STROLLING AROUND THE GROUND, FEELING AT HOME IS OPTIONAL

As you know, I like looking at the ground when I walk.  I also like looking at the sky – I’m versatile that way – but I’m working on a probably doomed project to be called Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground, and so the ground often takes precedence.

A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.

They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock.  Perhaps they had to.  Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.

They’d done this.  

I was disappointed.  I’d wanted more.

Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste. 

SORDID, DOMESTIC WALKING

S.J. Perelman was walking home one night in New York, and when he got to Washington Square Park he ran into poet E.E. Cummings, whom he knew a little.  

They walked along together and came to an apartment building on the edge of the square.  Cummings suddenly stopped and stared up at the building and said, ‘What scenes of sordid domesticity do you think are being played out behind those lighted windows?”

 Perelman protested, ‘Why, that’s my apartment.”

And Cummings said, “I know.’

WALKING WITH SHOES

“A man’s gotta live

A man’s gotta eat

A man’s gotta have shoes to walk out on the street.”

How true those lyrics are.  And it applies to women too. But you know, when I’m on my walking travels it’s strange just how many abandoned women’s shoes I see.  Mostly it’s just one, though not always

It leads to all kinds of speculation about the circumstances in which the shoe (or occasionally shoes) was abandoned: accidentally, deliberately, in high jinks, in disgust.  I just think about the Cinderalla–like possibilities, and take a photograph.

I’m often surprised how elegant some of the shoes look but I suppose that’s the whole thing – the fancier the shoes, the harder they are to walk in, the more uncomfortable they are and therefore more likely to be cast aside.

 When I lived in Los Angeles I happened to walk past the house that I knew belonged to Vince Vaughn on the day he was moving out.  There were a pair of his sneakers sitting out by the garbage can, and I did wonder whether I should take them and try to sell them on eBay.  But I didn’t – I thought that would have been sick.  If they’d belonged to an actress it might have been a different story.

"HAS ABSENCE EVER SOUNDED SO ELOQUENT, SO SAD?" Beats me.

There are all kinds of good reasons to go walking in Sudbury, in Suffolk.  The water meadows: 

The wildlife:

The achingly quaint archtecture, including silk weavers’ houses.

There are pill boxes – and I’m not sure if that mushroom-shped thing is a warning against nuclear attack, or an indication that some shrooming has been going in:

There are many passion fruits:

and VW campers, at least one of them for sale (18 grand seems to be about the going rate)

It may all seem a little bucolic, a little green and pleasant, but there's something that might make the journey to Sudbury a different proposition, if you’re a fan of Guy Debord’s psychogeography, 

or of Scott Wallker’s later work,

is this house sign:

You couldn’t make it up.  You don’t have to.

FREUD FEVER

The first volume of William Feaver’s The Lives of Lucian Freud has just been published.  That's Lucian below, walking:

A very minor part of Feaver's book describes, in 1948, Freud being invited to Cecil Beaton’s home at Reddish House in Wiltshire.  When he gets there he’s delighted to find that Greta Garbo is a fellow guest.  
          Now, the ‘affair’ or whatever it was, between Beaton and Garbo has always been a matter for speculation and mystery, and Freud’s account doesn’t clarify matters much.

Feaver writes:

I thought she was wonderful he (Freud) recalled. “She said, ‘Comm and sit ‘ere,’ and it was a chair for one, not two and I squeezed in.  She looked marvelous.  She drove Cecil mad and he’d become gruff and manly and say, ‘We must go for a walk,’ and she’d say, ‘I’ve left my shoes in New York.’

Now, I can totally believe this would the kind of thing Garbo would say and do, but it’s quite a stretch to imagine Beaton being ‘gruff and manly.’

Still, here are Cecil and Greta walking together on some occasion when she’d remembered her shoes.

And here she is walking alone.  Boy, I love that battered car behind her: