GARDEN WALKS, GOGH WALKS, GOD WALKS

Back in the day I had a girlfriend with a flat in Brighton, so on many a weekend I’d go down 

there from London. I liked the sea and the Volks Railway, but mostly I liked the secondhand book and record shops.

         And one weekend the girlfriend said ‘Let’s go on a day trip to Sheffield Park and Gardens,’ which is less than 20 miles from Brighton. ‘And what will we do there?’ I asked, and she said ‘You know, walk around.’  At the time I couldn’t think of anything worse.  Walking in gardens seemed so middle-aged and boring.  I didn’t say no and I didn’t complain once we got there, and although I don’t remember much about it, I'm sure I didn't enjoy myself much.  Though I do vaguely remember this bridge.

 

Now, of course, I find that walking in gardens is a perfectly good way to spend time.  This is Westbury Court in Gloucestershire where I was last month:

 

And it so happens I’ve been reading Lesley Chamberlain’s book A Shoe Story about Van Gogh and Heidegger.  The latter is likely to remain a closed book, but Vincent is OK by me, even though I had no idea he was much of a walker.  How ignorant I was.  Here is Chamberlain on van Gogh: ‘early in his life van Gogh associated walking very closely with his artistic practice …. He believed in nature as both his moral and artistic authority and to walk was to put himself physically in touch with that wisdom’ and she quotes van Gogh as saying in one of his many letters to Theo, ‘Our goal is “Walking with God.’’' Rather an overambitious goal I’d say, though this is not my area of expertise.

 

And I was lead to this picture which I’d never seen before, titled A Woman Walking in a Garden.  It’s all over the internet, though no two reproductions show it with the same colours.

 

Life being as it is, I spent last Sunday walking around the Secret Gardens of Mistley.  They weren’t as secret as all that – there was a map and everything. Most of the gardens were small and domestic and not at all grand, which is OK with me.  

 

And in one of them, the one shown above, there was a table full of used books for sale.  What a haul – Beckett, Pynchon and Shrigley for a total of 3 quid.  It’s the kind of thing that makes walking in gardens worthwhile.

 

Here’s Beckett: ‘For as I have always said, First learn to walk, then you can take swimming lessons.’

 

Here’s Pynchon: ‘Death is not a real outcome, the hero always walks out of the heart of the explosion, sooty-faced but grinning.’

 

I can’t find any specific utterance by Shrigley about walking, so here's this picture, which does show a stick figure walking:

 

 

FUN WITH RICHARD AND GEOFF

My oldest mate Richard, oldest in terms of years we’ve known each other, not in terms of 

how long he’s been on the planet, came up to Essex and we walked along by the 

River Stour. It was good.  Richard has become quite the walker and drifter.

 

He had an app on his phone for identify wild plants and flowers.  Now, I’ve had some trouble with these things in the past, and we used it first on a plant that I could actually identify - the teasel - and the app seemed to know what it was doing, so on we went,

 

I don't know how important it is to be able to identify things, though it's obviously useful in some cases.  Here’s Richard about to identify some Serbian Bellflower, which I definitely wouldn’t have known.

 

Along the roadside we found some jetsam – just waiting to be clutched and upcycled.  We thought clutching but then decided that neither of us really needed a lampshade or a glass vase, and we left them for others, but we were glad of the opportunity.

 

But as a fan of agit prop (if that terms still gets used) our greatest find was this – an anti-mask sticker.  

 

I’d have peeled it off so I could have added it to the archive but pulling would have torn it so I left it where it was, so it could continue to deliver its subversive and frankly not all that lucid message. 

 

A LITTLE SPACE WALKING HUMOUR

 

WILES WALKING

 

I’ve been reading Will Wiles’ novel Plume which acknowledges the attractions of what we 

might as well call psychogeography while also mocking it.  Wiles puts the chief objections 

into the mouth of a fictional writer, Oliver Pierce, who’s complaining about his career and 

his lot, and says ‘I was lumped in with all that psychogeography lot, Iain Sinclair and Will Self 

and so on, and I ... well, I didn’t like that.  There are so many people doing that shit now.  

All the fucking lost rivers, ghost Tube stations, all that shit … - I’m just so fucking sick of 

that.  It makes me want to puke.  It was getting boring ten years ago, it’s just intolerable 

now.’

It’s hard to tell from the novel whether Wiles completely agrees with his creation, but really, what’s to argue about?

Then, with the scent of psychogeography in my nostrils, I read an article online by Wiles, at Aeon.com titled ‘Walk the Lines’ which of course is also the title of a book by Mark Mason about walking the London Tube map above ground, in which I make a brief but honourable appearance.

         Wiles doesn’t echo Pierce word for word but they obviously have a lot in common. A pull quote from the article runs, ‘You read Sinclair, Sebald and Self, and wanted to do the same? Get in line with the others, Mr. Original.’  Ouch all round.

And in the article itself Wiles writes, ‘Meanwhile, walking was being rediscovered as a tool useful to journalists writing about architecture and the city. There’s a similarly long tradition of this, in which the presiding saint of urban studies, Jane Jacobs, plays a prominent role. Her descriptions of pavement life in ‘unslumming’ parts of New York and Boston have become a ubiquitous model. Michael Sorkin’s Twenty Minutes in Manhattan (2009) and Sharon Zukin’s Naked City (2010) are both bound in shoe-leather.’ He also cites, approvingly, Owen Hatherley, Rowan Moore and Jonathan Meades, heirs of Ian Nairn.   

He continues ‘Also, being necessarily introspective and subjective, the genre is equally prone to accusations of pretension. Assuming you are still reading (you are, aren’t you?) you might well have spent the last couple of paragraphs rolling your eyes at the conformist quality of my young non-conformism.’ 

Self-referential, self-hating ouch.

In the end, slightly more positively, he writes, ‘Walking is an aid to thought and will always be an aid to writing – all three happen at the same time. But in London, the dérive has come adrift. A form of writing that I once aspired to has expired.’

Is the psychogeographical party really over?  I suspect so, and it wasn’t a party I was ever really invited to, and yet like many parties it kind of drags on.  There are always a few lingerers who won’t go home.

I haven’t exactly gone home but I have left London. When a man’s tired of drifting round London, it’s time to drift to Essex.

EARLY WALKING SYSTEM

 Look, I don’t know much about Nadiya Hussein but I gather she’s a lovely woman, famous 

for baking cakes.  Beyond that I remained in happy ignorance until I saw this headline in the 

Times, ‘I make my kids go on 6 am walks.’  

 

This strikes me as both cruel and unusual, but that isn't the half of it.  If you read the article you discover the line ‘The family wakes each morning just before 5am to pray.’  'For me,' she says, 'it's about making the most of the day.' -  I mean, really?

 

Naturally I was reminded of the blessed Christopher Hitchens’ remark that he thought teaching religious knowledge in schools was a very good thing because it guaranteed an ongoing supply of atheists.  I assume much the same can be said about waking children at 5am for prayers. 

But I do worry that waking children at 6am, and making them go for a walk is most likely

guaranteed to create an ongoing supply of pedestrians and couch potatoes.

        Christopher Hitchens didn't look like a man who ever willingly went for a walk, but I 

could be wrong. Nice bookshelves.