICULOUS, HOW COULD IT BE?

2024-08-05T03:40:00.000-07:00

So off we went for a walk at the seaside, in Brightlingsea. I’d never been there before. When I was doing an MA in Modern European Drama at Essex University, thereby guaranteeing my unemployability, I used to see many buses with Brightlingsea on their destination boards, but I never got on one of them. So off we went.

It was a hot Sunday afternoon. There were a lot of people walking, some more stylishly than others.

Now I’m no body fascist, much less a fat-shamer, but I mean, really some things are just better covered up.

It’s not only the groynes you need warning against.

There were some top quality beach huts, this one with a skull and crossbones. Everything’s better with a skull, IMHO:

And on the beach we found a Henry-Moore style rock. I’ve noticed before that on the beaches of Britain you used to find endless rocks and stones with holes going right through them. These days there are a lot fewer. The obvious reason is that people pick up the ones with holes and take then home and put a string through them and hang them up, but no doubt there are other possible explanations. This one stands, or I suppose reclines, alone without need of string:

In the town there was a marker for the ‘1953 surge,’ part of the devastating East Anglian floods.

And there was a place to put your not quite extinguished cigarettes, which looked to me as though there had been a certain amount of after-the-fact combustion.

Will it surprise you to learn that this was at the fire station?

And we walked in The Lozenge – a ‘nature area … bringing you closer to nature, 9am till dusk March to end of November.’

You know how I like maps, this one in dappled sunlight, with a teasel, was the business – mapping the bench and the bin; the important stuff:

The best thing about the Lozenge: me and the inamorata were the only ones there. I suppose some people wanted to be closer to the food trucks than to nature. And here was a gentle reminder to make up your bloody mind about what you want before you get to the front of the queue.

WHITE WALKING

2024-07-30T02:37:00.000-07:00

I went to London to see my doctor who told me I was still alive, which seemed like good news. So the next day I went for a walk in and around White City, with my boon companion Ashley, flaneur of that parish, more or less. The temperature and the humidity were punishing so we didn’t walk as far or with as much zest as we might have in other circumstances.

Reader, it felt, at first, like walking in the future. There were shiny, fresh-out–of-the-box buildings with no indication of what went on inside them. There was free wi-fi outdoors in public spaces that had lots of places to sit. There were chain restaurants I’d never heard of before - Potager and Dear Grace – and the latter had set up a giant screen outside for those who wanted to watch the cricket. On a different day that would have been me.

In fact there were some buildings I could tell the purpose of; a mighty concentration of places where people lived, developments with names like White City Living, Cascade Apartments, Belvedere Row and the improbable Bowery Apartments. These mostly looked pretty good architecturally, and completely unaffordable.

I’d been to White City once or twice in the past, when I’d had some business or other at the BBC TV Centre. The BBC building remains, but is also converted into swanky flats, though there’s still a naked golden statue of Helios at the centre of the garden. If the sun god isn’t permanent, what is?

Although this White City walk was just a meander, there was a general plan to go and look at (and walk in) the Japanese Garden in Hammersmith Park – which dates from 1910, and was originally part of the Japan-British Exhibition held to strengthen the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. It’s a long story which I won’t tell here, though it's worth noting that White City was then part of Shepherd's Bush, which in many ways it still is.

Photographs from the time show it to have been a wild and complex affair, and it must have required a huge amount of work for what was a very short-lived exhibition.

There were two gardens at the exhibition, The Garden of Peace and the Garden of the Floating Isle. Now there’s only one: ‘The Garden of Peace was converted into a more traditional British public park named “Hammersmith Park”’ – I’m quoting here from the Japanese Garden Society.

I’m surprised, and pleased, by how many Japanese gardens there are in Britain - at least thirty open to the public – from Lowther Castle to the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, from Dartington Hall to the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and so on. I confess I haven’t walked in all that many of these.

I suppose this prevalence of Japanese gardens may possibly be because the features of a Japanese garden are easy to identify and easy to replicate: like these lanterns in Hammersmith Park, sponsored by various Japanese corporate interests.

There is also a type of Japanese garden called (at least by English speakers) a ‘stroll garden.’ just right for walkers, or meanderers, like me. This one’s in Kew.

In the Japanese Garden in Hammersmith Park on the day I was there, a few homeless people were setting up camp, and a few young women in bikinis were sunbathing but I thought it best not to photograph them.

Adjacent to, or possibly part of, the Hammersmith Park is something called the Wood Crescent Playground: you know, for the kids.

And as we walked around, a moment came when I looked at the mound in the playground (above) and it reminded me powerfully of this other mound in the Jencks Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, (below).

Possibly the heat was getting to me.

EDDIE AND ME

2024-07-21T08:54:00.000-07:00

More than half a lifetime ago, I was (for want of a better term) a security guard at the Hayward Gallery for their Thirties exhibition, and one of the items I had to guard was this head of Sir Edwin Lutyens. (Sometimes it’s referred to as a bust.)

I might just about have heard the name Lutyens before I worked at the Hayward, but only just. Nevertheless I loved that head: how could you not? And to be fair it didn’t need much guarding.

My job was by no means a walking job but we weren’t allowed to sit down and so we paced up and down the galleries hour after hour, day after day, as a deterrent.

Walking in galleries can be hard work even when you’re keen to see the exhibition; walking back and forth when you’re just a deterrent is much harder.

I gather that the head belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum and it incorporates Lutyens’ design for the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

And then last week I was walking round the Victoria and Albert as a punter not a security guard, there to see the Tropical Modernism exhibition, and there was old man Lutyens again. It felt like meeting an old friend.

Judge for yourself whether it's a good likeness.

DRIFTING WITH WITH DEAKIN

2024-07-08T08:01:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius, his ‘psychobiography’ – partly fictionalized - of John Deakin, in which he ‘follows in the footsteps of the famed Soho photographer. kept man, primitive painter and secret witness.’ I’m quoting from the blub there as you probably guessed.

The writing’s great of course – it’s by Iain Sinclair, but it’s not a pacey read. The problem I personally may have with it, is that I’m not all that fascinated by the gilded seamy glamour of Soho, the much recorded nexus of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson, Muriel Belcher, the Colony Club, the French House, all the booze and the gay sex with dodgy geezers, some of them in scarily sharp suits. And it seems to me that Sinclair isn’t entirely fascinated either, though I’m sure both he and I have done our miles pounding the streets of Soho.

The book picks up a lot of energy when Deakin, because of Bacon, becomes an habitué of Limehouse where he ‘walked. Alone. Uncommissioned. His patrons, the indulgent editors, had no part in this.’ The section is titled ‘Deakin as Psychogeographer,’ and Limehouse is Sinclair territory too - see Ludheat - and so he can walk the same streets as Deacon, and many others. Some of Deakin’s archive can be seen on Instagram.

Sinclair mentions the photographer and ‘compulsive pedestrian’ Harry Diamond, who sometimes modeled for Lucian Freud. Sinclair writes, ‘The lengthy sessions Freud demanded interrupted his (Harry D’s) eternal stamping across London. … Harry had no use for taxis. He knew that blisters were the surest route to Enlightenment.’ Somebody, not me, should have that tattooed across their instep. This is a self-portrait of Harry Diamond in Brick Lane in 1973.

There is no doubt a mighty book to be written about photographers who walk and walkers who take photographs, though how would the poor author ever be able to afford to pay for the use of the images? We might quote Julio Cortazar, as Sinclair does, ‘But in all the ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not that lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun’s rays off an old stone.’

I don’t understand why it’s almost a duty rather than entirely a duty, but maybe it loses something in the translation.

VOTING WITH MY FEET

2024-07-04T22:07:00.000-07:00

I walked up the hill to the polling station yesterday to cast my vote and participate in the democratic process.

This wasn’t any kind of politically-motivated derive, but it was a nice day, I felt like a walk, and perhaps the greatest motivation of all, I thought it might be a bugger to park near the polling station.

The walk was fine, the polling station was fine, the polling clerks were very friendly and helpful and good humoured. However, that was at 10 in the morning, and I imagine their humour might have faded somewhat by 10 at night. And so I presented my photo ID, was given a ballot paper, put my cross in a box on the paper, and put the paper in a plastic box. My civil duty was done.

And the parking?

Well of course there was enough room to park a bus, several buses, several battle buses.

I walked down the hill again, to await the tsunami.

TRAILING IN HARLOW

2024-07-02T05:27:00.000-07:00

One of the best reasons for spending a Saturday night in the Holiday Inn Express in Harlow is that come the next morning you can have a meander round the Market Square and the Broad Walk.

You could, and we sort of did, walk around it on Saturday night, but there was a certain amount of police activity which in an unknown town rather deters the casual boulevardier. Come the morning at about 9 am the place was all but deserted, although by ten it was starting to get busy, though not in a ‘police activity’ kind of way, just people on their way to Gregg’s, Primark and to the many barbers, and on the way strolling past quite a few closed down establishments.

Such a walk, inescapably, covers part of the Harwich Sculpture Trail. There are pieces of sculpture around the town, including a Henry Moore and a Rodin, though we by no means saw them all.

The sculptures we saw were great; Meat Porters by Ralph Brown, 1959

Trigon, by Lynn Chadwick, 1961

Vertex, by Paul Mason 1979

But for a man with my specialist enthusiasms they all rather fell by the wayside compared with this fine obelisk, possibly a quasi or broken obelisk by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who was one of the chief begetters of Harlow New Town, as well as architect of the London Central Mosque and the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

We also got a look at the bus station, and at Terminus House, which I thought looked all right from the outside, though according to the BBC it’s a ‘Human Warehouse,’ formerly an office block, and now hot bed of drugs and sex crime: we had to take their word for it.

This is Sir Frederick Gibberd in life:

and in sculpture:

THE MOORE THE MERRIER

2024-06-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

Here’s a psychogeographic walking project for some bright, fit, young soul who’s got a private income and lots of time on their hands. Why not walk to, between, and around, every Henry Moore sculpture in the world? Here’s a map from the Henry Moore Foundation of ‘works in public’ that gives some sense of the task.

If you wanted to restrict yourself to just the ones in Britain it would be reasonably doable, though not a walk in the park.

Japan, with a short side excursion to South Korea, would make a fine project too.

Africa needn’t trouble you much, and Russia not at all.

These thoughts are inspired, if that’s the word, by a visit to the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, (also his house Hoglands) at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. There are 70 are acres of land with 21 major works by Moore scattered across them. The sculptures are different sizes of course, but none of them is small, and some of them are absolutely massive.

70 acres provides scope for plenty of walking. The main area that visitors go to is called the sculpture lawn, then there’s a meadow and a large area designated as ‘sheep field,’ complete with sheep. In the outer reaches of the site, the sculpture thins out considerably, and that’s the evidently way Moore wanted it.

Perhaps the best thing about the gardens is how few paths there are. There are one or two, but mostly you’re free to walk where you like, make your own way, plan your own route across grassy expanses, and see the sculptures in any order you like, from any angle, from as near or as far as you like. You can even touch them, so long as you’re gentle and you don’t climb on them or their plinths.

I was left wondering how much of a walker Henry Moore was? He grew up in Castleford in Yorkshire, which is near some very good walking territory, and I take it that if you own 70 acres you’re going to do some walking one way or another.

There are certainly pictures of him walking. In later years he used a walking stick but many do. We know that he liked his sculptures to be placed and seen in the great outdoors, and there are plenty of pictures of him posing with them in wide open spaces, and presumably he walked to them.

And I find myself wondering if he ever said to his wife Irina, ‘All right love, I’m just going for a walk round the garden,’ and then she wouldn’t see him for a few hours. More research required. I’m working on it.

WALKING WORDS

2024-06-20T07:46:00.000-07:00

I do love a good concordance.

In Mike Bonsall’s majestic concordance of JG Ballard you’ll discover that the sage of Shepperton used the word walk and its derivatives well over 500 times in his fiction. I’m somehow glad to know that.

Photo by Fay Godwin

Examples:

I was walking down Shepperton High Street on my way to the shops

The psychiatrist was walking towards the pool with a dry towel.

Do you mind walking me back to the elevator? It must sound rather paranoid

I actually saw a unicorn walking on the water, its hooves shod in gold.

And so on.

https://bonsall-books.co.uk/concordance/index.htm

And now I discover a website called The Flickering Lexicon, which has a concordance of Fall lyrics, mostly by Mark E Smith I assume. Did he let anybody else get a word in?

The scores are as follows

walk - 60

walked - 11

walks - 40

walking -48

there’s one walkin, one walkmans, and one walkman’d

I do like ‘walkman’d’ – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it anywhere else.

Examples:

I was walking down the street when I tripped up on a discarded banana skin

Watch out for the lorries as you walk in the gate

You don't see rabbits being walked down the street

They are walking with M&S bags, doing the jingle bell

Hands up Billy you're walking in a crutch, yeah

Photographer unknown, at least to me.

https://dannyno.org.uk/fall/w.htm

I’m not sure that either Ballard or Smith were great walkers but so what? The words are there, in the texts, in the literature. That’s where it really matters.

JGB photo – Fay Godwin

Photographer unknown, at least to me.

Of course it’s not every author who merits a concordance (no, I’m not bitter, and yes I suppose you probably have to be dead) and even when they exist they may be done by individual titles rather than complete works, so I can’t give you the complete countdown for the whole of Virginia Woolf, but thanks to victorian-studies.net I can for Mrs Dallowayoften regarded as the crème de la crème of flaneuse fiction. It has just 12 uses of walk, but 25 walking, 25 walked, 1 walks.

Example:

Yes, he remembered Regent's Park; the long straight walk; the little house where one bought air-balls to the left.

I don’t really know what an air-ball is. Could it be this kind of thing?