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