WALKING UNWOUNDED (AS YET)

I have no idea of the real politics (or even realpolik) behind the killing of Qasem Soleimani, but I do know that on CNN, Nation Security Analyst Samantha Vinograd said that as a result ‘all American citizens are now walking prime targets.’  

Again I have no idea if this is actually true – I’d have thought if you were working on a ranch in Wyoming, the Iranian Quds Force is unlikely to come after you - but in any case I find something strangely tonic about the notion of being a ‘walking target.’  It seems so much better than being a sitting target or even a running target.  Let’s take comfort where we can.

AS I WAS GOING TO ST IVES ...

During his expedition to Mecca (1851-3) Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton and the rest of his party anchored at a place called Marsa Mahar on the Red Sea.

Burton writes, ‘Wading ashore we cut our feet on the sharp rocks.  I remember to have felt the acute pain of something running into my toe; but after looking at the place and extracting what seemed to be a bit of thorn, I dismissed the subject, little guessing the trouble it was to give me.’

It seems he had stepped on a sea urchin, and the foot was so seriously infected that he couldn’t put any weight on it. He had to be carried for part of the journey in a sort of litter or shugduf, and later he rode on a donkey that was itself lame.  Various treatments were recommended for the foot but they all failed.  Dressing the foot with onion skin only inflamed it further, although by the time he got to Mecca it must have healed – he was fit enough to make a good few enthusiastic circuits of the kaaba.

Burton has been on my mind since I was in Cornwall at the weekend, and partly in St Ives which is home to the Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton Museum, in a private house run by one Shanty Baba (conceivably not his real name).

It was great – a kind of son et lumiere, enjoyed while sitting in a room modeled on Burton’s smoking room in Trieste (don’t you find that fewer and fewer of your friends have smoking rooms these days?) surrounded by Burtoniana, including a page from a Burton manuscript, Burton’s medal from the Royal Geographical Society, and this fine little figure, also from the Royal Geographical Society.

There was some walking to be done in St Ives, by me, not by Burton, who as far I can tell never set foot there.

There was Mount Zion and there was Teetotal Street – I’ve searched in vain to find how these places got their names

There was also some intriguing ground, for those of you who like that kind of thing.

Burton would have been taking notes and measurements, learning Cornish, and probably finding his way to the nearest brothel.  I did none of these things.  But I did have a Cornish pasty.

 Incidentally, Burton once wrote, 'The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.'  I don't know how you'd test the accuracy of that statement, but it seems all too likely to be true.

ALL OVER IN DOVERCOURT

Back in the day, and it was a long day, I had an idea for a sort of travel book to be titled The Seaside in Winter.  The pitch was that I’d buy a camper van, a Volkswagen no doubt, and in the course of a long winter I’d travel around the coast of mainline Britain.  By day I’d walk and look and feel the wind and rain and icy chill, and in the evening I’d return to the camper, park up, and spend the evening writing up my notes from the day, which would involve reflecting on and savouring the bleak melancholy of deserted seaside spaces.  

I can still see how it might have worked but I never turned it into a proposal, because I also thought it might be recipe for doom.  ‘Promising melancholic young writer found dead by his own hand in VW Camper.’  That might have boosted sales a little, but it wasn’t enough.  Yet that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped enjoying the seaside in winter.

And so at the weekend I went to Dovercourt: north east Essex coast, next to Harwich, and the casual flâneur might be hard pressed to say where one town ended and the other one started.

Dovercourt is where Hi Di Hi was filmed, in Warner’s Holiday Camp, renamed Maplins for the show.  I wasn’t a regular viewer, but I don’t remember many scenes being shot outdoors, though evidently some were.

Dovercourt in late November had many of the things I thought would be components of my long lost book, even though I’m well aware that late November isn’t truly winter. There was the empty seaside shelter – with pro-Jesus and anti-Satan graffiti.

They’ve got two  19^th century steampunk(ish) lighthouses (no longer in use):

There was crazy golf – I would have played if the kiosk had been open:

And you know I love signs, not least this one, 

I think, and again I may be wrong, it’s warning you that you could be attacked by a blob of black ectoplasm rising from the beach and attacking you in the trouser region.  In general I think life requires a few risks, but I’m all in favour of being warned against that particular danger.

As well as being proper seaside, with groins, lighthouses and (rather small) stretches of beach, Dovercourt also has some serious suburbia, which of course I’m deeply attracted to.

Note how the two bungalows above are apparently mirror images of each other, but they have a different kind of pvc front door and a different kind of lamp adjacent to it.  That’ll make a house stand out from all the others, not that everybody in suburbia wants their house to stand out.

Anchors are another option:

So is a horse:

PROBE

Meanwhile Nicholson probed ever deeper into the Obelisk 

Jungle of Death. 

(photo by Yana Wormwood Smith)

HANGING ON THE HILL

I went on an exploratory drift with my flâneuse pal, and walking tour guide Jen Pedlar (she guides for Footprints of London).  The expedition was all hers but I liked that, since it meant I was able to tag along without any sense of responsibility.  The walk promised the tunnels of Hanger Lane, various kinds of northwest London suburb and a good old cemetery. You can’t ask for more, can you?

We met at Hanger Lane tube station which is a remarkable thing above ground, like a very low budget flying saucer stranded in the middle of a gyratory system:

And below ground were the tunnels that looked like this.  

You could perhaps argue that these tunnels were actually a very complicated subway system, but one man’s subway is another woman’s tunnel. The various exits were colour-coded with tiles that had seen better days.

The tunnels seemed cheerful enough in the middle of the day - I mean not all THAT cheerful but I think they’d have seemed a lot less benign at one in the morning.

People like to say that London is a collection of villages, but we know it’s mostly a collection of suburbs, some much more appealing than others.  The first we came to on our walk was Haymills which was astounding, and in places astoundingly posh, a mix of architectural styles: mid-century modern, streamlined moderne, seaside moderne, and the just downright very fancy; a kind of super suburb. 

It was laid out around a series of concentric semi circles

much like the council estate in Sheffield where I grew up

but there the resemblance ended.

Then we wandered into the Hanger Hill Garden Estate, 

It’s a conservation area, and is by no means not posh, but compared to the other place it seemed modest, well comparatively modest.

I'm also pretty sure that it has the highest concentration of half-timbered buildings I’ve  ever seen.  

If local evidence is to be believed these houses, and some of them are converted into flats, are very popular with Japanese buyers and renters – by which I mean that an estate agency named Japan Services appears to be doing some very good business in the area.

And of course we saw all the things there that make suburban walking worthwhile.  A stray cat:

a Volkswagen Beetle: 

pampas grass: 

an inscrutable arrow carved into the pavement:

And when we got to the Acton cemetery we went to see the grave of George Lee Temple, the first man to fly a plane upside down (Who knew? – Well, Jen did.)  And while we were there, I was able to indulge my taste for obelisks.

That all adds up to a pretty good day’s drift.  

And you know, all the time I was walking through the Hanger Hill Garden Estate, I kept thinking about Osbert Lancaster’s illustration of Stockbroker Tudor.

To be fair to Lancaster and indeed to the Hanger Hill Garden Estate, the illustration doesn’t show a half-timbered house, it shows a fully timbered house.  The thatched garage is especially fine.