LOAFING WITH BRYSON

I have nothing against Bill Bryson but I admit I couldn’t make it all the way through his recent book The Body: A Guide for Occupants.  There was just too much about death and decay,  which reminded me of the death and decay going on in my own body; and frankly I needed no reminding.

But I did read the chapter titled ‘On the level: Bipedalism and exercise’ because it had some stuff in it about walking. Most of it was pretty well known to pedalists such as you and me but I my eye was caught by the information that ‘Today the average American walks only about a third of a mile a day – and that’s walking of all types, including around the house and workplace …  According to the Economist, some American companies have begun offering reward to employees who log a million miles a year on  an activity tracker suck as a Fitbit.  That seems a pretty ambitious number but actually works out to just 2,740 steps a day or a little over a mile,’

Those must very short steps - 1.92 feet per step by my calculations: that is not the step of anybody engaged in actually walking.

But then Bryson was in the Times last weekend saying ‘I’m very active.  I walk between 16,000 and 20,000 steps a day.’  I have no reason to doubt him, and nobody believes that walking in itself makes you thin, but I would say he certainly doesn’t LOOK like a man who walks 20,000 steps a day.

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)