THE SOLACE OF WALKING

I was in Faversham last Saturday for the Literary Festival, being an author, and I was on stage with Sonia Overall, author of Heavy Time: A Psychogeographer’s Pilgrimage.  

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon

Among the many things we discussed and agreed on, was that a large part of walking and drifting is about noticing.  You walk, you see things, you record them in some way, in memory or a notebook or a photograph. and later, somewhere along the line, they become something else – a book, an essay, even a blog post.

 

After the event, the inamorata and I stayed in Whitstable for a couple of nights with pals Jacqueline and Nick (thanks kids), and it seemed only natural that we should all go for a walk and a drift Sunday morning and do some noticing. So that’s what we did.

 

And what did we notice?  Well I noticed this sign:

 I’m not sure that we actually walked along the Crab and Winkle Way – we certainly didn’t get as far as Canterbury - but we may have covered some small section of it

 

And I can’t speak for anybody else but one of the things I noticed was the the intersection of what we might call nature with what we might call the built environment.

 

We saw gardens including this one decorated with a stone bearing the message ‘One Who Plants a Garden Plants Happiness.’ 

Now you could argue that one who plants a garden is just as likely to plant frustration, disappointment and thankless labour, but I don’t want to rain on anybody’s gardening parade.

 

There was nature creeping up the walls of houses:

We even saw a couple of Nicholsons:

We saw some interesting ruin:

 

And we saw this classic VW bus – every drift is better when it includes a VW bus:

There was also this very noticeable mural of Somerset Maugham:

 

Now, I didn’t know that Somerset Maugham was a Whistable lad: he was born in the British Embassy in Paris.  But after both his parents died he was sent to England to live with his uncle Henry MacDonald Maugham, vicar of Whitstable.   

 

You know it’s a good while since I read any Somerset Maugham – I think the last book I read was Ashendenwhich I really enjoyed, so Maugham is definitely all right with me, but even so, from what I know of his life, I think perhaps he found some forms of solace even more supreme than writing.

NICHOLSON ON NICHOLSONS

Let us again consider the concept of the Nicholson – which as regular readers will know is defined as a manmade object, preferably a single vertical – a street lamp, a telegraph pole, a fence post - that has been taken over by natural growth, so that a plant is using the manmade object as a climbing frame and support.

This is not my invention (obviously), but I came up with the name, you know the way Adam came up with names in the Garden of Eden

 

Some things, once you start looking, you see them everywhere, but in my experience this isn’t true of the Nicholson. As I walk through the world looking for them they’re just uncommon enough to be interesting but not so uncommon as to be frustrating.

 

Of course some Nicholsons are purer than others.  In some cases a plant may climb a manmade post and then get tangled up in nature, like these below, but I think they still fit the definition.  Purity isn’t everything.

 

And this has become one of my very favourite Nicholsons – greenery climbing up a graveyard obelisk – two of my milder obsessions combined.

Below I think is definitely a Nicholson because the ivy (or whatever) is climbing up the fence posts but then it’s also climbing along chain link which isn’t quite as impressive as climbing a single upright, but you can’t have everything.

 

And I would love this to count as a Nicholson: greenery climbing up a bridge, which is certainly a manmade object - but on balance I’m really not sure it fits the bill.

 

 

And here for your viewing pleasure is a photograph of Nicholson photographing some Nicholsons.

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon.

 

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.’