WALKING WITH WINDOWS

 And speaking of flaneuses, I see that Deborah Moggach is back in the news: new book and newly single.  

 

I remember a time when her Who’s Who entry listed one of her recreations as ‘walking around London looking in people’s windows.’  This sounds so much more fun that just ‘walking.’  This is as close as I can get to a picture of her walking:

 

I did once walk with her for several hundred yards, maybe half a mile, around central London, near Oxford Circus, as we looked for a place to have lunch.  We didn’t look in any people’s windows, and at the time I didn’t know this was one of her recreations, but I certainly would have given half a chance.

PARISIAN WALKWAYS

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I was reading about Paris Hilton, who has a cooking show on Youtube, despite apparently not being much of a cook.  Good for her.  The show sounds like an unmissable car crash, though in fact when you watch it, it's just slow and dull.   But I did see a quote from Paris  that I’d never seen before, ‘I don’t think, I just walk.’

 

The woman is a flaneuse!!  And possibly a bit Zen. This is her walking:

GARDEN WALKS, GOGH WALKS, GOD WALKS

Back in the day I had a girlfriend with a flat in Brighton, so on many a weekend I’d go down 

there from London. I liked the sea and the Volks Railway, but mostly I liked the secondhand book and record shops.

         And one weekend the girlfriend said ‘Let’s go on a day trip to Sheffield Park and Gardens,’ which is less than 20 miles from Brighton. ‘And what will we do there?’ I asked, and she said ‘You know, walk around.’  At the time I couldn’t think of anything worse.  Walking in gardens seemed so middle-aged and boring.  I didn’t say no and I didn’t complain once we got there, and although I don’t remember much about it, I'm sure I didn't enjoy myself much.  Though I do vaguely remember this bridge.

 

Now, of course, I find that walking in gardens is a perfectly good way to spend time.  This is Westbury Court in Gloucestershire where I was last month:

 

And it so happens I’ve been reading Lesley Chamberlain’s book A Shoe Story about Van Gogh and Heidegger.  The latter is likely to remain a closed book, but Vincent is OK by me, even though I had no idea he was much of a walker.  How ignorant I was.  Here is Chamberlain on van Gogh: ‘early in his life van Gogh associated walking very closely with his artistic practice …. He believed in nature as both his moral and artistic authority and to walk was to put himself physically in touch with that wisdom’ and she quotes van Gogh as saying in one of his many letters to Theo, ‘Our goal is “Walking with God.’’' Rather an overambitious goal I’d say, though this is not my area of expertise.

 

And I was lead to this picture which I’d never seen before, titled A Woman Walking in a Garden.  It’s all over the internet, though no two reproductions show it with the same colours.

 

Life being as it is, I spent last Sunday walking around the Secret Gardens of Mistley.  They weren’t as secret as all that – there was a map and everything. Most of the gardens were small and domestic and not at all grand, which is OK with me.  

 

And in one of them, the one shown above, there was a table full of used books for sale.  What a haul – Beckett, Pynchon and Shrigley for a total of 3 quid.  It’s the kind of thing that makes walking in gardens worthwhile.

 

Here’s Beckett: ‘For as I have always said, First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.’

 

Here’s Pynchon: ‘Death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning.’

 

I can’t find any specific utterance by Shrigley about walking, so here's this picture, which does show a stick figure walking:

 

 

FUN WITH RICHARD AND GEOFF

My oldest mate Richard, oldest in terms of years we’ve known each other, not in terms of 

how long he’s been on the planet, came up to Essex and we walked along by the 

River Stour. It was good.  Richard has become quite the walker and drifter.

 

He had an app on his phone for identify wild plants and flowers.  Now, I’ve had some trouble with these things in the past, and we used it first on a plant that I could actually identify - the teasel - and the app seemed to know what it was doing, so on we went,

 

I don't know how important it is to be able to identify things, though it's obviously useful in some cases.  Here’s Richard about to identify some Serbian Bellflower, which I definitely wouldn’t have known.

 

Along the roadside we found some jetsam – just waiting to be clutched and upcycled.  We thought clutching but then decided that neither of us really needed a lampshade or a glass vase, and we left them for others, but we were glad of the opportunity.

 

But as a fan of agit prop (if that terms still gets used) our greatest find was this – an anti-mask sticker.  

 

I’d have peeled it off so I could have added it to the archive but pulling would have torn it so I left it where it was, so it could continue to deliver its subversive and frankly not all that lucid message.