Sometime over the weekend, in the morass of media silt I was absorbing, I came across an online article (actually from Woman & Home) about Mel Giedroyc with the picture you see below and the headline ‘My fantasy? A walking holiday.’
I think this was supposed to be a surprise to somebody, as though Mel G was far too cool to go on a walking holiday, but I can’t say it surprised me, and I can’t believe it surprised anybody else. I like Mel G but she’s always struck me as exactly the kind of woman who goes on walking holidays.
And I do quite like the shoes she’s wearing in the above pic. I assume she wouldn’t be doing much walking in them, but they’d be just fine for posing around the boudoir at the end of the day.
Later I was reading an extract from David Sedaris's book of diaries. In this extract, dated July 17 2011, he'd been watching an episode of The Tyra Banks Show featuring a woman named Donna who weighed 600 pounds but would have liked to weigh 1000. ‘I guess I'm a sort of reverse anorexia.'
People on the show tried to reason with Donna. Tyra Banks said, 'But you can hardly walk. If you keep this up, you won't be able to move.' And Donna replied coolly that she thought walking was overrated.
I'm sure she's not alone in thinking that.
And then I was reading a back issue of the London Review of Books and there was a review by Colm Toibin of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: An Experimental Life. Part of it runs, ‘The French translatorand scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933 remembered leaving a café with Pessoa and walking with him for a few blocks. Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, “this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he had disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him.”’
I think that’s a great way to end a walk, any walk.
