WALKING THE CLARKSON WAY

Recently I’ve realized that the only reason I ever buy the English Sunday Times is for the Jeremy Clarkson column. Now, Clarkson is a serious hate figure for the British bien pensant liberal classes (which in many circumstances would include me), but I also think he’s one of the great ironists.  

He never says exactly what he means and he never means exactly what he says, which is great, but it means the reader actually has to tease out his actual meaning, which of course is a terrible punishment for many readers. 

Clarkson’s column last week was a masterpiece as he went to town on walkers and walking, under the headline ‘I leave the pointless promenading to the French.  A walk is not a walk without a pub at the end.’

There are some pretty good lines as he lays into flaneurs – he doesn’t mention psychogeographers.  I’m sure he knows what they are but maybe he doesn’t want to alienate his core readership with fancy words.

He says, ‘I couldn’t care less about almost everything, and I’ve always never wanted to spend two hours stroking the brass of a faded plaque in Spitalfields.

‘I’ve tried walking with no purpose.  I’ve simply left my London flat and set off without knowing where I was going, and when I’d be back, and I always, always end up in the Ladbroke Arms.  The other day I was in Mayfair and I decided to walk back to Holland Park which was about three miles away, and I ended up in the Ladbroke Arms, again, using rosé wine to water my remaining chins.’

Well this is marvelous, isn’t it?  He obviously cares about a great many things (he’s a writer).  He obviously knows the attractions of faded plaques in Spitalfields, and obviously if he’s prepared to walk three miles home, he’s more of a walker than most.  Ending a walk in a pub is no kind of disqualification.

In fact Clarkson has some form in the abuse of walkers and walking, not least an article, again in the Sunday Times, from 2005 titled ‘Jackboots rule the countryside.’

He wrote, ‘Walking is something that I will gladly do when the car breaks down. In London I have been known to pop out for the papers and not stop until I get to Dartford in Kent. But the notion of treating the exercise as a noun, of going for "a walk": that has always seemed faintly preposterous.’

And then he goes for a walk, because it gives him a chance to abuse the then new Countryside Code, a thing that passed me by completely at the time.  And in general it occurs to me that the kind of people who need a book telling them how to behave in the countryside are exactly the kind of people who aren’t going to read a book telling them how to behave in the countryside, but that’s just me.

He writes that the countryside ‘now looks like Camp X-Ray. You're marshalled by signposts telling you where the footpath goes and, just to make sure that you stay on it, you're fenced in by miles of electrified razor wire. 

       ‘Every few hundred yards you are reminded of your responsibilities by slogans that would not look out of place in a Soviet tractor factory. "Kill nothing. Only time", said one.
         ‘There was another which said "No dogs". But before I turned to my faithful labrador and said, "For you ze valk is over."’ Yeah, his irony is sometimes way better than his jokes.

But then he concludes,  ‘If you must go for a walk, forget the green bits that have been colonised and sanitised by Tony Blair's urban army; do it in the middle of your local city. 

‘There is no mud, there are more visual diversions, you can go where you want without fear of electrocution, your dog is welcome and you won't come home covered from head to foot in shit.’

         In other words, be a flâneur or a psychogeographer.  Good old ironic Jeremy.

Incidentally, or coincidentally, last week’s Sunday Times ran a review of a book titledIn Praise of Walkingby Shane O’Mara, which according to the review is a book that says that walking is a good thing, which to some of us seems about as profound and suprising as saying that the pope defecates in the Vatican.  O’Mara, apparently, collects together all the recent research which says that walking is, you know, a good thing, which no doubt is in itself a good thing.  The reviewer called it ‘Convincing and compelling stuff.”  Yes, honestly.  They couldn’t have got Clarkson to write the review?  Nah, he’d have been way too ironic.

         Incidentally, there’s something about the jacket of In Praise of Walking that looks oddly familiar, can't quite think why.

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THE OBELISK AND I (ANOTHER IN THE SERIES)

Again I’ve been walking with, or at least past or close to or in the vicinity of, obelisks.  I’m tempted say ‘it’s what I do’ and recently it kind of is, but it’s a new interest, not quite an obsession yet, and I don’t altogether know why.  I just like ‘em is all.

Last week, walking with top photographer Jason Oddy, we went to look at Edwin Lutyens’ Royal Naval DivisionWar Memorial on Horse Guards Parade (that’s it below).  It was designed immediately after the First World War in which the Royal Naval Division took terrible losses at Gallipoli.

 

For a monument it’s rather well-travelled.  It was first placed in Horse Guards Parade in 1925, ten years after Gallipoli, but it was moved during the Second World War, for safety.  After that it went to the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, and only returned to Horse Guards Parade in 2003.  

 

It’s tucked away at the side of the parade ground, and nobody was paying it any attention.  It was evidently once a fountain, but it was bone dry on the day we looked at it.

Jason and I were heading for Waterloo so inevitably we walked past Cleopatra’s Needle, which people seem to think is a great place to hang out and pose, though it doesn’t look very comfortable, especially if you sit on the sphinx. 

And then a couple of days back I went to Spitalfields to have another look (I mean, I’d seen it before in passing) at the obelisk in the wall of the garden adjacent to Hawksmoor’s Christ Church. Built into it is a drinking fountain, supplied by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain Association in 1860, but again it was dry.

If you walk into the garden you’ll see another obelisk stashed away in a corner, disappearing behind greenery. This one is a memorial to the Nash family from the early 19^thcentury.

The website for British listed buildings describes it as ‘Portland stone with statuary marble inscription panels. Square obelisk surmounted by a flaming gadrooned urn.’ I had never encountered the word gadrooned before. I have obviously led a sheltered life.

The garden is a place you can walk and sit and admire the obelisks (although I didn’t see anybody else doing that) and nobody will bother you.  I sat there for a while and noticed what I took to be a family group sitting nearby. I didn’t see marriage or birth certificates but it looked like mum, dad and teenage son.  They were drinking beer, and although I wasn’t watching very closely, I did notice that after a while the dad lit his crack pipe.  Ah, families.

What I have learned subsequently is that Nicolas Hawksmoor designed Britain’s first large obelisk (80 feet tall) erected in the market place in Ripon in 1702, and much messed about with since. I feel the need for a field trip coming on.

 

 

JONATHAN PROBABLY DOESN'T KNOW OR CARE WHAT GEOFF LIKES

In moments of anxiety and depression, and sometimes when I’m at stool, I reach for Jonathan Meades’s Peter Knows What Dick Likes, published by Paladin, a collection mostly of his magazine work.

I open it at random and I always find something decent.  Yesterday I opened it at a piece titled ‘I Like Maps.’  Me too, Johnny.

And in that article Meades writes, ‘Just as William Morris abhorred illusionism in wallpaper so do I fear the increasing three-dimensionalism of OS (Ordnance Survey) products whose reductio ad absurdum would be no more than doctored aerial photographs … Nothing about the rigours of abstraction, about studied concentration, about the exercise of imagination.’

It could have been written yesterday. And then I saw the date of publication of the piece. 1987!!!  The man’s a prophet.  Still with a certain amount of honour.

I wonder if he, and you, are familiar with the children’s book The Map That Came to Life, ‘described by HJ Deverson and drawn by Ronald Lampit’? A couple of children and their dog go for a walk, from Two Tree Farm to Dumbleford Fair, and on the way they learn how to use a map.  It’s brilliant in its nostalgia, and in its charting an England that never really existed. 

That’s another thing maps can do.

WALKING BETWIXT

And speaking of gennels (pronounced jennels), or ginnels or snickets, a jitty in Leicestershire, a jigger in Liverpool, or whatever (I may not have all those spellings quite right), here‘s a picture I took a while back on a return trip to Sheffield:

This is the place where I was walking when I was about eleven years old, on my way to the library – yes, I was a swat (I said swat) - I met a man with a stethoscope in his pocket who engaged me in conversation.  He looked like a doctor and I believed he was one, but I can’t swear that he was or wasn’t, and although he neither said or did anything inappropriate, in fact he talked to me like I was a grown up, which I found flattering. When I got home and reported the meeting to my dad I could see he was troubled, even as he didn’t want to make too big of a deal out of it.  But neither did he speak to me like a grownup. Oh the hideous responsibilities of fatherhood.

This is also from Sheffield, it might be a gennel but really I think it’s just an alley:

This is in Halesworth and I've walked down it many times.  I’d say it’s not really a gennel, not least that it has a name, official name is Rectory Lane (known locally as Duck Lane) and I have a feeling that gennels, by definition, nameless, but I do like it because of the crinkle crankle wall, good for directing heat into specific areas of the garden on the other side:

On Sunday I was walking in Hampstead Garden Suburb and I learned that the word they use there is twitten. Twittens look like this:

The word is Sussex dialect apparently, and presumably it’s got something to do with ‘betwixt and between,’ though I can’t imagine how it got to NW3.

THE SAME OLD NOT THE SAME OLD

I recently came across a quotation, which may be familiar to everybody else but it’s new to me, from John Burroughs’ Signs and Seasons: ‘The place to observe nature is where you are; the walk to take today is the walk you took yesterday. You will not find just the same things: both the observed and the observer have changed.’

This seems to be the equivalent of saying you can’t walk on the same water twice, and I absolutely agree with that.

Above is a path, perhaps a gennell, perhaps a snickett, depending on which bit of England you come from, and I walk down it pretty much every day.  As far as I can tell it doesn’t have a name. 

I always see a few pigeons perching on the fences beside the path, and sometimes I see a skulking cat or two, and sometimes I see evidence that a cat got among the pigeons. Nature, don’t you love it?  I suppose I’d feel better if the cats actually ate the pigeons as opposed to just killing them, but cats, I know, don't care about my feelings,

On the path I encounter  people once in a while and words are occasionally exchanged but mostly we don’t make eye contact and keep silent, which seems to suit everybody.  

The other day I was walking up the slope and a young couple were walking behind me and arguing, and I heard him say, 'So it’s ok for you to talk to me like that but I can’t talk to you like that, is that right?’

And the girl said, ‘I wasn’t talking to you like anything.’  
This seemed a moment of transcendent Zen.

Sometimes there are big mushrooms growing in the grass alongside the path:

And sometimes there are fungi that are not just big but monstrous (that ruler’s  15 inches long).  

I wish I had the wisdom to know whether or not they’re edible, which may be just another way of saying I wish I was John Cage.