SOME NEW OLD OBELISKS

If you happen to be visiting a patient in the Cirencester Community Hospital in Gloucestershire, you might well feel like having a walk after the visit.  If you go one way, the easier route, you’ll pass through the staff car park and see this sign:

Did you know the NHS was in the business of creating forests and orchards?  I didn’t, and I don’t think many others do either, but if you follow the signs you’ll find yourself in a gloriously ramshackle bit of land, with apple trees and pear trees, with a few benches to sit on, though nettles tend to be growing up through many of them, so you’ll probably keep on walking, and chances are you won’t see another soul.  It would be nice to think that patients from the hospital wander here as part of their recovery but I saw no actual evidence of this.

If you walk the other way from the hospital, you go through Querns Wood, where you might see evidence of guitar hero worship among the tree cutters:

And before long you’ll arrive at the Circencester Amphitheatre, a Roman creation, now reduced to a circle of hills forming a grassy bowl.  Once it held about 8000 people, now it’s a place where kids run up and down exhausting themselves while parents watch.

However if you walk around the side of the amphitheatre you can find yourself at the Circencester Obelisk, which is a very big, very impressive and slightly mysterious construction.

The sources say it’s ‘probably’ 18^thcentury, and probably erected for Earl Bathurst in what was, at the time, the grounds of Cirencester Park Mansion. Alexander Pope may have had some input.  Bathurst wrote to Pope in 1736, ‘I have also begun to level the hill before the house, and an obelisk shall terminate the view’.  Pope didn’t think an obelisk was quite the right thing for that spot, though signficantly, or not, Pope did erect an obelisk as a memorial to his mother.

My trip to Gloucestershire wasn’t a walking expedition but, thanks to my plucky chaffeuse I was able to walk (after a car ride) in the graveyard of the church of St James’s, Sevenhampton (which is actually in Wiltshire), famous chiefly as the place where Ian Fleming, his wife Anne and their son Caspar are buried.  

The Flemings bought Sevenhampton Place in 1959 and spent four years having it restored and remodeled. It had forty bedrooms, a billiard room and a ballroom. Does anybody in the world have 39 friends they’d want to have stay with them? Anne love the place, Fleming not so much.  Maybe after spending so much time in Goldeneye, in Jamaica, an English country house didn’t seem so appealing.

The Fleming grave is in a beautiful spot, overlooked by a field of cows and marked by (you probably guessed, if you didn’t know already) an obelisk, which is very elegant and surprisingly modest: traits that we only partly associate with Ian Fleming.

OH WELL, OH MY

Peter Green died recently. The Green Manalishi (with the Two-Prong Crown) was my favorite song of his.  And I also liked Oh Well because of the lines

I can't help about the shape I’m in

I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin

Did Peter Green have thin legs? Well thin-ish, I think, but not amazingly so.  It’s hard to get a really good look.  

He sometimes kept them very well covered:

Was he much of a walker?  I’m not sure.  He did have a song titled Walkin’ the Road, but then every blues player has a song about walking

And then in the Times t’other week there was a profile of Rishi Sunak the current English Chancellor of the Exchequer and by some accounts our Prime Minister in waiting.

Is Rishi Sunak a walker?  Well apparently so. One paragraph in the Times read, ‘Another (student friend) remembers bumping into him on a Saturday at the sort of time most students were sleeping off hangovers.  He was walking around with a notepad. ‘I asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘My parents are coming tomorrow so I am devising a walk of interesting landmarks in the city.’'

A lad who prepares a walking tour for the aged parents is OK by me. 

Does Rishi Sunak have thin legs? If the photo below is anything to go by then yes, yes he does.  

GET CARTER

I’ve been looking at photographs of Howard Carter walking in the desert.  Carter was the discoverer (or I suppose rediscoverer), in 1922, of the tomb of Tutenkhamun.

I notice Carter’s walking stick in all the photographs, which might suggest he wasn’t a great walker, I don’t think it was just a style thing.  But chiefly I noticed that he seems wildly overdressed for doing anything in the desert - the three piece suit – definitely herringbone, possibly tweed and of course the high collar and the bow tie, and sometimes the handkerchief in the breast pocket.  

But maybe he only dressed up like this for a photo-op; these photographs look decidedly set up, and some of the other people in the photographs look overdressed too, especially the soldiers and the guy on the far right in the picture below who seems to be wearing jodhpurs.  The guys who are doing the heavy lifting inevitably look more appropriately dressed for the occasion.

Then I started thinking about the few pictures that have been taken of me walking, and sometimes posing, in the desert.  I look overdressed too.  The one below was taken somewhere near Death Valley (I think) and I honestly don’t remember what the temperature was like, but evidently not exactly blazing.

Geoff Nicholson

And this one was taken in the East Mojave desert in winter when I know it was absolutely freezing:

I can’t say I’ve ever tried to look very stylish or dressed up while walking in the desert, but then I’m no Howard Carter.

INFIDELS

This week, for one reason or another, I found myself walking in Frinton, part of the ‘Essex Riviera.’  It was sufficiently packed that we had to drive around for a very long time before we found a parking spot, though on a hot day in the August holidays was not in itself a big surprise.

The beach was busy, but people tended to be walking or seated or sunbathing at least a couple of meters apart. I didn’t feel at risk, but maybe I was naïve. I picked up a stone from the sand that looked at least somewhat like a skull.

Now, I don’t know much about religion but I do know that while I was at the seaside many believers were undertaking Haj, the Islamic pilgrimage to the Kabba in Mecca, a serious walking event, which I gather has been rather different this year than previously.

In past years it's looked like this:

Now apparently this year it looks like this:

 

The latter seems much actually pleasanter, though  I don’t suppose people go there because it’s pleasant.

Apparently stones, skull-shaped or otherwise, play a part in Haj.  As I understand it, I mean I read it in the paper, pilgrims usually pick up stones from the ground as they walk, which they then ‘symbolically’ hurl at the devil.  These are now being provided by the religious authorities, washed and sterilized, in ‘haj kits’ Mine was just washed by the sea. I do hope that’s enough.

Here’s a picture of our hero Sir Richard Francis Burton, dressed for his trip to Mecca.

THE PROFOUND WALK

Walking provides endless opportunities for coming up with profundities, some of them more genuinely profound than others, though we could argue about which are which.  

And when it comes to notions of ‘The Path’ then everything gets ramped up considerably.

‘No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.’ – That’s Buddha

‘Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.’ – That’s Thoreau.

‘Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.’ - Khalil Gibran

‘Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.’   That’s Oprah Winfrey.

And sometimes you find profundity at unexpected times and in unexpected places, such as in the Chelsea Psychic (sic) Garden.

FROM MAJOR TO MINOR

When I was a kid there were a good few family outings to Sherwood Forest,  These involved a lot of walking but that was OK because I knew that as part of the walk we’d visit The Major Oak, the hollow tree in which Robin Hood supposedly, mythically, hid from the Sheriff of Nottingham.  The tree’s named after Major Hayman Rooke, author of a small book titled Remarkable Oaks  in which he described and drew the tree.

By ‘visit’ I don’t mean just standing there looking at the tree or even walking around it, no, in those days you could actually go insidethe tree, into the very cavity where Robin Hood had (supposedly) hidden.  It wasn’t a very big cavity as I remember, not much bigger than kid-size, and the internal ‘walls’ of the tree were worn to a glassy smoothness by all the bodies that had rubbed against them over the centuries. 

I haven’t given this a vast amount of thought over the years but I had no doubt that what we’d all done so innocently back in the day was obviously bad and wrong from a conservationist point of view, and I had seen recent pictures of the Major Oak, with a Dali-esque arrangement of struts supporting the branches.

Turns out it was worse than I thought.  Even walking around the tree created damage.  Footsteps from hundreds of thousands of visitors compacted the soil, preventing rainwater and nutrients from fallen leaves getting down to the tree roots.  A fence was eventually built around it to keep pedestrians and others away and the tree has been saved, even if it’s not looking its very best.

I’m prepared to accept my own small responsibility for the overall state of the Major Oak, on the other hand …

Last autumn I was walking in Essex and came across a big (if not major) oak tree, and under it were a lot of acorns. I picked up a handful, took them home, put them in compost in pots to overwinter, and come late spring there was absolutely no sign of germination so I used the pots and compost to grow other things, including poppies which are fugitive, see Robbie Burns: 

‘But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;

But then last week, clearing out the poppies that had been and gone and died, I saw to my amazement that a very minor oak was growing in one of the pots.  Oh boy! 

I realize this is only the very smallest act of reparation for my mistreatment of the Major Oak, but we all do what we can.  

WALKING WITH GIANTS

On the wall, across the room from where I’m writing, there’s a poster like this: Attack of the 50ft Pinup – Yvette Vickers.

You could just about say that the woman in the image is doing a highly specialized kind of walking, the kind that crushes cars and freeways.

The poster is designed by George Chastain and mine is signed by Yvette Vickers, and I used to think it was advertising her autobiography, but I don’t know that there was ever such a book.  I think it was just a poster she used to sign and sell at collector and memorabilia fairs, which I guess is where mine came from – it was a present.

The poster, of course, is an homage to the 1958 movie Attack of the 50ft Woman and Yvette Vickers was one of the stars, though she wasn’t the one who grew to 50 feet – that’s Alison Hayes – Yvette played the floozy.

Vickers died rather horribly in 2010 or 2011. The reason for the doubt: she’d become a recluse, and her dead body was found in her home in one of the canyons above Beverly Hills - expert opinion thought she might have been dead for as long as a year.  Yep, people in the LA canyons keep themselves to themselves.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was remade in 2020 with Darryl Hannah. You can sort of understand why they thought it was suitable for a remake it, advances in special effects technology, CGI and all that, but I don’t think the movie was very popular.

The idea of some giant, sexy woman walking through the landscape obviously has its appeal and for some men it’s a major fetish – macrophilia - but of course when it comes to movies we know it’s not the woman who’s fifty feet tall, it’s the buildings that are just a couple of feet tall, and the cars are toys.

But personally I think that’s OK. I really like model villages.  You walk around and you feel like a giant or maybe Godzilla or one of those other Japanese monsters, as though you could just stomp the world into submission, but you don’t because it’s not the real world, and because they’d call the cops.

And it appears that out own dear queen was also something of a fan, or at least had to do a walkabout around Bekonscot when on a royal engagement – she actually looks pretty miserable 

And here’s a picture I took earlier, at the model village in Great Yarmouth.

OH, THE INHUMANITY

It's interesting, isn’t it, how many ‘walkers’ have been created by the lockdown. Once people were told they could walk for an hour a day, people started walking for an hour a day, as though they couldn't possibly have done it unless the government told them to.  Jeez.
          In last Saturday’s Times Magazine there was Caitlin Moran, who can be very funny, writing a rather serious piece under the headline ‘Escape from Suburbia – in 41,000 steps: I walked from home into the city – and a London I no longer knew.’ That headline is so thorough that you don’t altogether need to read the article itself but I did.  Her home is in ‘the north London suburbs’ which seems gloriously unspecific, and she goes into central London, evidently with somebody unnamed (though maybe Pete Paphides) and concludes, ‘Now that it’s empty, you can admire the sets.  God, this place is beautiful.  The people who made this town are geniuses … You can fall in love with humanity all over again – even though there’s no one here – just by looking at the things it’s done.’

Couldn't find a pic of Caitlin Moran walking exactly, but this isn't too far off the mark.

         Of course it’s much easier to fall in love with humanity when it’s not there, a view that I think Jeremy Clarkson would share.  There was in the Sunday Times with a piece headlined, ‘Oh dear, I’ve realised I’m a ramblin’ man.’ Actually it sounds like was always something of a walker but having become a farmer he’s walking a bit differently these days. He writes, ‘I’ve been told many times by fellow farmers that it’s important once in a while to do a “perimeter walk”. And obviously I’ve nodded enthusiastically and left the conversation thinking, “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

          ‘I can walk for miles in a town, but I’ve never really seen the appeal in the countryside. What’s the point of going for a walk when you just end up back where you started? You go past a tree and then, shortly, you go past another exactly the same. And then you get hay fever.’

Probably there’d be no point telling him that no two trees are exactly that same, or that you get can get hay fever in the middle of the city. Still, he does manage to find some humanity on his walk – ‘a fat youth in an anorak, walking straight through my barley,’A heated argument ensues, and Clarkson says, ‘I’ve never had an argument ’with another pedestrian in London,’ though personally I’ve had several. Then he meets a woman whose dog is off its lead who told him he couldn’t throw his weight about just because he was on television.  See: humanity is nothing but trouble.

Of course one of the things about walking in a crowded city even when there are lots of people there you don’t actually have to engage with them, in fact you spend most of time trying to keep out of their way. They may be within 6 feet of you, but as you walk you try to avoid having them impinge on your consciousness.

Then as fate would have it my Facebook feed led me to an interview on Urbanautica with the walker and photographer Paul Walsh, who again was clearly a walker long before the lockdown.  ‘Walking taught me to be at ease in my own company, to understand myself, to conquer the fear of the unknown and gave me self confidence. The combination of walking and photographing taught me to analyse my surroundings and to try and understand my place in the world.’

All of which sounds right to me, though he often walks with other people ‘I am currently working in Finland with The MAP6 Collective, where we are exploring themes surrounding the world happiness report. I am walking with people who live locally, but I am allowing them to guide me through a walk of their choice, whilst I record our conversations and document the walk photographically.’

Well I guess that’s all right.  This is one of Walsh’s photographs of a fellow walker:

And here’s a photograph of his I like better, from a project titled Insomniataken on a night walk. You know there are people up there in the block of flats, you just don’t have to see them.

This is the Urbanautica interview:  

https://urbanautica.com/interview/paul-walsh-the-sense-of-walking/1804 

This is Paul Walsh’s website: 

https://paulwalshphotography.co.uk/home

WALKING WITH WALKMEN

Much like old Bill Shakespeare, I have ‘small Latin and less Greek’ which may be why I only just learned a new word for walking.  It’s solivagant, as noun meaning somebody who wanders wandering alone, or as an adjective describe the act of wandering alone, as in ‘I say, that solivigant over there is obviously on a solivigant journey.’It comes from the Latin solivagus, and I suppose I have might have teased out the meaning if given enough time but it was still a new one on me.

Evidently quite a lot of people know the world perfectly well. It’s the name of a band, a website, various bloggers, a teen novel, the title in one form or another of at least two movies, and no doubt much more besides.

Titles, I know, are hard, but it seems to me that titling anything with a word that a lot of people have never heard, may be a problem.

But the French like to have problems. The Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language  (La Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française), is an institutions that tries to keep the French language pure and unsullied by non-French words, at least so far as official written and spoken communications are concerned.  Borrowed English words trouble them especially.

As far back as 2006 they eschewed the word Walkman, and suggesting baladeur, which in fact became a general term for a portable music device, baladeur being a French word up there with flâneur and promenadeur, meaning a walker. See, the English language sometimes embraces foreign words.  Of course Walkman was a trademark of Sony, which may have complicated matters.

But CELF is now fretting about the word podcast. This was already outlawed and changed to diffusion pour baladeur(broadcast for the walker) it has now become audio a la demande (audio on demand) which is OK but not very adventurous.  I’d have liked audio pour la solivigant but I always want too much.