I WOULD WALK 500 STEPS ... AND SO ON

  

This is Peta Bee:

 

A little while back she had a piece in the Times Weekend Section – ‘Why walking is the best midlife exercise. Peta Bee on how many steps you really need.’

 

It was variations on the usual flannel –  ‘Improve the scenery to improve your pace,’  ‘Walk faster,’ ‘Complement walking with weights,’  - but there was an interesting part in which she quoted someone called Thomas Yates who is – wait for it -  a professor in ‘physical activity, sedentary behavior and health.’  Imagine that.  I suppose later in his career he may become a professor just of sitting about.

 

The quotation runs as follows, ‘If you are someone who is very sedentary then increasing you daily walk by 500 steps or just aiming for five minutes of continuous walking would be enough to provide a reasonable health boost.’

 

You see that.  You don’t actually have to DO it.  You just have for AIM to do it.

 

However, according to a sign currently displayed at the Barbican Centre, the government takes a different view – 

 

They say you need ‘a daily walk lasting 20 minutes or more to reduce the risk of heart disease,’ though they don’t say how MUCH more than 20 minutes.  And of course it doesn’t say you actually reduce heart disease, just RISK or heart disease.

 

Now, if you find yourself between trains at Chelmsford station, as I did recently, you’ll have the time to walk from one end of the platform to the other.  In fact you’ll have time to walk from the middle, where the platform entrance is, to one end, back to the middle, down to the other end and back to the middle again. 

 

I’d estimate that the platform is 250 yards long, so that’s your 500 steps right there, though it seemed to take me longer than 5 minutes.

 

In fact if you’re at Chelmsford station and your train is cancelled you’ve got a good half hour to walk back and forth, do you 500 steps and then a great many more.  That must begged for your health, though that's not why I walk.

 

And at the southern end of the platform there was a sign, in fact a use of language, in fact a concept, that I’d never seen before:

 

‘Cess path continues at other end of platform.’

 

I'd never seen the term 'cess path' before. It was the kind of thing that makes a walk worthwhile.  Strange that it's not a category of experience mentioned in Peta Bee’s article.

BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN

 War involves endless movement, getting civilian and military personnel from one place to 

another, getting to the right place and escaping from the wrong place  Very often 

machines are involved – cars, trains, tanks, planes, armoured vehicles.  And yet for many, 

especially (though not exclusively) refugees, war involves a great deal of walking.

 

These are Ukrainians:

 

These are Afghanis:

These are Rohinya refugees:

 

And obviously it's not just civilians. In the Falklands. British soldiers referred to ‘yomping.’

My dad was in his teens when Sheffield was bombed in World War 2.  The day after a round of bombing he still went to work, walking over bodies on the way. 

 

In the same week that a war started in Europe there was a piece in the papers about researchers in Canada who had discovered that - and I'm quoting from the Times here 'that the prevalence of obesity among adults living on "highly walkable" neighborhoods was 19% lower than in those living in areas with 'low walkability.'"

And yeah, you might think, trivial First World problems, although until recently we tended to believe that Russia and Ukraine were firmly in that first world.

 

Also at times like this it might be reasonable to remember Ed Ruscha's line, (which I don’t imagine he invented) the phrase ‘Brave Men Run in My Family.’

ABIDE WITH ME, ETC

 Here’s a picture of an old feller walking in Sheffield.

 

I took it about fifteen years ago when I was walking around the old neighbourhood where I grew up.  It’s taken at the corner of Crowder Road and Crowder Crescent, and I’d have said it was on the Longley Estate, but it could be the Southey Green Estate: these things are finely nuanced and I’ve been gone a long time.

 

I don’t make any claims for myself as a photographer but I’m rather pleased with this one: the twisting of the trees contrasted with the bending of the old man.  (Are they trees? I suppose they may be bushes or shrubs, but never mind). And for one reason another I decided to take a look on Google Street View to see what had been happening on that corner. This view, dated 2021, shows that the twisty trees are gone.

 

What a sad thing.

 

However, if you let Street View take you into the side street, Crowder Crescent, they’re still there.  They’re not looking as healthy as in my pic but they’re hanging in there.  But that picture is dated 2012.

 

So we can say that somewhere between 2012 and 2021 those trees were either removed or possibly they just died.  It seems a sad thing but it may be nature taking its course. 

 

The old man, I assume, is long, long gone.

WALKING WITH WINDOWS

 And speaking of flaneuses, I see that Deborah Moggach is back in the news: new book and newly single.  

 

I remember a time when her Who’s Who entry listed one of her recreations as ‘walking around London looking in people’s windows.’  This sounds so much more fun that just ‘walking.’  This is as close as I can get to a picture of her walking:

 

I did once walk with her for several hundred yards, maybe half a mile, around central London, near Oxford Circus, as we looked for a place to have lunch.  We didn’t look in any people’s windows, and at the time I didn’t know this was one of her recreations, but I certainly would have given half a chance.

EARLY WALKING SYSTEM

 Look, I don’t know much about Nadiya Hussein but I gather she’s a lovely woman, famous 

for baking cakes.  Beyond that I remained in happy ignorance until I saw this headline in the 

Times, ‘I make my kids go on 6 am walks.’  

 

This strikes me as both cruel and unusual, but that isn't the half of it.  If you read the article you discover the line ‘The family wakes each morning just before 5am to pray.’  'For me,' she says, 'it's about making the most of the day.' -  I mean, really?

 

Naturally I was reminded of the blessed Christopher Hitchens’ remark that he thought teaching religious knowledge in schools was a very good thing because it guaranteed an ongoing supply of atheists.  I assume much the same can be said about waking children at 5am for prayers. 

But I do worry that waking children at 6am, and making them go for a walk is most likely

guaranteed to create an ongoing supply of pedestrians and couch potatoes.

        Christopher Hitchens didn't look like a man who ever willingly went for a walk, but I 

could be wrong. Nice bookshelves.

SIMPLY WALKING SIMPLY

 

Some people say that all great ideas are simple.  Obviously this isn’t literally true.  Some 

great ideas are incredibly complicated.  And of course not all simple ideas are great.

 

But one great, simple idea is exemplified by a piece of art title Walking by the Chinese artist Deng Tai.

 

It was shown at the Hammer Museum in LA in 2015, at a time when I was living in LA and could have gone to see it but I’m only reading about it now

 

The description from the Hammer runs as follows.

“Walking is a series of photos made over a three to four year period of time, in different cities, always at night, using only the street and shop lights for illumination. It is simply the recording of a journey, walking an endless road, without a map, to some distant and undefined destination “  

 

The description goes on for a while getting a bit artspeak-ish, but concludes more or less sanely with the words 

“Walking is a simple travellers (sic) passage down streets, over bridges, up stairs, around corners, past buildings, glass, trees, and lights. Each photo, or each frame, is a painting of a day in the life, but all together it is a bigger story, a journey without beginning and without end.’

 

In other words it’s a video of a couple of thousand blurry photographs of some bloke’s feet.

And not only is this a simple idea, but it leads me to the thought – I COULD HAVE DONE THAT!!

 

But of course I didn’t.

 

However the most telling line on the website is “Music for Walking video by William Basinski.”  Now, getting William Basinski to do the music for your art is a great idea, but I’m sure making it a reality is not at all simple.  

THE PROFOUND WALK

Walking provides endless opportunities for coming up with profundities, some of them more genuinely profound than others, though we could argue about which are which.  

And when it comes to notions of ‘The Path’ then everything gets ramped up considerably.

‘No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.’ – That’s Buddha

‘Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.’ – That’s Thoreau.

‘Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection. Advance and do not fear the thorns in the path, for they draw only corrupt blood.’ - Khalil Gibran

‘Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.’   That’s Oprah Winfrey.

And sometimes you find profundity at unexpected times and in unexpected places, such as in the Chelsea Psychic (sic) Garden.

NOW, AND NOW AGAIN

I’ve said it before so it must be true – one of the best thing about walking is the way it sharpens up your perceptions – the more you walk the more you look the more you see.  Just basic rocket science.

And I suppose there’s an argument that if you go away from home you may in fact observe with less acuity, because you’re seeing things for the first time, and so you only notice what’s new and obvious.  Whereas if you stay in you own neighbourhood and walk variations of the same old route time after time, day after day, you end up looking at the same things with the different eyes.

And so the lockdown might be construed as some grand experiment in the nature of perception.

This being so, I’ve been walking while paying attention to three minor Nicholson obsessions: benches, arrows, and cars in gardens.  I’ve always looked at these things in various locations, and sometimes I’ve taken photographs of them, but right now I’m only looking at the ones within walking distance of home, although admittedly I’m also thinking about more distant examples I saw in the past.

This for example is a bench at a gibbon sanctuary somewhere up the Interstate 5 in California – pretty fancy:

but now I find myself looking at this one in the neighbourhood:

This is an arrow in the zoo in Tokyo:

and this is an arrow which has suddenly appeared on the road surface very close to where I live:

This is a car in a garden in Los Angeles:

and this is a car up the road by the (now open) garden centre:

And of course there is death with variations everywhere you go. These critters were shot dead in the desert somewhere near Yucca Valley:

and this is a swan on the shore of the River Stour.  I don’t know how it died, but it makes me realize that I never saw a dead swan before.

RUMMY WALKING

Have we discussed how people walk in art galleries?  Maybe we have.  But we all know that nobody walks in art galleries the way they do in ‘real life.’ In galleries the walking is ponderous, thoughtful, heavy, a way of showing that you’re taking the art seriously. And of course it’s not real walking, you walk for a bit then you stand for a bit and then you kind of shuffle from one exhibit to the next, then you walk into the next room in the gallery, and so on.  We also know that an hour walking round an art gallery is probably the equivalent of a three hour walk in the street.

No great revelations in all this, but I just found a cosmically perfect description of the phenomenon in PG Wodehouse’s – ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’ written, would you believe, in 1925.  Seems like it could have been written this morning.  The narrator, naturally, is Bertie Wooster:

‘Well, you know, I have never been much of a lad for exhibitions ..’ That wonderfully inappropriate and maybe self-referential use of the word ‘lad’ gets my chuckle muscles going, and it continues, ‘The citizenry in the mass always rather puts me off, and after I have been shuffling along with the multitude for a quarter of an hour or so I feel as if I were walking on hot bricks.’

Personally I can probably do 45 minutes rather than 15, but otherwise, this describes my exhibition walking experience perfectly.

NORMAL WALKERS

Its true!  All they need is a map, a good walk and a few heteronormative friends.

LEANINGS

I know it’s probably bad and wrong of me to be walking down the street, see this, and be royally amused.

Of course if this had been in a sitcom, the whole row of bikes would have fallen over like dominos, and I suppose there’s something about the stands holding the bikes that prevents that.  
          In general I don’t want my life to be more like a sitcom.  But in this case I’m not so sure.

WALKING CURATORIALLY

I am, or at least used to be, a bit of a scavenger when I walk.  I’m well aware of the eco tourist mantra “Leave only footprints, take only photographs” which the interwebs attribute to Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe.  However, since his dates are 1786 – 1866 it seems unlikely he’d have given all that much thought to photography.  There is one, and only one, known photograph of him, from 1865.

I have no argument with the chief, or anyone else about this.  Obviously I’m not in favor of driving a truck into the Mojave desert and loading it up with native flora and fauna, but if you’re walking in some scrubby bit of territory, outside any kind of designated park or preserve, and you find a horse bone or a bit of inscrutable machinery lying in your path, well I don’t think it’s the crime of the century to pick it up and put in your backpack and take it home with you.

And when you’re walking in the city I think it’s perfectly ok to pick up just about any old thing that’s lying in the street – books, toys, a loud speaker.  You could claim you were picking up litter, beautifying the environment.

But then the question arises of what you actually do with all this disjecta when you get it home.  For years I’ve been accumulating stuff and putting it on shelves in a little room off the garage.

And I suppose there was always some idea in the back of my mind that I might become a junk sculptor like Noah Purifoy, or one of those curator-artists like Mark Dion, both of whom I admire greatly.

But the years go by and the sculpture doesn’t get made, and yes I suppose any accumulation involves a kind of curating but I don’t see the good folks from the Pitt Rivers museum knocking at my door, asking me to install a display of the Nicholson collection, and so recently I’ve been thinning the archive, perhaps better described as throwing away junk, which is, in general, a remarkably pleasurable experience. 

At the same time (and I’m not sure if this is part of the same impulse or its opposite) I’ve been photographing the stuff before I throw it away.   As you see.

But then just a few days back I was out walking and I saw a machete on the ground at the side of the street.  Obviously it had been left there by a worker who’d forgotten it when he was packing up, and yes it’s obviously wrong to steal a man’s tools, but equally the man couldn’t have valued the machete all much or he wouldn’t have left it behind.  And so despite my resolution not to pick up more stuff I really did want that machete.  And the only reason I didn’t take it was because I’d have had to walk down the street with it in my hand, and I thought that by the time I got home somebody would have seen me and called the cops to report a dangerous armed lunatic in the neighbourhood.  So I left it where it was and I had to make do with a photograph. 

But I kept thinking about it and the next day I went for a walk down the same street and the machete had gone.  I hope it went to somebody who needed it more than I did, not hard since I didn’t really need it at all.