OBELISK FINDER GENERAL

I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason.  I believe that most things happen for no reason whatsoever. And I don’t believe that life brings you what you need.  And yet and yet ...  

I currently find myself billeted (for reasons that make more sense some days than others) in Manningtree in Essex. That’s where Matthew Hopkins, aka the ‘Witchfinder General,’ did some of his best work.  Funny thing about witch hunts – they always find lots of witches.  He did look at least somewhat like Vincent Price who played him in the movie.

 Quite independently, and before I moved here, I had developed an interest in obelisks.  Now I discover this area is strangely well-supplied with obelisks.

If you start somewhat to the east of Manningtree you’ll find the Mistley Towers, op cit, quite the folly landmark, but rather more intriguingly from my point of view it’s also the site of the obelisk commemorating Jean Death, a hard name to live with.  

In fact there’s a bakery in Manningtree called the De’aths Bakery, so presumably there’s some connection, and something for me to investigate.

If you go into Manningtree from Mistley and walk up the hill to the Trinity Free Church, you’ll find a churchyard which looks rather older than the church, and in there you’ll find a couple more obelisks, small, discreet, unspectacular and all the more appealing for that.

And then last weekend, I walked to Cattawade, part of which I’d often seen from the train heading up into Suffolk, and I’d spotted some fine industrial ruins; ICI, Ilford films, Xylonite, as I now know.  Part of the area was once known as Highams Park. Some say that Margaret Thatcher worked for Xylonite at this location, but others say she worked up in Lawton – more research needed there too.

Most of the Cattawade site has been demolished or left to collapse, which was why I was there, but (need I say) I discovered an obelisk.

In fact it's a war memorial that used to be in the grounds of the now absent ICI compound.

At one time it had obviously had commemorative metal plaques attached to it, but they’ve been removed for safe keeping, and so the stone has become a canvas for some profoundly unambitious taggers. Couldn’t any self-respecting street artist do wonders with an obelisk? This one’s in Lincoln County Oklahoma (pic by MJ Alexander, I believe).

ICE COLD IN WC1

During World War Two a team of scientists (American I think though I’m not certain), studied how long soldiers could walk in the desert without water.  They worked out that, if the soldiers were properly hydrated before they started, they could walk 45 miles in 80 degree heat, 15 miles in 100 degree heat, and 7 miles in 120 degree heat.  I’m getting this info from Bill Bryson’s forthcoming book The Body: A Guide for Occupants.

Well I’m no soldier but those distances strike me as enormously optimistic. Walking 7 miles in 80 degree heat without any water strikes me as quite bad enough.

Thursday June 25th, was predicted to be the hottest day ever recorded in English meteorology - that would be 38.5 degrees C, 101.3 F.  And I do hear most of my American contacts saying, ‘You call that hot?’  

So, being the mad dog and Englishman that I am I decided walk around London and see how things looked and felt. I also had a vague plan to plan to see the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery.

The first think to say is that it felt nothing like a hundred degrees.  After my years in the states I’m rather more attuned to Fahrenheit.  I mean it was definitely hotand it wasn’t a dry heat, but it didn’t feel, and in fact it wasn’t, as hot as predicted – 37.9 or 100.22 at Kew and Heathrow, which is plenty hot enough, though I was nowhere near either of those places.  And although it’s possible to find weather forecasts online for the whole of the world, finding what the temperature was in central London two days ago has defeated me.

Still, as I walked around, camera in hand, it was interesting to see how people coped with the heat

Some managed to look downright icy:

 

Some tried to sleep through it:

Others were definitely suffering:

And then about 6 o’clock it rained very hard and very briefly.  That didn’t seem to make much difference to anything, though I suppose it must have cooled things down at least slightly.

Though not everyone looked any better for it:

Did I walk 7 miles in the course of the day? Yes, I think so, more or less, but I certainly took on a lot of liquid along the way.

And the Cindy Sherman? Oh I dunno.  I’m not sure that putting on a bad wig and bad make up is synonymous with exploring ‘identity,’ though I'm sure other views are possible.  And as for the clowns …  

On the other hand I still love the Untitled Film Stills, and have for a very long time. At least it used to get her of the studio and doing a bit of walking around. 

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.