WEEKEND WALKING

     You might like this – it’s Robert Benchley in a piece titled ”The Tortures of Week-end 

Visiting, First published in Vanity Fair, February 1917.  Who'd have thought there was a war 

on?

 

 

After dinner the host says to himself: "Something must be done. I wonder if he likes to walk." Aloud, he says: "Well, Bill, how about a little hike in the country?"

A hike in the country being the last thing in the world that Bill wants, he says, "Right-o! Anything you say." And so, although walking is a tremendous trial to the host, who has weak ankles, he bundles up with a great show of heartiness and grabs his stick as if this were the one thing he lived for.

After about a mile of hobbling along the country-road the host says, hopefully: "Don't let me tire you out, old man. Any time you want to turn back, just say the word."

The guest, thinking longingly of the fireside, scoffs at the idea of turning back, insisting that if there is one thing in all the world that he likes better than walking it is running. So on they jog, hippity-hop, hippity-hop, each wishing that it would rain so that they could turn about and go home.

    Here again the thing may go to almost tragic lengths. Suppose neither has the courage to suggest the return move. They might walk on into Canada, or they might become exhausted and have to be taken into a roadhouse and eat a "$2 old-fashioned Southern dinner of fried chicken and waffles." The imagination revolts at a further contemplation of the possibilities of this lack of coöperation between guest and host.

RANK AND GROSS - A GREAT DOUBLE ACT

 Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.

 

Oh come on Hamlet, you say that like it’s a bad thing.

 

One of the things I do as I walk through the world is peer into people’s front gardens.  This seems reasonsable and unintrusive.  Somebody (and I wish I could remember who) said back gardens are for yourself, front gardens are for others.  So I feel justified in my prying.

 

It’s evident that some people are happy to show an eccentric face to the world via their front garden.  As above and below: 

 

I like this stuff, obviously.  But I’m equally intrigued by the gardens where people appearto have done nothing and just ‘let nature take its course’ (whatever that might mean).

 

Once upon a time you’d have thought these people were wastrels of slackers, or people who were just giving an ‘up yours’ to their neighbours, but now we’re all in favour of wildness (or even rewilding), aren’t we? So it’s even possible to convince yourself that your overgrown garden has become a nature reserve.  Mine used to look like this: 

 

But there are always limits. Walking through Mark Street Gardens in Shoreditch t’other day I came across this sign:

 

Yes, we may love nature but we always like some kinds of nature better than others.

WELL RAPPED

 I know I was once in the same room as Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

 

And I know where it was – at a signing at the Strand Bookstore in New York, but I can’t remember when it was.  It seems like only yesterday, but Jeanne-Claude died in 2009 so it was at least before then.  Christo died in 2020.  This means that the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe, currently to be seen in Paris is a posthumous work.

 

But, you might say, who needs artists at all, when you can currently walk down Kingsway in London, as I did at the weekend, and see this:

 

It’s a building (or two buildings depending on how you look at it – the tower and the office block next to it came as a set) that has gone by various names.  It was originally Space House, then Civil Aviation Authority House, with the tower known as I, Kemble Street.  And, it may be changing its name again – I understand the Civil Aviation Authorityhas moved on - to Gatwick.

 

It’s a building I ‘discovered’ for myself while walking around, a bit of not too brutal sixties Brutalism, and a lot of Londoners seem never to have heard of it, which strikes me as surprising since it was designed by George Marsh of the Seifert’s architectural practice for the property developer Harry Hyams.  This is the same lot that  – the same team that built Centre Point, which I did (secretly) like even when it was a symbol of capitalist evil.

 

Pevsner said Centre Point was ‘coarse in the extreme.’ He called Space House (as it was then) ‘an intruder.’ Will it surprise anybody if I say that both buildings are now grade 2 listed.

Here's a picture of Christo walking.

WING WALKING; YES, THAT KIND

You may remember t’other day I put up a picture, actually a gif, of Peter Falk walking in a scene from Wings of Desire.  Below is Bruno Ganz in the same movie, playing an angel. Can angels walk?  Yes, I suppose they can, though I don’t suppose they have to.

 

I was led to other pictures of Peter Falk walking, some of them in Beverley Hills, in 2008, on an occasion when he was in great distress caused perhaps by the presence of paparazzi, and certainly by the dementia that he experienced towards the end of his life. Some of these pictures are shocking and terrible, and I think it would be wrong to show them again, but here he is after he’s been calmed down by a cop.  Still not looking his best.

 

I headlined that original post ‘Wing Walking: No, Not That Kind,’ so as to distinguish it from this kind of wing walking:

 

I does look terrifying but then I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad, as long as you were firmly lashed to the plane, what could go wrong?

 

And then I heard that at the weekend, at the Bournemouth Airshow, a plane piloted by David Barrell and carrying a wing walker named Kirsten Pobjoy, plunged into Poole Harbour.  

 

Pilot and walker survived without injuries, though presumably with a certain amount of 

trauma.  But it seems there’s a lot more of this kind of thing going on than you might 

imagine – you can look it up.  It's grim stuff.   But obviously a wing walker has a much 

better chance of surviving if the plane crashes into water as opposed to solid ground.  

Nobody walks away from those.

 

But to return to Peter Falk. I never knew anything about his private life but according to a website titled The Life and Times of Hollywood he was quite the womanizer.  For instance he spotted Shera Danese walking through the streets of Philadelphia and chased her begging for a date.  He was, of course, married to somebody else at the time.

 ‘She wasn’t interested,’ Falk said. ‘I kept at it. She conceded to a hello over a cocktail.'

Reader, he married her, though by all accounts he continued to womanize.  She appeared in six episodes of Columbo, though not as Mrs Columbo (obviously).

 

  

WING WALKING; NO, NOT THAT KIND

You looking for a walking gif?

This will do nicely

• 

Peter Falk in Wenders' 'Wings of Desire'

Of course I know it isn't, but that background looks an awful lot like Sheffield to me.