WALKING AND SUPINITY

 I’ve been reading Jonathan Meades’s Pedro and Ricky Come Again, Selected Writing 1988-

2000. I think it’s great.  

 

Admittedly it’s rather light on references to walking though there is this, ‘Our cities are full of people hurrying, their narrow pavements are not made for promenades at snail's pace; they are for getting from A to B rather than civic recreation. Walking for its own sake may be further discouraged by the climate and, equally, by the work 'ethic'. This week I put in several hours' sterling loitering interspersed with energy-saving bouts of farniente supinity. Observant sloth is its own reward. Just hanging around and seeing what happens …’  Fair enough.

 

And there’s a piece, not in the book, from the Quietus by John Doran, which describes Meades as ‘the slowest strolling human being I've ever met, even manages to be a flâneur at 380 feet above Tottenham Court Road, pointing out buildings and an amazing sunset to me as we head at snail's pace from our table towards the lifts.’  

 

And perhaps I’m getting a little obsessed with the man, because since I was walking across my local supermarket carpark yesterday and there walking alongside me was a guy who looked very much indeed like Jonathan Meades.  He did look a bit whiskery (he wasn't wearing a mask) but it seemed perfectly possible that Meades might let his beard grow between public appearances.

 

This is a picture of the car park (for obvious reasons I didn’t photograph the man):

 

Now, it was obviously surprising that Jonathan Meades would be heading into my local supermarket, since we know he lives in Marseille in Le Corbusier’sCité Radieuse – that’s the picture at the top.  On the other hand he has written and made films about Essex, so his presence wasn’t completely inconceivable, especially in these confused, socially disrupted times. Here’s a still from The Joy of Essex  (yes, you can see the joy in his face):

 

I still couldn’t quite believe it was him but I looked again and the fellow looked SO much like Mr. Meades that I found myself saying, ‘Excuse me, do I know you?  Is your name Jonathan?’

He seemed surprised by this though not offended and he said with a smile, ‘Oh, I’m Robert’s father,’ as though that solved everything, which it did not.

Once we’d made eye contact, he looked considerably less like Mr. Meades, but you will note that he didn’t say his name WASN’T Jonathan.

 

 

 

JONATHAN PROBABLY DOESN'T KNOW OR CARE WHAT GEOFF LIKES

In moments of anxiety and depression, and sometimes when I’m at stool, I reach for Jonathan Meades’s Peter Knows What Dick Likes, published by Paladin, a collection mostly of his magazine work.

I open it at random and I always find something decent.  Yesterday I opened it at a piece titled ‘I Like Maps.’  Me too, Johnny.

And in that article Meades writes, ‘Just as William Morris abhorred illusionism in wallpaper so do I fear the increasing three-dimensionalism of OS (Ordnance Survey) products whose reductio ad absurdum would be no more than doctored aerial photographs … Nothing about the rigours of abstraction, about studied concentration, about the exercise of imagination.’

It could have been written yesterday. And then I saw the date of publication of the piece. 1987!!!  The man’s a prophet.  Still with a certain amount of honour.

I wonder if he, and you, are familiar with the children’s book The Map That Came to Life, ‘described by HJ Deverson and drawn by Ronald Lampit’? A couple of children and their dog go for a walk, from Two Tree Farm to Dumbleford Fair, and on the way they learn how to use a map.  It’s brilliant in its nostalgia, and in its charting an England that never really existed. 

That’s another thing maps can do.

WALKING MADLY

‘It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.” 

Those are the opening lines of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of linked short stories posing as a novel. I can’t say I’d forgotten the lines because I’ve never actually read the book from beginning to end, though I have read at least one of the stories it contains – ‘The Veldt.’   

But I have seen the movie and I have never forgotten the sight of Rod Steiger, all naked and tatted up. The book describes him as “a walking treasure gallery.”

Gotta say I didn’t know that people went to Wisconsin on walking tours, but it seems they very definitely do.  The state seems to be dense with walkers and walking trails.

         When I first lived in Los Angeles, Ray Bradbury was alive and well and doing a lot of public appearances around town, many of them in Glendale.  I don’t know how much of a walker he was but sometimes apparently he walked while wearing a suit, like this:

And I think he must have been rather proud of his legs, perhaps honed and toned by walking, because he was always showing them off in shorts; like this:

Tangentially I have been reading Museum Without Walls,some collected essays by another writer who also walks while wearing a suit, at least when the cameras are on him; Jonathan Meades, a man I can’t quite imagine in shorts.

In a piece on Ian Nairn, Meades writes of “the ever-increasing battalions of soi-disant psychogeographers - who are distinguished from plain geographers by neglecting to take their Largactil before they release themselves into the edgelands of Sharpness or the boondocks of Sheppey.”  

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Largactil, as some of you will know, and some may not, is one of the trade names for Chloropromazine, an anti-psychotic.  Looks like good stuff:

WALKING INTO THE SUNSET

-->

Life, being as it is, I open the latest issue of  the London Review of Books, and there’s Jonathan Meades in full flight, reviewing Hitler At Home and Speer: Hitler’s Architect.  It’s illustrated with this painting by Luc Tuysmans, titled The Walk in English, originally De wanderling in Dutch – Tuysmans is Belgian.

Meades writes, “Luc Tuymans’s painting The Walk shows Hitler and Speer silhouetted in early evening light on the Obersalzberg. The photograph that the painting is based on is mute. Tuymans’s manipulation of it is anything but. His Hitler, the Führer, the guide, is indeed guiding, just. He is stumbling awkwardly towards the last of the light while the upright Speer holds back, following certainly, but cautiously, tentatively, allowing his idol and besotted patron first dibs on divining the future – which may prove to be less golden than the sun’s shafts seem to promise. What if the guide has lost his touch, can no longer read the entrails?”

Well, this is good stuff, of course, and only a fool would get into an argument with Jonathan Meades, but I think I’ve found the original photograph, or a very close variant (on the website reichinruins.com), and I don’t find it mute at all.

  Let’s face it, Ayrian dreams aside, most walkers look good pretty good and picturesque when walking into the sunset.  For that matter most people look pretty good when walking among snow covered peaks.  And I do find it interesting however, that in the painting Speer has grown to be a head taller than Hitler.  Does that make the painting pro-Speer? Meades is virulently anti-Speer, as he's absolutely entitled to be.

Speer, as we know, was quite a walker, and he didn’t let incarceration in Spandau slow him down.  In his native Heidelberg there remains the Thingstätte, an amphitheater which he designed for the Nazi party, built in 1935.  It’s a great place for walking these days apparently.  ”Carry a map and watch for the labeled rocks” is the headline on Tripadvisor.

WALKING WITH YOU

A man walking down the street – sometimes it’s a woman, but more usually it’s a man – and as he walks he talks, and points at things, and it seems that he’s talking just to you, explaining those things that aren’t obvious, that don’t immediately meet the eye. 

Sometimes this “talking” may be in book form – a text, a narrative, a guide book, and often it’s on video, whether a serious documentary or travelogue or just some wobbly fetish footage shot on somebody’s cellphone and destined for YouTube and an amazingly low number of views.

         And of course this person almost certainly doesn’t know you, may be addressing an imaginary you, a big audience of “yous.”  And there may be a whole army of intermediaries between you and him – publishers, editors, a film crew, programmers.  Some of these intermediaries aim for a much higher degree of invisibility than others.

I’ve been thinking about this while reading two versions of A Survey of London, two very different versions of what are in some ways the same book.  John Stow’s A Survay (sic) of London was first published in 1598, and he revised and expanded it for a second edition published in 1603, two years before his death. I did not, alas, read the version below:

          
Posthumous editions continued to appear after Stow had departed, often containing maps and illustrations. Some of the editing was wayward, but there was a “perfected” or at least unlikely to be improved upon edition by John Strype, often referred to as "Strype’s Stowe," published in 1720.  It was several times longer than the original, incorporating all kinds of new material, much of it necessitated by changes and growth in London, some of it dictated by Strype’s own personal preferences.

John Stow 1525-1605 was a tailor by trade but more passionately he was a historian, antiquary, collector of books and manuscripts.  And he was also a great walker, an urban explorer, a psychogeographer some centuries avant la letter.  He was therefore an ancestor of a whole tribe of writers and historians and TV presenters who use walking as a mean of investigating the geographic, historic and cultural landscape.

Sometimes this seems a bit old hat.  I think Alan Whicker was the first on-screen walker and talker I ever saw – and he began presenting Whicker’s World in 1958.  And I’m sure there were earlier ones too.  But it’s a tribe that shows no sign of dying out: think Anthony Bourdain, think Mary Beard, think Simon Sharma, think Jonathan Meades.

Edmond Howes, Stow’s literary executor wrote that Stow never rode, but always traveled on foot when he visited historic buildings or sought out historical documents.  William Drummond reports Ben Jonson as saying, “He (Stow) and I walking alone, he asked two criples (sic), what they would have to take him to their order.”  I think Stow protested too much about his poverty: he left his wife and daughters enough money that they could erect this elaborate monument to him in the Church of St John Undershaft in EC2.  Think you or I will get one like that?

Stow’s prose style is chatty and he writes as though you’re “there,” walking along with him. He’s your guide, pointing things out, telling you stories and anecdotes, but he’s not uncritical about what he sees and knows.  Like many an observer he regrets some of the changes. 

“In the East ende of Forestreete is More lane: then next is Grubstreete, of late yeares inhabited for the most part by Bowyers, Fletchers, Bowstring makers, and such like, now little occupied, Archerie giving place to a number of bowling Allies, and Dicing houses, which in all places are increased, and too much frequented.” 

That’s right, you know the neighborhood’s on the skids when the archers move out and the bowling alley moves in.

         John Strype’s edition of Stowe is titled A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, and he adheres to Stow’s notion of exploring the city as though on a walking tour, and he adds a few “perambulations” or circuit walks of his own.

It’s very hard for me to see that word “perambulation” without thinking of Nikolaus Pevsner and his Buildings of England series.  He perambulated all over the country.  Was he consciously echoing Stow and Strype?  He must surely have been aware of the Survey.  In any case, Pevsner’s work, just like Stow’s, is now reedited and revised by subsequent diverse hands. 

I’m one of that generation who finds it impossible to walk round an English church or churchyard without noting and mentally cataloging the features in a Pevsner-esque way  - rhenish helm, blind clerestory, nodding ogee arch – etc.   I’m not sure that this is a necessarily good thing.

         

Perhaps Jonathan Meades is similarly conflicted.  In his documentary Pevsner Revisited he says that while other disaffected youths were off demonstrating and smashing the state, he was exploring English architecture clutching a volume of Pevsner.

There’s plenty of footage of Pevsner himself walking around looking at buildings, and he was seen on TV once in a while, but he never had the popularity or that “posh but with a common touch” thing that John Betjeman had.  There was a certain rivalry between them, but Pevsner just wasn’t cuddly, he wasn’t televisual, and he wasn’t loved - possibly his German origins had something to do with that.  Betjeman was a London lad, born in Gospel Oak, though that surname is Dutch, originally with two n’s – changed precisely because it sounded German.

And I remember that at some point in my not especially misspent youth, I used to walk the streets of my hometown of Sheffield, fantasizing that an imaginary camera crew was following me as I wandered among the treasures of the Sheffield urbanscape – not that I knew much about the Sheffield urbanscape.

         Now, just occasionally, in my role as walker, writer, pontificator, and god knows I've been called a "cultural critic," I do get called upon to wander around, talk and point at things, usually not in Sheffield.

   
Sometimes there’s even a camera crew.  It’s never as much fun as I once thought it would be, but I do always try very hard not to look or sound like Alan Whicker.