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.