WALKERS INCARNATE

 

It was Boxing Day and I was leafing through Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, you know the way you do, and I came upon one of his observations that I’d never noticed before.  Benjamin writes, “The sandwich-man is the last incarnation of the flaneur.”

 

Of course Benjamin isn’t talking about a man who walks the street with a handcart full of BLTs and chip butties, but rather the type of man who historically walked the streets with advertising boards strapped to his back and front.  This kind of thing.

In fact that’s a still from The Sandwich Man, a 1966 film starring Michael Bentine, who also co-wrote, and featuring a panoramic cast of British comedy troopers, Dora Bryan, Bernard Cribbins, Harry H Corbett, Diana Dors, Stanley Holloway, Wilfred Hyde White, Terry Thomas, Ron Moody, Norman Wisdom, Suzi Kendall, among many others.

 

Imdb describes the plot as: “A man with a sandwich-board (advert) wanders around London meeting many strange characters.”  

Having now watched the film, I can tell you this isn’t a very accurate description, and it makes it sound rather more fun that it is.  Yes, Michael Bentine walks the streets of London advertising the wares of a tailor on his boards, and things do happen around him, rather weary comedy routines mostly, but he tends to be just standing there watching and smirking.

It’s impossible to think of him as a flaneur, but he certainly does get around.  We see him in Croydon, Piccadilly, at Tower Bridge, the London Palladium, in Surbiton, in Trafalgar Square, at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, even in Dulwich Park.  Of course it’s best not to ask how he gets to all these places on foot in a single day, but that’s movie magic for you.  And London does look wonderful in the film – very sixties, i.e. very modern in some sense, very old fashioned in others, both very familiar and very alien.

 

There aren’t many reflections on walking, flaneurism or anything else, although the wonderful John Le Mesurier makes a very brief appearance as ‘religious sandwich man’ - (and is the best thing in the film by miles if you ask me), and he tells us the sandwich man’s motto is “A fair day’s walk for a fair day’s pay ...  If you’ll take the advice of an elderly sandwich man, see it all happen but never get involved … And never wander from the path of righteousness, brother.” Words to live by.

  I’m not saying that The Sandwich Man is a Christmas substitute for Die Hard or It’s a Wonderful Life, but I’m glad I saw it.  And as I watched I couldn’t help thinking about Anthony Newley in The Strange World of Gurney Slade – which was a short TV made six years earlier, but it feels like a much more ‘sixties’ creation than The Sandwich Man – genuinely strange and surreal, sometimes experimental, sometimes downright Theatre of the Absurd.  And with a lot of walking. 

 

WALKING SOMEWHERE ELSE

    Here's a thing that popped up on Instagram a little while ago

 - a quotation (and pic) from Buckminster Fuller “How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.”  

To which I suppose you might ask, “Well yes, but how often exactly?”

 

Anyway, it did make me think, in a way that I’d never quite thought before, that one of the great and comparatively rare pleasures of walking, is to be strolling along, going nowhere in particular, and suddenly to come across a geodesic dome.

In Los Angeles you can do it just by walking along Sunset Boulevard and seeing the Arclight cinema.

 

And if you walk further you might see them in some unexpected places – not a million miles away from the Hollywood sign:

 

And in Glendale you might once have walked by this dry cleaner, which I’m pretty sure was abandoned despite the Open sign on the door.

Or you might walk down a suburban street and think, who on earth lives in a house like this?

The experience can be even better if you’re walking in the desert. You crest a hill and look down, and boom there it is:

 

Or here:

Or here in Arizona:

Inevitably the experience happens rather more often in the United States that it does in old England but it’s not completely unknown.  There were these belonging to restaurant in Gloucestershire named (I think) The Ragged Cot:

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

And there are these bad boys in Victoria Park, 

the kind of backdrop that a lad might use for an author portrait:

 

Photo by Travis Elborough

As for the question of whether Buckminster Fuller was much of a walker, well, his 1981 book The Critical Path certainly makes some mention of walking, as when he writes, “We walk right foot, left foot, not right foot, wrong foot.”  Though I’d say we surely all put a foot wrong once in a while.

 

And here he writes later in the book, “As I have mentioned before and now repeat in a more comprehensive manner, in 1800 the average human being was walking an annually cumulative distance of 1,100 miles and riding ten additional annual miles. By 1900 the average human being was yet walking a total of yearly distance of 1,100miles but the average U.S.A. citizen's annual vehicle-ridden miles had increased to 400.  All humanity is as yet in 1980 walking an annual average of 1,100 miles but in the U.S.A., Europe, and parts of the Near East, Asia, Africa, and Australia, all men, women, and youngsters free to travel, are averaging over 20,000 annual miles of vehicular travel.”

I’ve no idea how accurate his numbers are, though the general principle seems reasonable.  I know a good many people who walk more than 1,100 miles a year; as for the 20,000 vehicular miles, I suppose much depends on whether you’re frequent flyer.

         

     But here’s a thing. During World War One, Fuller married Anne Hewlett, daughter of an architect, and when the war was over he started a company with his father-in-law, making bricks out of wood shavings. Things didn’t go well, and on the verge of bankruptcy, they sold the business 1927. At much the same time, Anne gave birth to a baby daughter. As a jobless new dad Fuller was deeply depressed. One day, he was walking by Lake Michigan, and by his own account, contemplating suicide.  But suddenly when he found himself floating a few feet above the ground, bathed in sparkling light; which I suppose is walking of a sort. He felt time standing still and he heard a voice say, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe.”  Note the capitalization and absence of definite article.

 

 

 

WANDERING LOST

Pic from RCMP

It was old man Tolkien who said “Not all who wander are lost,” and how true that is. Some of them are psychogeographers, and some are following their GPS not realising it’s leading them astray.  But then again some of them really are lost, like this this guy, twenty year old, Sam Benastick who went missing on a ten day solo fishing and hiking trip in Redfern-Keily Park in the northern Rockies, British Columbia. 

 

When he failed to return at the expected time, and as temperatures dropped to -20C (-4F) there was an official search, but failing to find him, the authorities called it off fearing the worst.

 

And then 5 weeks later he turned up alive, even if not exactly well.  He was found by two trail workers heading for Redfern Lake. They knew exactly who he was.  He’d sliced up his sleeping bag and wrapped it around his legs to stay warm.He was suffering from frostbite and also, get this, smoke inhalation caused when the makeshift shelter he’d built for himself burned down.  An ambulance was called to take him to hospital, and Benastick was said to be in “rough shape.”

 

It’s not clear how much walking he did while he was missing - one account said he was chased by a wolf, although the BBC did manage to come up with what must be one of the most bathetic captions in their history, "Sam Benastick is an avid hiker."

Avid hiker indeed!  I wonder if he's less avid than he used to be.

 

 

Benastick apparently told police he stayed in his car for a couple of days and then walked to a creek where he camped for 10 to 15 days. He was carrying a tarp, a backpack and some camping supplies.  He also had a dirt bike, and according to his mother a lot of peanut butter. And eventually he  made his way to the area where he flagged down his rescuers. A very happy ending

Anyway here he is, in and out of hospital 

I do hope Taylor Swift sends him some love).

The BBC quotes Adam Hawkins, the search manager, as saying he’s ‘intensely curious’ to learn more about the area where Mr. Benastick was found and what he was doing while missing.  It’s a curiosity many of us share, in a good way.