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.

FROM MAJOR TO MINOR

When I was a kid there were a good few family outings to Sherwood Forest,  These involved a lot of walking but that was OK because I knew that as part of the walk we’d visit The Major Oak, the hollow tree in which Robin Hood supposedly, mythically, hid from the Sheriff of Nottingham.  The tree’s named after Major Hayman Rooke, author of a small book titled Remarkable Oaks  in which he described and drew the tree.

By ‘visit’ I don’t mean just standing there looking at the tree or even walking around it, no, in those days you could actually go insidethe tree, into the very cavity where Robin Hood had (supposedly) hidden.  It wasn’t a very big cavity as I remember, not much bigger than kid-size, and the internal ‘walls’ of the tree were worn to a glassy smoothness by all the bodies that had rubbed against them over the centuries. 

I haven’t given this a vast amount of thought over the years but I had no doubt that what we’d all done so innocently back in the day was obviously bad and wrong from a conservationist point of view, and I had seen recent pictures of the Major Oak, with a Dali-esque arrangement of struts supporting the branches.

Turns out it was worse than I thought.  Even walking around the tree created damage.  Footsteps from hundreds of thousands of visitors compacted the soil, preventing rainwater and nutrients from fallen leaves getting down to the tree roots.  A fence was eventually built around it to keep pedestrians and others away and the tree has been saved, even if it’s not looking its very best.

I’m prepared to accept my own small responsibility for the overall state of the Major Oak, on the other hand …

Last autumn I was walking in Essex and came across a big (if not major) oak tree, and under it were a lot of acorns. I picked up a handful, took them home, put them in compost in pots to overwinter, and come late spring there was absolutely no sign of germination so I used the pots and compost to grow other things, including poppies which are fugitive, see Robbie Burns: 

‘But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;

But then last week, clearing out the poppies that had been and gone and died, I saw to my amazement that a very minor oak was growing in one of the pots.  Oh boy! 

I realize this is only the very smallest act of reparation for my mistreatment of the Major Oak, but we all do what we can.  

WALKING WITH GIANTS

On the wall, across the room from where I’m writing, there’s a poster like this: Attack of the 50ft Pinup – Yvette Vickers.

You could just about say that the woman in the image is doing a highly specialized kind of walking, the kind that crushes cars and freeways.

The poster is designed by George Chastain and mine is signed by Yvette Vickers, and I used to think it was advertising her autobiography, but I don’t know that there was ever such a book.  I think it was just a poster she used to sign and sell at collector and memorabilia fairs, which I guess is where mine came from – it was a present.

The poster, of course, is an homage to the 1958 movie Attack of the 50ft Woman and Yvette Vickers was one of the stars, though she wasn’t the one who grew to 50 feet – that’s Alison Hayes – Yvette played the floozy.

Vickers died rather horribly in 2010 or 2011. The reason for the doubt: she’d become a recluse, and her dead body was found in her home in one of the canyons above Beverly Hills - expert opinion thought she might have been dead for as long as a year.  Yep, people in the LA canyons keep themselves to themselves.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman was remade in 2020 with Darryl Hannah. You can sort of understand why they thought it was suitable for a remake it, advances in special effects technology, CGI and all that, but I don’t think the movie was very popular.

The idea of some giant, sexy woman walking through the landscape obviously has its appeal and for some men it’s a major fetish – macrophilia - but of course when it comes to movies we know it’s not the woman who’s fifty feet tall, it’s the buildings that are just a couple of feet tall, and the cars are toys.

But personally I think that’s OK. I really like model villages.  You walk around and you feel like a giant or maybe Godzilla or one of those other Japanese monsters, as though you could just stomp the world into submission, but you don’t because it’s not the real world, and because they’d call the cops.

And it appears that out own dear queen was also something of a fan, or at least had to do a walkabout around Bekonscot when on a royal engagement – she actually looks pretty miserable 

And here’s a picture I took earlier, at the model village in Great Yarmouth.

OH, THE INHUMANITY

It's interesting, isn’t it, how many ‘walkers’ have been created by the lockdown. Once people were told they could walk for an hour a day, people started walking for an hour a day, as though they couldn't possibly have done it unless the government told them to.  Jeez.
          In last Saturday’s Times Magazine there was Caitlin Moran, who can be very funny, writing a rather serious piece under the headline ‘Escape from Suburbia – in 41,000 steps: I walked from home into the city – and a London I no longer knew.’ That headline is so thorough that you don’t altogether need to read the article itself but I did.  Her home is in ‘the north London suburbs’ which seems gloriously unspecific, and she goes into central London, evidently with somebody unnamed (though maybe Pete Paphides) and concludes, ‘Now that it’s empty, you can admire the sets.  God, this place is beautiful.  The people who made this town are geniuses … You can fall in love with humanity all over again – even though there’s no one here – just by looking at the things it’s done.’

Couldn't find a pic of Caitlin Moran walking exactly, but this isn't too far off the mark.

         Of course it’s much easier to fall in love with humanity when it’s not there, a view that I think Jeremy Clarkson would share.  There was in the Sunday Times with a piece headlined, ‘Oh dear, I’ve realised I’m a ramblin’ man.’ Actually it sounds like was always something of a walker but having become a farmer he’s walking a bit differently these days. He writes, ‘I’ve been told many times by fellow farmers that it’s important once in a while to do a “perimeter walk”. And obviously I’ve nodded enthusiastically and left the conversation thinking, “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

          ‘I can walk for miles in a town, but I’ve never really seen the appeal in the countryside. What’s the point of going for a walk when you just end up back where you started? You go past a tree and then, shortly, you go past another exactly the same. And then you get hay fever.’

Probably there’d be no point telling him that no two trees are exactly that same, or that you get can get hay fever in the middle of the city. Still, he does manage to find some humanity on his walk – ‘a fat youth in an anorak, walking straight through my barley,’A heated argument ensues, and Clarkson says, ‘I’ve never had an argument ’with another pedestrian in London,’ though personally I’ve had several. Then he meets a woman whose dog is off its lead who told him he couldn’t throw his weight about just because he was on television.  See: humanity is nothing but trouble.

Of course one of the things about walking in a crowded city even when there are lots of people there you don’t actually have to engage with them, in fact you spend most of time trying to keep out of their way. They may be within 6 feet of you, but as you walk you try to avoid having them impinge on your consciousness.

Then as fate would have it my Facebook feed led me to an interview on Urbanautica with the walker and photographer Paul Walsh, who again was clearly a walker long before the lockdown.  ‘Walking taught me to be at ease in my own company, to understand myself, to conquer the fear of the unknown and gave me self confidence. The combination of walking and photographing taught me to analyse my surroundings and to try and understand my place in the world.’

All of which sounds right to me, though he often walks with other people ‘I am currently working in Finland with The MAP6 Collective, where we are exploring themes surrounding the world happiness report. I am walking with people who live locally, but I am allowing them to guide me through a walk of their choice, whilst I record our conversations and document the walk photographically.’

Well I guess that’s all right.  This is one of Walsh’s photographs of a fellow walker:

And here’s a photograph of his I like better, from a project titled Insomniataken on a night walk. You know there are people up there in the block of flats, you just don’t have to see them.

This is the Urbanautica interview:  

https://urbanautica.com/interview/paul-walsh-the-sense-of-walking/1804 

This is Paul Walsh’s website: 

https://paulwalshphotography.co.uk/home

WALKING WITH WALKMEN

Much like old Bill Shakespeare, I have ‘small Latin and less Greek’ which may be why I only just learned a new word for walking.  It’s solivagant, as noun meaning somebody who wanders wandering alone, or as an adjective describe the act of wandering alone, as in ‘I say, that solivigant over there is obviously on a solivigant journey.’It comes from the Latin solivagus, and I suppose I have might have teased out the meaning if given enough time but it was still a new one on me.

Evidently quite a lot of people know the world perfectly well. It’s the name of a band, a website, various bloggers, a teen novel, the title in one form or another of at least two movies, and no doubt much more besides.

Titles, I know, are hard, but it seems to me that titling anything with a word that a lot of people have never heard, may be a problem.

But the French like to have problems. The Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language  (La Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française), is an institutions that tries to keep the French language pure and unsullied by non-French words, at least so far as official written and spoken communications are concerned.  Borrowed English words trouble them especially.

As far back as 2006 they eschewed the word Walkman, and suggesting baladeur, which in fact became a general term for a portable music device, baladeur being a French word up there with flâneur and promenadeur, meaning a walker. See, the English language sometimes embraces foreign words.  Of course Walkman was a trademark of Sony, which may have complicated matters.

But CELF is now fretting about the word podcast. This was already outlawed and changed to diffusion pour baladeur(broadcast for the walker) it has now become audio a la demande (audio on demand) which is OK but not very adventurous.  I’d have liked audio pour la solivigant but I always want too much.

THE ROAD TO HELL, GOOD INTENTIONS AND SO ON

Yeah right! And you know, I'm not sure that people answer 100% honestly when they answer a survey.

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.

THE LONG WALK AWAY FROM HOME

As we celebrate hundred year old Captain, now Colonel, Tom Moore for his walking and charity fund raising efforts – 100 laps of his 82 foot garden, 30 million quid, do let’s, spare a thought for the heroic failure of Martin Echegaray Davies, a man who two years ago set off walking from to Patagonia to Alaska.  

         It was intended to be a walk of just under 19,000 miles, but after he’d completed 14,287 of them he arrived at the border between North Dakota and Canada, where Canadian officials, responding to Covid-19 fears, told him his travel was non-essential, and so they wouldn’t let him.

Having sat in a motel for a week, weighing his options, he decided to go back home, and managed to get on a flight organized by the Argentinian government.

There are two unusual aspects to Davies’ walk as far as I’m concerned.  First that he took a trolley with him, containing camping equipment, weighing 140 kilogrammes, and flying Welsh and Argentinian flags, and secondly, that along the way he took 1,718 selfies with people he met along the way. He has a Facebook page where these are displayed.

He said he didn’t think he was likely ever to complete the walk, which of course reminds us of the great Sebastian Snow who planned to walk a similar route (though without trolley or selfies) from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska, but gave up when he reached Panama City.  He was sick and tired and he’d simply had enough.  That sometimes happens to walkers, you know.

THE BEARD AND I

A good few years back I interviewed Peter Beard ‘on stage’ in a bookshop in New York.  (Yes, yes, my life used to be far more glamorous than it is now). Beard was absolutely the easiest man to interview.  Any question, whether about Africa, or Andy Warhol, Karen Blixen or the elephant that gored him, produced a long, articulate and (naturally) highly opinionated answer.  I could just have held up flash cards.  I now realize I should have asked him about walking.

I didn’t walk with Beard but I often walked in SoHo and went into his gallery-cum-archive: The Time is Always Now.

But he was obviously something of a walker.  He was known to his friends as Walkabout for his tendency to wander off on adventures.

And when he wandered off from his home in Montauk a little while ago, and we know that wandering is a symptom of dementia, a number of us thought he might have decided to end it all by walking into the sea – a very brave and elegant way to go.  But in fact no, he walked into the woods, where he was found dead not so very much later, by a hunter.

But the thing I remember best about my Beard ‘conversation’ was when he said he’d been into a toy store in Manhattan, probably Toys-R-Us which was still in business at the time, and tried to find a toy animal that in any way resembled a real animal.  He had of course failed to find one because all the toy animals were cute or cuddly or anthropomorphic.  This made him very angry.  And as the years have gone by I’ve come more and more to think that his anger was absolutely justified.  And if an elephant gores well, that’s exactly the kind of occupational hazard an animal lover has to expect.

          This is him, recently gored:

WHITE SANDMAN

As we try to fill our days by tidying up our lives, I was digging through the archive and I found this old picture of me, not looking my very cutest, at White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

I was walking there, as you do, and I found the thing that I’m holding, which I think is a piece of some experimental aircraft or rocket or missile, found among the dunes, and I only picked up for the photo op, although sometimes I wish I’d put it in my back checked luggage and brought it home to England.

After I’d done my walk, I called in at the Ranger Station to look at the postcards and souvenirs, and I said, casually, to the ranger behind the desk that I’d seen bits of aereonautical debris among the dunes, and the ranger said sternly, ‘Whatever you do don’t pick them up.’  He didn’t say why, but I'm assuming it was because the debris had all kinds of weird and dangerous chemicals on it.

I said nothing but I’m still glad I got the picture.  I got this one too.  It's arty.  You can take the man out of the Volkswagen, but you can't take the Volkswagen out of the man.

DRIFTING STILL

Just so you know, I’m keeping on walking – in accordance with government guidelines, naturally.  There are lots of cats and birds just walking in the road – because there’s so little traffic.  There is also an increase in road kill – not cats, but pigeons, plus the occasional rabbit and hedgehog.

But how about this for a surprise – growing up in the road between the tarmac and the kerb – garlic!!  Or so I thought.  Greener people than me have suggested it's probably chives, and they're surely right.  But it does smell very garlicy.

So I don't know if it’s some wild variety or an escapee from somebody’s garden.  It smells great, and in general I believe in foraging but somehow gutter garlic or even gutter chives seems a bit unappealing.  Call me overdelicate.
                                                            *
And I talked to my neighbor a couple of days later - she tells me they're all escapees from her front garden - and she doesn't like the taste of chives!!