WALKING WITH FELINES

 I was walking in the neighborhood and came across a man taking his cat for a walk.  

The man is named Steve.  The cat is named Boris the Bold.  I’d have thought that most cats would resist violently being put on a lead, but Steve explained, ‘He’s never known anything different.’

 

I was of course reminded of this picture of Cary Grant and his cat, or at least somebody’s cat, walking in L.A..

 

And of course there are these familiar leashed black cats, also in Los Angeles, attending an open casting call.

 

A little digging around also revealed this photo of Dr Ava Cadell, the founder of Loveology University.  Before she was a doctor she was an actress starring in such movies as Lunch Box, and Not of This Earth.  And yes, she is a genuine cat lover.

 

And finally there's this faked picture (not faked by me) of Barry Obama.  I think it’s supposed to make him look weak, like somebody who can be pulled around by felines, but in fact I think it makes him look very human, and also as though he's enjoying himself.

 

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.