THE HANGING TREE

I’ve been walking in Oxleas Wood, on the top of Shooter’s Hill in Greenwich.  I was with my pal Hugh and his dog Fergus. This is Fergus:

Oxleas Wood is 77 hectares of ancient deciduous forest.  Its initial survival is thought to have been because the land was too hilly to clear for human settlements.  And it was part of the royal estate from the 14^thto the 20^thcentury which obviously guranteed that no riff raff would mess with it. 

Tucked into Oxleas Wood is Severndroog Castle a great bit of folly architecture built as a memorial to Sir William James by his widow, Lady Jane, after his death in 1783.  

Among other things, Sir William James was commander of the East India Company navy, and in 1755 he attacked and destroyed the island fortress of Suvarnadurg, off the coast of what is now India, what was then part of the Maratha Empire.  Suvarnadurg currently looks like this:

Severndoorg is the Englished version of Suvarnadurg, though it seems that historically other spellings have been used:

As memorials and follies go it’s genuinely impressive, some fine brickwork and possibly a Thomasson:

But on the day we walked there, another memorial was visible.  

It is a certain tree, unremarkable in itself, that Hugh tells me for a long time had a blue rope attached to one of the high branches, and local kids used to swing on the rope.

The rope has now gone and it’s not a place where children play because a young man, a single dad with a history of what we now call “mental health issues”  hanged himself from that very rope.  His name was Garry Guest.  He was, inevitably, found by a dog walker.

The lower part of the tree has now been turned into a rough, makeshift memorial that is gradually being worn away by the elements.  It’s strangely moving in its roughness and decay, not least the photograph and the empty Strongbow can.

No doubt it will not last as long as Severndroog Castle but in its way it's far more moving. 

WALKING MADLY

‘It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks’ walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky.” 

Those are the opening lines of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of linked short stories posing as a novel. I can’t say I’d forgotten the lines because I’ve never actually read the book from beginning to end, though I have read at least one of the stories it contains – ‘The Veldt.’   

But I have seen the movie and I have never forgotten the sight of Rod Steiger, all naked and tatted up. The book describes him as “a walking treasure gallery.”

Gotta say I didn’t know that people went to Wisconsin on walking tours, but it seems they very definitely do.  The state seems to be dense with walkers and walking trails.

         When I first lived in Los Angeles, Ray Bradbury was alive and well and doing a lot of public appearances around town, many of them in Glendale.  I don’t know how much of a walker he was but sometimes apparently he walked while wearing a suit, like this:

And I think he must have been rather proud of his legs, perhaps honed and toned by walking, because he was always showing them off in shorts; like this:

Tangentially I have been reading Museum Without Walls,some collected essays by another writer who also walks while wearing a suit, at least when the cameras are on him; Jonathan Meades, a man I can’t quite imagine in shorts.

In a piece on Ian Nairn, Meades writes of “the ever-increasing battalions of soi-disant psychogeographers - who are distinguished from plain geographers by neglecting to take their Largactil before they release themselves into the edgelands of Sharpness or the boondocks of Sheppey.”  

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Largactil, as some of you will know, and some may not, is one of the trade names for Chloropromazine, an anti-psychotic.  Looks like good stuff:

NICHOLSON, DESTROYER OF CITIES

If you’re going to walk all the way around a city, it helps (in once sense) if that city is small.  On the other hand, all the great cities are big, and all the great walks are long. So perhaps some miniaturization is what’s required.

This is a model of Chicago I saw last month, in the Chicago Architecture Center, in a Mies van de Rohe building on upper Wacker Drive.

And this a model of London which is in the Building Center, in Store Street, “a bud for the built environment” since 1932.

The Chicago one even changes color:

I love miniaturization; model buildings, model railways, miniature golf courses.  

It makes me feel a bit like Gulliver and a bit like Godzilla.  I know I could destroy large areas of the tiny city long before any security could get there.  But I don’t do any destroying.  I just walk around.

Here's a picture of Mies van Der Rohe walking with Le Corbusier.  Oh the laughs there must have been.  

And here's another bloke who liked a bit of miniaturization:

AMBIGUITY - HOW MANY TYPES YA GOT?

“I am living at the Villa Borghese. There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.”

That’s Henry Miller, the opening lines of Tropic of Cancer, an author and a book I used to spend a lot of time thinking about. I don’t anymore but those lines have evidently stayed with me.  This is a picture of Miller walking (more or less), I think in Brooklyn.  

For my own part, I am living, or at least staying for a couple of weeks, in an Airbnb, in Endsleigh Court, in Bloomsbury.  

The place is indeed very clean, and I can place the chairs wherever I want.  I am certainly alone, but the feelings of wanting to be dead are becoming rarer.  My therapist has views on this.

        Some would say that everybody needs therapy.

       One great thing about Endsleigh Court, since I’m on the 7^thfloor, is that you can look out of the window, down into the street, and at certain times of day the walkers in Upper Woburn Place, are very beautifully lit (or backlit).

         You know, in general I find that whole Bloomsbury Group franchise thing pretty insufferable.  And I’m sure the feeling would have been mutual.  If there were some shift in the space/time continuum and Virginia Woolf actually met me, I’m sure she’d have thought I was the kind of oik who should be taken down a dark Bloomsbury alley and given a good kicking.  Hard to imagine which member of the Bloomsbury Group could have done that: maybe Vanessa Bell.

Still, you can’t object to a geographical area simply on the basis of who used to live there.  Bloomsbury is a very decent area to walk around.  It may lack the grit and grime of the most interesting areas of London but it’s full of curiosities, and you can’t have grit and grime all the time.  

There are blue plaques everywhere, Dickens, Darwin, Dorothy L. Sayers, as well the whole Bloomsbury Bunch.  But this one’s very special:

Empson was the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity, and given that he taught in Tokyo and Peking, he might have been enough of an orientalist to appreciate the Bangladesh connection. 

Empson was also, by adoption, another Sheffield lad, teaching at the university for the best part of 20 years – 1954 to 1972.  He had a bunker-slash-man cave in the basement of 17 Wharncliffe Road. 

Sheffield has always been an essentially tolerant city but the idea that a man could walk its streets with a beard like Empson's and not have the dogs set on him, suggests that the city used to be even more tolerant than I imagined.

Anyway, back in Bloomsbury, my Airbnb is close to one of my favorite London buildings, the Mary Ward House:

And I am suddenly reminded, though I never exactly forgot, of an odd and brief period in my life when I was dating a woman who was a doctor.  She was very accomplished, and obviously smart, saving lives wherever she went, from Nottingham to Lesotho and back again.  So she came down to London and we walked around and we were having a good enough time as far as I could tell, and we walked past the Mary Ward Centre and I said it was one of my favorite London buildings and she looked at me as though I was an idiot, and said something along the lines of “How can anybody have a favorite building?”  

        She found it both absurd and incomprehensible that a person might walk around the built environment and have feelings about what he saw. I didn’t even try to explain. On that same day we walked down to the ICA where there was an exhibition that included Meret Oppenheim’s Object which I said I found really great.

My date, the doctor, did not. You can imagine how well this relationship went. 

Meret in playful mood.

 A last thought about William Empson, from Kenneth Lo, the chef, who was (apparently) Empson’s lodger when they both lived in Hampstead. Lo said that “William was one step removed from contemporary reality and seemed to stroll through life unhindered by its troublesome details.”  Lucky old William, you might say.

A MAN IMPROVED

Strange as it may seem, I was in Bradfield in the Peak District at the weekend.  I was there for an event titled “Walking Through Time: A celebration of Sheffield’s Walking Heritage.”  It was organized by my cousin Margaret and her husband Chris.  I hadn’t seen either of them in a very long time, and I’ve never knew them all that well, but over the years they’ve become keen walkers it seems.

Bradfield, if the local literature is to be believed, “is probably the largest civil Parish in England covering 56 square miles, with over 100 miles of public footpaths,” and it has a boundary walk that’s pretty much 50 miles long. 

There were talks in the village hall about the local wildlife, and rights for walkers including one by a former local MP on the Countryside and Rights of Way (CROW) Act, and there was music from a group called Clarion Call, singing songs about rambling. I was there to do my party piece about walking and trespassing with my dad. 

This guy was there (Terry Howard) - a man you tend to remember:

and so were these two:

This is cousin Margaret, me, and the man on the right is top, Sheffield-based photographer Berris Conolly.

The event didn’t in itself require any actual walking, so between acts I meandered from Low Bradfield to High Bradfield and back, which took me to St Nicholas’s Church which among other attractions has this very, very fine gargoyle:

Back in the village hall there were people selling books, one fellow selling old photographs and postcards of the area, and Terry Howard was selling off the stock from the now defunct Sheffield Clarion Ramblers, including this lovely little volume (about two inches by three) which I bought, produced in the 1950s, still in amazingly good condition, with a fold out map at the back:

And best of all is that line on the front of the book, “The man who was never lost, never went very far,” attributed to GBH (Bert) Ward, who was a local steelworker and walking activist.  It's a sentiment currently very popular with people who call themselves psychogeographers (and even Rebecca Solnit), but the date here is 1952/3 which is interestingly close to the year that Guy DeBord published his “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography” – 1955.

And – (and now set your face to stun) – 1955 was also the year that Chet Baker released the album Chet Baker Sings and Plays containing the song “Let’s Get Lost.”  And lord knows Baker was a man who, for a significant amount of time, lost himself quite spectacularly.

“Ee by gum” as somebody probably said at some time in Bradfield.  

The "Walking Through Time" event raised 310 quid for the restoration of local stiles.  I actually thought the local stiles were pretty wonderful as they were, but no doubt it would be better if there were more or them: