"NOTHING ENDURES BUT CHANGE"

 Who could disagree with Heraclitus when he said, “No man ever steps in the same river 

twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”  (Incidentally, “steps” is 

sometimes translated as ‘walks,’ but that sounds off to me.  I mean who walks in a river?  

Wade at best). 

 

Anyway it seems to me that Heraclitus’s notion applies to streets as well as rivers, though judging by this picture, old H. found walking a bit of a strain.  Scholars are reasonably sure that he suffered from dropsy.

 

Living as I do in small town Essex there’s a strictly limited number of nearby streets to walk down.  Even so, by definition, and not just Heraclitus’, every street is different every time I walk down it, as am I.  And I think you can say something similar about photography: you can’t photograph the same subject twice because the subject will have changed, as will the photographer.

 

There’s a certain street I walk down reasonably often and the first time I did it I was taken by this strange and interesting and rather attractive juxtaposition of plant life and dog statue. 

 

A year or so later it looked like this.  

 

I wasn’t sure what had happened to the plants but, as you see, snow was on the ground, and it did occur to me that the plant might have simply come to the end of it’s life or perhaps just receded for the winter.  I suppose a better plantsman would be able to tell you the names of the absent plants.  

 

And then, not so long ago, I walked down the street again and things had taken chaotic a turn – no snow, no plant, and a significant pile of rubbish.  The dog, however, endures, for now.

 

WALKING AND FIELDING

 

I’ve been sorting my books – not ‘unpacking my library’ – I did that years back but 

I’m still trying to find a reasonable order for them.

 

And I happened to find my copy of The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2004) by Robert Shoemaker.    I opened it not quite at random and came across this extraordinary passage:

 

‘In 1776 John Fielding warned new arrivals to the city of the dangers of walking at night: “he will sometimes be liable to the more dangerous attacks of intemperate rakes in hot blood who occasionally by way of bravado, scower the streets, to shew their manhood, not their humanity; put the watch to flight; and now and then have murdered some harmless and inoffensive person.”’ This is from A Brief Description of the Cities of  London and Westminster.

 

The passage is illustrated by the engraving (anonymous as far as I can tell) ‘High Life At Midnight’ which is at the top of this post.

 

Shoemaker could have had left it there,  but he goes on:

 

‘The common themes of these attacks, which were public, unprovoked, committed by elite young men, often targeted at strangers (especially young women), involved an element of playfulness and were often described using the imagery of blood, suggest that the perpetrators were adolescents, possibly confused about their sexuality ..’

 

Well thanks Bob, that explains everything.

 

This is Sir John Fielding 

I don't know how much of a walker he was but he was an amazing man; half-brother of Henry Fielding (together they set up the Bow Street Runners), blinded in a naval accident at the age of 19, became a magistrate known as the Blind Beak and was supposedly able to recognize 3,000 criminals by the sound of their voices.