WALKING BIGLY, WITH BEN

As I walk around London in mid-November, especially at night (although “night” starts at about half past four), I’m struck by how much of it is lit up.  Some of it is in honour of the approaching Christmas, but by no means all.  County Hall and the London Eye (which if you’re in the right frame of mind can look like the portal to another dimension) are evidently illuminated to compliment and contrast with each other.  They look great.

I’m reminded of a time when I was a student, and I brought a friend down to London from the boonies to show him the sights, even though my own knowledge of the sights was extremely limited at that stage.

The friend was a man of, let’s say, very specific imagination. London disappointed him at every turn because it wasn’t exactly as he’d imagined it. He’d thought the Thames would be much wider, Buckingham Palace far more palatial, and specifically that Big Ben would be much, much bigger.

I think he probably had a point with Big Ben. The name is confusing, chiefly because the bigness originally referred only to the bell inside – which is indeed very big and impressive, but since you can’t see it from outside, it’s easy to understand somebody's disappointment.

Now it so happened that last week I walked over Westminster bridge and back.  I walked south in daylight (pushing through crowds of tourists and selfie-takers) and north in (illuminated) darkness, by which time there were fewer self-takers, but still a surprising number.

Big Ben is currently being refurbished, and not set to reopen to the public until 2021, so the whole thing is wrapped up, like something by Christo, and at night it's all lit up; not exactly like a Christmas tree, but I suspect it’s never looked better:

And then I was in Dalston at the weekend and walked past a furniture shop that had this in the window:

It had no price on it, perhaps in a “if you have ask …” kind of way, but on this occasion it looked surprisingly like the “real thing.”  My friend from the north would still not have been impressed, I’m sure.  But I'm thinking that maybe I should dash back to Dalston and buy it - damn the expense.

FOSTER AND DRACULA

“Presently, with an excuse, he left me, asking me to put all my papers together. He was some little time away, and I began to look at some of the books around me. One was an atlas, which I found opened naturally at England, as if that map had been much used. On looking at it I found in certain places little rings marked, and on examining these I noticed that one was near London on the east side, manifestly where his new estate was situated.”

The “he” in that passage – you probably guessed - is Count Dracula, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been on my mind because I was walking again with Foster Spragge, a woman who draws rings on maps. Although perhaps to be more precise she probably uses the rings to create maps of a unique kind, but either way you understand the connection.

Dracula, like many a well-heeled immigrant before and since, moves to England and starts buying up property – a house in Piccadilly and another in Purfleet – that’s the place that’s “near London on the east side,” and that’s where Foster and a group of us walked – from Rainham to Purfleet, both in Essex – a mere five miles, but a vital and final part of Spragge’s 150 mile walk - Drawing Dialogue London Loop.

It was a terrific section of the walk to be on – starting early afternoon and ending at dusk, by which time the light was extraordinary and I was thinking of the opening of Heart of Darkness:

"The day was ending in a serenity of still and exquisite brilliance. The water shone pacifically; the sky, without a speck, was a benign immensity of unstained light; the very mist on the Essex marshes was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds. Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more somber every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun."

Along the way there were giant sheds and giant hogweed: 

Cats (more than just this one):

Outsider art: 

Concrete barges:

And much more besides.

Better scholars than I have asserted that there isn’t and has never been a house in Purfleet that fits the description of Dracula’s property there, named Carfax.  However I did see this place which with some modifications might be turned into a very cool, quasi-industrial home, though I suppose you'd have to work pretty hard to give it the Gothic qualities Dracula was looking for.

In Chelsea the next day I took a walk past Bram Stoker’s former digs at 188 St Leonard’s Terrace.  That didn’t look very Gothic either.  

Zoopla estimates its current price as £9,183,000 which is strangely precise for an estimate, and seems a bit steep even for Chelsea, but what do I know?  

These are the kind of things you think about while walking in Chelsea, actually while walking pretty much anywhere, these days.  Of course that doesn’t necessarily stop you thinking about the Undead.  

This is Dracula walking in the streets of London in the 1931 movie:

WAR WALKS

Lawrence Weschler would probably call this a convergence.  I’m not sure what it is, but it doesn’t seem entirely a coincidence.

As we mark the 100 year anniversary of end of the First World War (“So then we all lived in peace, did we dad?”), I saw this painting by John Singer Sargent titled “Gassed,” painted in 1919. 

It’s owned by the London Imperial War Museum, which describes it thus:  

“A side on view of a line of soldiers being led along a duckboard by a medical orderly. Their eyes are bandaged as a result of exposure to gas and each man holds on to the shoulder of the man in front. One of the line has his leg raised in an exaggerated posture as though walking up a step, and another veers out of the line with his back to the viewer. There is another line of temporarily blinded soldiers in the background, one soldier leaning over vomiting onto the ground. More gas-affected men lie in the foreground, one of them drinking from a water-bottle. The crowd of wounded soldiers continues on the far side of the duckboard, and the tent ropes of a dressing station are visible in the right of the composition. A football match is being played in the background, lit by the evening sun.”

I kept looking and looking at this image, and admittedly I was only looking at a jpg – the painting is mighty big – 


but it took me a very, very long time to see that football match.  It’s there but the resolution is low enough that anyone might be forgiven for not spotting it:

The painting apparently, and clearly, references “The Parable of the Blind” by Breughel the Elder, 1568, which I absolutely believes shows no football match.

I was then reminded of “Blind Field Shuttle” a performance work by the artist Carmen Papalia, who is blind, and who leads people on walks as they follow behind him, hands on the shoulder of the walker in front, their eyes held shut. I’d have thought blindfolds would have make the work better, but probably there are health and safety  issues. The event, which obviously changes all the time, sometimes looks like this: 

And  then, out of nowhere, (and of course I realize that with the Internet, there’s no such place as nowhere, and perhaps there’s no such thing as a convergence, and certainly no coincidence, and no doubt it’s all algorithms) this image appeared on my Facebook, plugging Google. 

There’s no blindness, no hands on shoulders, and of course no gassing, and yet there does seem to be some resemblance or echo or something.  I’m still not sure if I ought to be outraged by this.

MORE LONDON EXCURSIONS

The London Eye:

The London Arse:

PHOTOGRAPHS OF FANCY TRICKS

An apparently simple question: when Elvis Costello sings “I don't want to go to Chelsea” - to which Chelsea is he referring?  The one in London SW3, surely.  The appearance of a character called Elsie rather confirms the point.  But I suppose he was smart enough to know there was also a Chelsea in Manhattan, and he may have used that to give the song wider, if more oblique, appeal.

And when he sings, “Oh no it does not move me/Even though I've seen the movie” to which movie is he referring?  You might well think Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, though that doesn’t fit at all with the rest of the lyrics.

Of course all manner of movies had used Chelsea as a location, long before Costello wrote his song; swinging sixties movies, and even A Clockwork Orange  -  the record store scene was shot in the Chelsea Drugstore, a place I’m old enough to have been in. It’s now a McDonald’s, natch.

I’m also old enough to remember walking up and down the King’s Road (the apostrophe comes and goes) looking at the punks.  We were (pace Simon Reynolds) definitely in the post-punk era but a lot of people hadn’t got the memo. The pic below is dated 1980.

I was too late for Westwood and McLaren’s Sex but I was there for World’s End.  We used to go in and laugh at the clothes, and then laugh even harder at the prices.  It’s still there, kind of.

But there were plenty of other reasons to go to Chelsea: the Royal Court Theater, the Chelsea Physic Garden, the Chelsea Potter (a pub), and for Pete’s sake I got married there at Chelsea Town Hall.  And it’s a pretty decent area to walk, mostly flat, and mostly interesting once you get in the side streets.

So this whole “I don’t want to go to Chelsea” thing doesn’t really apply to me, even though I feel like an imposter as I walk around.  Not a real Chelsea guy.  But now I find myself, for the next 6 months or so, residing in Chelsea, subletting a flat that I can’t really afford – as is the way with flats in London.

But at least the universe is sending me messages to make me feel at home here.  Right across the street is a place called Footopia!  

And around the corner there’s a VW Bus with a customized front end.  I assume it moves from time to time, but it hasn’t so far.

And today I was walking to the Waitrose mini-supermarket and I saw a tall, rangy black man coming from the opposite direction, walking with some difficulty, using a stick, and I looked at him sympathetically, and he looked and me and said, “All right, captain?” Nobody has ever called me captain before.

NB - I know there are some who make great claims for Costello's lyrics - worth pointing out that the rhyme Elsie/Chelsea first appeared in Cabaret.  Maybe it was an homage.