Showing posts with label Walking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Walking. Show all posts

Thursday, February 22, 2024

THE SOLACE OF WALKING


I was in Faversham last Saturday for the Literary Festival, being an author, and I was on stage with Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage.  

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Among the many things we discussed and agreed on, was that a large part of walking and drifting is about noticing.  You walk, you see things, you record them in some way, in memory or a notebook or a photograph. and later, somewhere along the line, they become something else – a book, an essay, even a blog post.

 

After the event, the inamorata and I stayed in Whitstable for a couple of nights with pals Jacqueline and Nick (thanks kids), and it seemed only natural that we should all go for a walk and a drift Sunday morning and do some noticing. So that’s what we did.

 



And what did we notice?  Well I noticed this sign:




 I’m not sure that we actually walked along the Crab and Winkle Way – we certainly didn’t get as far as Canterbury - but we may have covered some small section of it

 

And I can’t speak for anybody else but one of the things I noticed was the the intersection of what we might call nature with what we might call the built environment.

 

We saw gardens including this one decorated with a stone bearing the message ‘One Who Plants a Garden Plants Happiness.’ 



Now you could argue that one who plants a garden is just as likely to plant frustration, disappointment and thankless labour, but I don’t want to rain on anybody’s gardening parade.

 

There was nature creeping up the walls of houses:




We even saw a couple of Nicholsons:




We saw some interesting ruin:

 


And we saw this classic VW bus – every drift is better when it includes a VW bus:



There was also this very noticeable mural of Somerset Maugham:

 


Now, I didn’t know that Somerset Maugham was a Whistable lad: he was born in the British Embassy in Paris.  But after both his parents died he was sent to England to live with his uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable.   

 

You know it’s a good while since I read any Somerset Maugham – I think the last book I read was Ashendenwhich I really enjoyed, so Maugham is definitely all right with me, but even so, from what I know of his life, I think perhaps he found some forms of solace even more supreme than writing.




Monday, January 29, 2024

THE DANGERS OF WALKING – ONE OF A VERY LONG SERIES


 

 

Here’s the kind of thing you don’t read every day. In fact I read it in the Evening Standard on January 12thand have been waiting to hear further developments, but as far as I can tell there haven’t been any. 




There in the paper, along with the above picture, was the headline ‘Crumbling Justice’ and the sub-headline ‘Pedestrian hurt after old Bailey Masonry Crashes into the Street Below.’  

 

From this you and I would imagine a someone was walking down the street, and a lump of stone fell off the building from a great height and hit the walker below, But then you read the article (by Tristan Kirk, who I think also took the pictures), and it reads, ‘A member of the public was hospitalised after masonry over the “decaying” historic entrance to the Old Bailey crumbled and crashed into the street below. 

‘No one was hurt when the stone fell from the building, but a pedestrian was injured after tumbling over debris on the pavement before the area had been cordoned off.’

 

Am I wrong to be disappointed by this?  Walking along and being hit by an unidentified falling object has a lot of drama, maybe even cosmic drama, this kind of thing:



     But tripping over a lump of stone that’s lying on the ground, really lacks grandeur.  The fallen piece doesn’t even look to have been very big. The little white bit on the statue in the picture below is where it fell from. 




 

Interestingly it seems to me, the pedestrian is not named in the news item. I wonder if the journalist was sparing his or her blushes.  I don’t mean to mock this or any other pedestrian but falling over in the street and ending up in hospital is pretty hopeless and humiliating.  I know because I’ve done it.  And there wasn’t even a lump of masonry to trip over.








Friday, December 15, 2023

AN OCCASIONALLY WEARY AND SOMEWHAT LONESOME TRAVELLER

Life being as it is, it turns out I’m in the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, writing a very short piece about walking in the American desert.  The opening is below.

 



More than that they’ve got an illustrator (Jaqui Oakley) to do my portrait – from photographs not from life - a perfectly decent-looking man who only very very vaguely resembles me.



The first two paras of the article:


Geoff Nicholson

NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR


The memories of my first encounter with the California desert are so clear and intense that sometimes I wonder if I invented them, but I don’t believe so. I was hitchhiking across the States —it was the 1970s —and I was a young Englishman ‘on the road’, having read too much Jack Kerouac. My lift dropped me at a gas station near Barstow, a city in the Mojave Desert, in the south of the state. The car was air-conditioned and as I got out, I was hit by a wall of heat as strange and thrilling as anything I’d ever experienced.            

I was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I went into the petrol station’s bathroom to drench it in water, then went out looking for a place to hitch. By the time I found one, the T-shirt was completely dry. It was a learning experience, proving that the desert has to be treated with huge respect. It isn’t a monster, it won’t bite you, but it does demand that you’re on your mettle. That was the start of a long relationship with the American desert, chiefly the Mojave, especially Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley and Death Valley. I’d always lived in cities and done lots of urban walking, but the moment I set foot in the desert I knew it was a very special place for me. Nothing in the English landscape moved me the way it did. I began to make regular desert trips and for a decade and a half I lived in Los Angeles. I had many reasons for moving there, but the fact that I could be in that landscape in a couple of hours was a large part of the attraction.

Sunday, October 22, 2023

MEANDERING IN EDEN



I was thinking about the viability of my ‘walking in gardens’ project, and how to make it interesting, when I had an idea.  Since walking in gardens is a low key, low intensity activity, I reckoned that what was needed was some added rigour.  

 

I wondered how it would be if, instead of just wandering around a garden, going wherever your feet and your eyes take you, you went to a somewhat well-known location, say the RHS garden at Hyde Hall, in Essex, set over 360 acres of more or less rolling hills, and made your walking schematic.  Now obviously there are different kinds of scheme and rigour that could be applied but I thought I’d begin simply enough, by walking systematically down every single path in the garden.  Fortunately there was a map.



I’d been to Hyde Hall before and found one or two favourite spots; the Dry Garden and the Winter Garden especially, but this was no time to back favourites.  As far as the walk was concerned one place was as good as any other, the Rose Garden, the Global Growth Vegetable Garden, Sky Meadow, the Queen Mother’s Garden, the Floral Fantasia, the Sky Meadow, and so on, all had to be treated as equals as I walked the paths.

 


My trusty amanuensis and I started in a section known as the Birch Grove and there was a rather poetic introductory sign that included the words, ‘Meandering paths immerse you in an airy woodland, dappled and cool in the summer sun.’   






In fact it was autumn, but even so that sign set me thinking: here it's the path that meanders, not the walker. And I wondered if you walked rapidly along a meandering path could you still be said to meander?  I admit it isn’t one of life’s greatest questions.  

 

And so we walked.  And inevitably we walked in places we might otherwise not have.  I’m sure, for example, I’d have avoided the Children’s Play Area and yet there was the Grand Bug and Pest Hotel.



 

Who’d have thought there were fans of Wes Anderson at the RHS?



We covered the ground and the paths. NB - that isn't us in the picture above. There were no Keep Off The Grass signs and occasionally we did stray off the path.  There were also one or two desire lines and you might well ask whether a desire line can be construed as a path, and I’d say it probably can, though I wouldn’t fight about it, and in any case we avoided them: the desire lines not taken.

 



To be honest I think by the end, as our resolve faltered, we may have missed a few short stretches of path but for a first expedition it wasn’t too bad.

 

There were others walking too. As a cross section of British society it was hardly representative but as a snapshot of the kind of people who like to walk in gardens it was probably typical – mostly older, mostly couples, mostly though not exclusively white, a few parents and children, some of the kids looking bored, others looking dangerously excited.  Nobody else seemed to be walking rigorously.

 



And somewhere in the course of the walk I started to wonder whether this could be considered a form of psychogeography. And you know, after deep reflection, I do believe it could. Debord says psychogeography is ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.’  And heck, a garden of any size is full of varying geographic elements and full of specific (and sometimes vague or downright ambiguous) effects, as you move from one part to another.  At Hyde Hall the ‘feel’ of the Birch Grove was very different from that of the Dry Garden, the Floral Fantasia was very different from the Global Growth Vegetable Garden.  So hell yes, walking in gardens may be considered a form of psychogeography. Whether this makes my walking in gardens project any more viable, remains to be seen.



Monday, October 16, 2023

PRO BONO PUBLICO

 


I’ve been talking to Stefan van Norden about being on his podcast titled ‘Nature Revisited.’ Stefan is also a gardener and a filmmaker, perhaps best known for the documentary Negotiating with Nature about the natural world, gardening, connection and disconnection.  Walking inevitably comes into it. This is the man himself:

 


He wants to do a podcast to be called something like ‘Walking In The UK.’  He’s based in the States in New Hampshire, and his line is that British walking culture is very different from any other in the world.  I’ve been pondering whether and how this is true, and naturally I dug out a few volumes from the Nicholson Pedestrian Library to see what others had had to say on the subject. The one that seemed most on the money was The Magic of Walking by Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode, in which there’s a section titled ‘Walking, British Style.’  

Part of it runs, ‘Wherever we may set foot (in Britain), some eighteenth-century essayist or nineteenth-century poet walked there before us.  When Thomas Gray whose ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ we all read in school, walked the Lake District in 1769, after a long day’s walking he found the inn’s best bedroom dark and damp, and went sturdily on for another 14 miles to Kendal and another inn that pleased him more, before he stopped for the night.’  

I’m not sure that this is especially British, and it does seem a bit like showing off.

 

 

         Stefan is particularly fascinated by our system of Public Footpaths. He’s thrilled by the idea that you see a sign that says Public Footpath and you know you can walk freely there, across or through other people’s land, and who knows where you’ll end up.  That part I absolutely agree with.  I have quite a collection of photographs I’ve taken of Public Footpath signs; this kind of thing:

 


And when I see one pointing to a footpath like this, I often feel compelled to go down it.

 


I was able, to a limited extent, to explore this further last week when a mixed group of fellow trudgers came to Manningtree; 3 from London, one from lower Essex, one from Brazil, to do the somewhat familiar walk to Dedham, in Constable Country.  Here we are looking like a little-known but still surviving prog-rock band.

 


There was one woman in the group, who took the above picture.  She looked like this, while admiring a mound of sheep’s wool.

 


We didn’t have any great sense of urgency or purpose in our walk, and even with detours and meanders we probably only covered about 7 miles:  Thomas Gray would have laughed at us, but we passed a considerable number of Public Footpath signs in their various forms:



 



And at my instigation we did discuss British notions of walking versus hiking versus trekking, and how these might be different elsewhere in the world.  We found the ‘rambling’ especially interesting.  The British Ramblers Association has been around since been around since 1935.  Looks like it was a great way to meet babes.

 



And we certainly discussed how different English rambling is from American rambling.  I’m still singing the Allman Brothers’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ not least because of its lines

My father was a gambler down in Georgia

And he wound up on the wrong end of a gun.


As Stefan and I had discussed, if you stray from a footpath in Britain you might possibly get yelled at by an angry farmer, but in general you’re unlikely to get shot. In America it can be a little different.


I suspect the Allman Brothers weren't great walkers.



 



 

Monday, October 9, 2023

OF WALKING AND SITTING

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Look, you know me; I like walking. But however much you like walking, however intrepid you are, however much stamina you’ve got, a moment always comes when you need to sit down.  Of course if you’re truly intrepid you’ll happily sit on a rock or an ants’ nest but some of us are glad to find a bench on our travels.

 


All benches are good and some are downright exotic but the memorial bench is a particular favourite of mine. 

 

As far as I’m aware, nobody I’ve known personally, has ever been memorialized on a bench but I think it’s a great way of remembering someone.  And so I walk through the world sometimes sitting on benches, sometimes just looking at them and particularly noting the plaques and inscriptions. 

 

However, in most cases, these memorialize people I never knew and have never even heard of.  I got rather enthused by his one, in the Painswick Rococo Garden in Gloucestershire which memorializes John Berryman, but it’s not John Berryman the poet, it’s some quite other John Berryman.






This next one in Holland Park commemorates Arnold Toynbee who I’d sort of heard of, and Daisaku Ikeda – who I absolutely hadn’t, but he sounds like a good guy – look him up.  


This is the two of them having a dialogue:


But fame isn’t necessary.  Below is a wonderful bench in a churchyard in Chelsea which I like a lot.  Aren’t all spouses debating partners in the end?  Until they stop talking. Though of course you want to know the back story.




Similarly with this one.  What exactly do you have to do to become known as The Duck Lady.  Is it just a matter of feeding them or is it more that that?



Sometimes the back story seems a more complicated and inscrutable and possibly tragic one, as with this one in Wivenhoe (I think).  'Lost in India' raises a lot of questions.




And I'm intrigued by this one in Richmond. And no, I haven’t been able to find out who John 'Jack’ July is.  He could have been a dancer, but perhaps the dancing was only figurative.  And was he really still dancing in his 90s?



 Of course picking the right spot for your bench is all-important: you can’t put it just anywhere. They say that if everybody who wanted to put a bench on Hampstead Heath was allowed to, the place would look like a giant arena.

      Which brings me to Nicky Hopkins’ memorial bench in the wide open spaces of Perivale. 

Hopkins played keyboards with huge numbers of bands and artists, including the Stones, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joe Walsh and L. Ron Hubbard (yes really).  He died aged 50 in Nashville Tennessee.  I wonder if there’s a memorial bench for him there.