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I’ve been talking to Stefan van Norden about being on his podcast titled ‘Nature Revisited.’ Stefan is also a gardener and a filmmaker, perhaps best known for the documentary Negotiating with Nature about the natural world, gardening, connection and disconnection.  Walking inevitably comes into it. This is the man himself:

 

He wants to do a podcast to be called something like ‘Walking In The UK.’  He’s based in the States in New Hampshire, and his line is that British walking culture is very different from any other in the world.  I’ve been pondering whether and how this is true, and naturally I dug out a few volumes from the Nicholson Pedestrian Library to see what others had had to say on the subject. The one that seemed most on the money was The Magic of Walking by Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode, in which there’s a section titled ‘Walking, British Style.’  

Part of it runs, ‘Wherever we may set foot (in Britain), some eighteenth-century essayist or nineteenth-century poet walked there before us.  When Thomas Gray whose ‘Elegy written in a country churchyard’ we all read in school, walked the Lake District in 1769, after a long day’s walking he found the inn’s best bedroom dark and damp, and went sturdily on for another 14 miles to Kendal and another inn that pleased him more, before he stopped for the night.’  

I’m not sure that this is especially British, and it does seem a bit like showing off.

 

 

         Stefan is particularly fascinated by our system of Public Footpaths. He’s thrilled by the idea that you see a sign that says Public Footpath and you know you can walk freely there, across or through other people’s land, and who knows where you’ll end up.  That part I absolutely agree with.  I have quite a collection of photographs I’ve taken of Public Footpath signs; this kind of thing:

 

And when I see one pointing to a footpath like this, I often feel compelled to go down it.

 

I was able, to a limited extent, to explore this further last week when a mixed group of fellow trudgers came to Manningtree; 3 from London, one from lower Essex, one from Brazil, to do the somewhat familiar walk to Dedham, in Constable Country.  Here we are looking like a little-known but still surviving prog-rock band.

 

There was one woman in the group, who took the above picture.  She looked like this, while admiring a mound of sheep’s wool.

 

We didn’t have any great sense of urgency or purpose in our walk, and even with detours and meanders we probably only covered about 7 miles:  Thomas Gray would have laughed at us, but we passed a considerable number of Public Footpath signs in their various forms:

 

And at my instigation we did discuss British notions of walking versus hiking versus trekking, and how these might be different elsewhere in the world.  We found the ‘rambling’ especially interesting.  The British Ramblers Association has been around since been around since 1935.  Looks like it was a great way to meet babes.

 

And we certainly discussed how different English rambling is from American rambling.  I’m still singing the Allman Brothers’ ‘Ramblin’ Man,’ not least because of its lines

My father was a gambler down in Georgia

And he wound up on the wrong end of a gun.

As Stefan and I had discussed, if you stray from a footpath in Britain you might possibly get yelled at by an angry farmer, but in general you’re unlikely to get shot. In America it can be a little different.

I suspect the Allman Brothers weren't great walkers.

 

 

OF WALKING AND SITTING

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Look, you know me; I like walking. But however much you like walking, however intrepid you are, however much stamina you’ve got, a moment always comes when you need to sit down.  Of course if you’re truly intrepid you’ll happily sit on a rock or an ants’ nest but some of us are glad to find a bench on our travels.

 

All benches are good and some are downright exotic but the memorial bench is a particular favourite of mine. 

 

As far as I’m aware, nobody I’ve known personally, has ever been memorialized on a bench but I think it’s a great way of remembering someone.  And so I walk through the world sometimes sitting on benches, sometimes just looking at them and particularly noting the plaques and inscriptions. 

 

However, in most cases, these memorialize people I never knew and have never even heard of.  I got rather enthused by his one, in the Painswick Rococo Garden in Gloucestershire which memorializes John Berryman, but it’s not John Berryman the poet, it’s some quite other John Berryman.

This next one in Holland Park commemorates Arnold Toynbee who I’d sort of heard of, and Daisaku Ikeda – who I absolutely hadn’t, but he sounds like a good guy – look him up.  

This is the two of them having a dialogue:

But fame isn’t necessary.  Below is a wonderful bench in a churchyard in Chelsea which I like a lot.  Aren’t all spouses debating partners in the end?  Until they stop talking. Though of course you want to know the back story.

Similarly with this one.  What exactly do you have to do to become known as The Duck Lady.  Is it just a matter of feeding them or is it more that that?

Sometimes the back story seems a more complicated and inscrutable and possibly tragic one, as with this one in Wivenhoe (I think).  'Lost in India' raises a lot of questions.

And I'm intrigued by this one in Richmond. And no, I haven’t been able to find out who John 'Jack’ July is.  He could have been a dancer, but perhaps the dancing was only figurative.  And was he really still dancing in his 90s?

 Of course picking the right spot for your bench is all-important: you can’t put it just anywhere. They say that if everybody who wanted to put a bench on Hampstead Heath was allowed to, the place would look like a giant arena.

      Which brings me to Nicky Hopkins’ memorial bench in the wide open spaces of Perivale. 

Hopkins played keyboards with huge numbers of bands and artists, including the Stones, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Joe Walsh and L. Ron Hubbard (yes really).  He died aged 50 in Nashville Tennessee.  I wonder if there’s a memorial bench for him there.

 

 

 

 

 

A LONG WAY TO WALK

 Will Pavia interviewed the now late Martin Amis in 2018, 

when Amis was in his late 60s, not so very long before 

his death as it turns out.

Amis said, ‘I’m more and more averse to any kind of exertion.’  And then discussing the walk to his local grocery store he said, ‘When I come around the corner and look up the street (I think) that’s a long way.’ 

I wonder if it had something to do with the cigarettes.

 

From the Smithsonian magazine

You know, sometimes I look out of my window and see old people struggling with walking sticks and Zimmer frames and occasionally Nordic poles, and I admire them enormously because they’re still out there, determined to carry on walking.  But at the same time I think, if I had that much difficulty walking, if I needed a stick or a Zimmer frame or Nordic poles I don’t think I’d ever leave the house.  No doubt time will tell.

 

LOST IN SPACES

 I know I’ve led a sheltered life but even so I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to find out that the line ‘Not all those who wander are lost,' which I think is a pretty good line, comes from Tolkein’s poem  "The Riddle of Strider," written for The Fellowship of The Ring.

 

I’ve always found Tolkien pretty much unreadable, but somehow his reputation has survived this obstacle, and that quotation (with variations) has thrived on a lot of those ‘inspirational quotation’ sites around the Interwebs.  

Now, there’s nothing quite like an inspirational quotation to bring out the cynic in me, so you can imagine how pleased I was, while looking for something else, to find this, which I subsequently found in various other versions :

 

And finally, to prove, as if proof were needed, that not all who walk are noble, moral or decent, here is a picture of a walker, in fact power walker, whose name shall not be spoken.

 

EVERYBODY WALKS IN L.A.

 For various reasons, some of them obscure even to me (perhaps especially to me), I’ve been in southern California, pretty much avoiding all my old friends and acquaintances there, trying to sort out my feelings about a place I loved for decades, lived in for over 15 years, and have ‘lost’ one way or another.  I mean, I haven’t really lost it.  It’s still there and I know how to find it, but even so ...

 

Naturally I did a fair bit of walking while I was there because that’s what I do wherever I am, and although I was seldom the only person on the street, sometimes I was:

 

The walking was great. I really do think that the LA authorities should promote the place with some slogan such as “Los Angeles – One Helluva Walking City.”

 

The place is built on a grid of course, which makes finding your way around comparatively easy, although admittedly the things you might want to see and places you might want to go are seldom walking distance from each other, and once in a while you do have to walk around or through a tent city, but what’s pedestrianism without a little local difficulty?

 

On my wanderings I briefly thought I’d found a Thomasson – in this case a set of stairs to nowhere - but in fact I think they’re part of the emergency exit from the building above, so unlike a true Thomasson the stairs do have a function.

 

There were ruins, just like ancient Rome:

 

There was even an obelisk:

 

There were cool vehicles of course. Here is the author with the vehicle of his dreams:

 

photo by Caroline Gannon.

And I saw a couple of VW Beetles still in action on the street, which is always reassuring. I even managed to get a picture of one of them.

 

There was walking in the gardens at the Huntington in San Marino, not least the desert garden.

It was fabulous.  And then the inamorata and I got in the rented car and drove inland to do some ‘proper’ desert walking …

 

MIRACLE ON OXFORD STREET

 

OK well, I’m still banging on about ‘Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground’ – a project of 

potentially infinite scope and duration.

 

I was in London for a few days last week; and you know, the stuff you find on the ground in London does seem more interesting and curious than the stuff you find on the ground elsewhere.

 

Some of the stuff is not necessarily surprising - it may just be litter – but most litter isn’t quite as eye-catching as this package of ‘Sliming’ Herbs, found on the pavement in Leytonstone. (That's one for the archive).

 

But other things are more mysterious.  Yes, I can imagine circumstances in which I might abandon my socks while out for a walk but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t just leave them lying on the pavement, like these near Leicester Square:

And what exactly is the story behind this mysterious pair of crutches left in Oxford Street.  To be fair they’d been left next to a waste bin which could be construed as an attempt to be tidy.

 

But it so happened that immediately after I’d taken that picture above, the man who empties the bins came along and asked me suspiciously, ‘Are these yours?’

 

I thought of one or two smart replies involving miracle cures but thought it best to play it straight, and said no they weren’t mine and I think he believed me.  And we both said they looked brand new.  Who throws a way a brand new pair of crutches, we asked each other?  We didn’t have an answer.

 

But I was reminded of a book I used to look at in my catholic grandma’s house when I was a kid.  The book was about Lourdes the scene of any number of miracle cures, and a place where a great many crutches were abandoned, like this:

And on the ground in Walthamstow – a pro-bee graffito (I think that’s the word even though it’s on the ground). 

 

WALKING IN AND OUT OF NATURE

 

I went for a walk, not a very long one, at a place called Nature in Art, at Twigworth in Gloucestershire, according to the website ‘the world’s first museum and art gallery dedicated to fine, decorative and applied art inspired by nature’ which sounds a bit catch-all for my tastes.

 

Not so very long ago people spent a lot of time saying to themselves and others, ‘Yes, but is it art?’  These days we pretty much accept that it IS art, whatever it is.

 

I spend rather more of my time saying, ‘Yes but is it nature?’  I don’t find ‘nature’ quite such a simple concept as so many people seem to. 

 

Nature in Art is in fact a permanent, though changing, exhibition partly inside Wallsworth Hall, a Georgian mansion, and partly in its garden. In the house are galleries featuring depictions of ‘natural’ subjects – frogs, lions, elephants, snakes, dodos and whatnot.  Some of these are paintings.  Some of them are three dimensional.

 

And of course you walk around the galleries just as you walk in any other gallery, but the real action is outside, a chunk of land, looked after but not too well-groomed, with pieces of sculpture scattered around it:  a metal squid, giant poppy seed heads, the tail of a whale (seen above).

Now, it seems to me, you might ask yourself whether a walk in a garden really counts as a walk in nature.  I mean a garden is green all right.   It has things growing in it.  But a garden is as much a creation as any piece of art. I don’t want to sound like a sour puss, but I’d have thought Art in the Garden would have been a better name for the outdoor space; but names are tricky.  The place is run by the Nature in Art Trust which was established in 1982 when it was called the Society for Wildlife Art of the Nations, so it’s definitely made a step in the right direction. 

And in fact I had a great time strolling around between the sculptures and the teasels, but I also spent a certain amount of time agonizing about what exactly is meant by ‘nature.’

 

         If you’ve ever pulled up a weed, trodden on an ant, or, lord knows, planted a tree, you have by definition interferred with nature.  You know, just like Capability Brown

 

These thoughts were nothing new.  I happen to live in the Stour Valley which is ‘An area of outstanding natural beauty’ (AONB – yes, I know it should be AOONB).  AONBs are protected by the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (CROW - yes, I know it should be CAROWA) which is all about protecting. conserving and indeed enhancing natural beauty, because obviously nature on it’s own isn’t enough.

 

The Stour Valley is a great place to walk, but do I really need government legislation to tell me what’s outstanding?  Or what’s natural or indeed beautiful? I’d have said not.

This may be because I enjoy walking in areas that some might call areas of outstanding unnatural ugliness.  That’s how we flaneurs are.  And of course I don’t need the government (or anybody else) to tell me what is and isn’t ugly.

Footnote: My friend and top photographer Berris Conolly tells me that ‘Art in the Gardens’ is the name of an annual summer sale at the Botanical Gardens in Sheffield. He writes, ‘I paid for a stall in a tent one year (2008ish) and did quite well, although amazingly, because of poor security, there was a (selective) theft in the night, and they took two of mine, which is probably quite complimentary. No insurance, of course.’