THE CONTROLLED WALK

 I always enjoy the post-Christmas, pre-New Year walk; it’s never very serious or arduous but among other things you do get to look at other walkers.  Some no doubt are fully paid up pedestrians, but some definitely aren’t, and I imagine a certain percentage are having their only walk of the year. Still, a little’s better than nothing.  (The picture below is from a  different Christmas walk).

We didn’t go very far, up to the estuary, past the WW2 pill box, and home via the supermarket, which we surprised to find open. But along the way we did see these things, were new to me, a couple of what at first looked like pig sties, though this isn’t pig keeping territory, and they were in with grazing sheep, so I suppose they were sheep shelters, and I thought they had a lot going for them as examples of minimalist architecture.

 

I’m not pretending this was one of the great walks of the year, however as you know by now, I’m a sucker for the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam that you find while walking.  It was a good day for that.  First, this nicely distressed metal plate from a Ford – my old Escort had one of those, and it did fall off but only on the driveway so I could retrieve it, and I still have it in the archive.

The second, far more inscrutably, is the label, complete with staple marks from (I assume) a package of legally obtained drugs.  I mean I don’t suppose a real drug pusher would bother with that kind of labeling, but I could be wrong.

IT'S THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS

The traditional Boxing Day walk; this year in the mean streets of Chelsea.  No great surprise to find a Christmas tree thrown out the day after Christmas.

But more surprising to find this; a heap of Christmas trees that, I assume, had remained unsold, never made it into anybody’s home, and so the Christmas tree dealer had dumped them in a pile on the pavement.  

And I can’t decide if this was a kind of altruism, that he’d left the trees there so that the poor and needy could pick one up for free, or whether it was just an advanced form of littering and dumping, and the dealer just couldn’t be arsed to take them away with him. Maybe he had mixed feelings.  Many do at Christmas.

HOLLYWOOD WALKS, CONSTRAINED AND OTHERWISE

I was at a party a couple of nights back and got talking to guy who’d grown up in Hollywood in the early nineties.  He went to Hollywood High, alma mater of Keith Carradine, Linda Evans, Fay Wray and Terry Richardson – to name a broad selection.

And the guy said that any time you walked in Hollywood in the early 90s you were always in danger of turning a corner and realizing you’d set foot in the “wrong” street, and then you’d be confronted by junior gang members who demanded to know what you were doing on “their” street.  The answer, “I’m just walking home from school,” wasn’t a good enough answer.

Of course, he said, you learned the rules pretty fast one way or another, learned where you could walk and where you couldn’t, but there was always this lurking anxiety that you might get it wrong.  

And some people think that Hollywood has become too safe and gentrified, eh?  Yeah, don’t you just hate it when there are no gang members confronting you on the street?

I’m not naïve enough to think that Hollywood is now an entirely safe haven of peace and tranquility, but as you walk around you don’t worry much about straying into enemy territory.  And of course it being Christmas and all, Hollywood looks pretty festive right now.  Even if the inhabitants behind this particular window haven’t quite got into the Christmas spirit yet: