WALKING STILL

It's true that I've not been spending a lot of time worrying about this woman I saw walking in the street in Colchester a couple of years back.  She is after all just a bronze statue, an artwork by Sean Henry, and able to take care of herself.

And yet looking at her yesterday, she was surrounding by a sea of road works, or perhaps earthworks, and that did seem somehow troubling:

But maybe I was being oversensitive.  I mean, she was still upright, and still walking, though admittedly still not getting anywhere

WALKING AND DISAPPEARING

         Sometime over the weekend, in the morass of media silt I was absorbing, I came across an online article (actually from Woman & Home) about Mel Giedroyc with the picture you see below and the headline ‘My fantasy?  A walking holiday.’

 

I think this was supposed to be a surprise to somebody, as though Mel G was far too cool to go on a walking holiday, but I can’t say it surprised me, and I can’t believe it surprised anybody else. I like Mel G but she’s always struck me as exactly the kind of woman who goes on walking holidays.

 

And I do quite like the shoes she’s wearing in the above pic.  I assume she wouldn’t be doing much walking in them, but they’d be just fine for posing around the boudoir at the end of the day.

 

Later I was reading an extract from David Sedaris's book of diaries.   In this extract, dated July 17 2011, he'd been watching an episode of The Tyra Banks Show featuring a woman named Donna who weighed 600 pounds but would have liked to weigh 1000.  ‘I guess I'm a sort of reverse anorexia.'

People on the show tried to reason with Donna.  Tyra Banks said, 'But you can hardly walk.  If you keep this up, you won't be able to move.' And Donna replied coolly that she thought walking was overrated.  

I'm sure she's not alone in thinking that.

 

And then I was reading a back issue of the London Review of Books and there was a review by Colm Toibin of Richard Zenith’s Pessoa: An Experimental Life.  Part of it runs, ‘The French translatorand scholar Pierre Hourcade, who visited Lisbon in 1933 remembered leaving a café with Pessoa and walking with him for a few blocks.  Hourcade had, Richard Zenith writes, “this uncanny sensation: that the poet, as soon as he had disappeared around the corner of a downtown street, had really disappeared, and would be nowhere in sight were he to run after him.”’

         I think that’s a great way to end a walk, any walk.

AND THERE'S THIS

An extract from Walking On Thin Air, a work in progress (and crowdfunding exercise), to be found at Caught By The River

link below

https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2021/09/walking-on-thin-air-geoff-nicholson-extract/

TREE OF KNOWLEDGE, INNIT

 About half a mile up the hill from where I live there’s a sort of public, not quite 

orchard, by which I mean there are a few apple trees apparently growing wild, and 

when they bear fruit nobody’s going to stop you walking in and taking a few apples.

 

So I was up bright and early and was out before the binmen came, and walked up, and there was not a single apple to be found – neither on the trees nor on the ground.  Gotta say I’m not totally in touch with the cycles of apple production but I thought I found a lot this time last year.

 

Still, an early walk is never to be despised and there was still some nature to be seen, if not of the malus variety.

 

There were spider webs in the apple trees:

 

Mushrooms on the ground:

 

And cats.  Yes, there are always cats.

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.