BUILDING BLOCKS

 If you walk down the high street of Manningtree at the moment, you'll see this, part of a 

building that's being worked on:

 

It’s a door marked for wheelchair users that’s about a foot off the ground – no ramp, no lift. Getting in of course is impossible, but getting out would be a wild ride.  The door opens, the wheelchair passes through and the occupant is (briefly) airborne.

 

I don’t honestly think this is a Thomasson – i.e. a surviving architectural relic that serves no purpose but by some kind of alchemy has become a work of art, or hyperart.

 

Nah, I think the guys working on the building just needed a door, any door, to plug up the hole and the one they found happened to have a wheelchair sticker on it. And maybe one of the guys likes a larf. I expect it’ll soon be gone.

 

If you happen to be walking in Ipswich, up in the next county, you might come across this place:

 

It’s closed up and one of the doors is bricked up, and again not a Thomasson, just a way of securely plugging a hole. But what really catches the eye is that belt arrangement that appears to be holding the house together. 

 I’m sure there must be a technical architectural term for those belts, and perhaps it’s a tried and trusted method.  Even so, the house owner, and the builder, evidently have more confidence in the belt materials than I would have, especially if I lived in the house next door.

WALKING DUSTY (DUSTILY)

For reasons we needn’t go into, I was thinking about Dusty Springfield.  I looked her up on Wikipedia and found this sentence; ‘She enjoyed reading maps and would intentionally get lost to navigate her way out.^[11]’  Now there’s a thing.

The footnote directs you to, Kort, Michele (1999). "The Secret Life of Dusty Springfield". The Advocate. Liberation Publications (Thomson Corporation Company). Retrieved 2 July 2012. 

In the article you’ll find this, ‘DUSTY SPRINGFIELD LOVED MAPS. She liked to curl up in bed with an atlas and could follow a road map with a navigator's elan. "She was a good person to be lost with," her longtime friend and manager Vicki Wickham has said.’ 

 

Do navigators display elan?  Not the ones I've met, but let let's not argue,  The article continues, ‘Perhaps the certainty of maps, with their solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations, comforted a woman who had to carve her own path through the pop-music jungle for nearly 40 years.’

 

You see, I don’t think you have to be a psychogeographic theorist to realize that most maps DON’T contains certainties, solid boundaries and clearly marked destinations.  Many of them are incredibly inscrutable.  That’s one reason why we like them.

 

And then the Advocate article completely loses its way, ‘But while living in Los Angeles she seemed to misplace her atlas, maps, and all sense of personal geography. America had seemed like a dream to her, but it bred nightmares too.’

 

I can’t tell you whether Dusty was much of a walker.  The pictures scattered around this post suggest she did do a certain amount of walking, in parks, with dogs, on roofs, and it’s worth noting that one album of her greatest hits was called ‘Walk On By’ – make what you will of that.

WALKING FREELY

When I was a stripling, living in Sheffield, most of a lifetime ago, I was a great fan of the 

band Cream, so much so that I was a member of their fan club, which was called Cream 

Addicts Anonymous.  At the time, the drug reference went over my head.

 

I’m pretty sure it was organised by the band’s management, The Robert Stigwood Organisation, but the newsletters were written by someone called Anne Hartzen and it all felt quite homely.  And so since I was just starting to play guitar I wrote to the fan club and said ‘I’m trying to work out the chords to “I feel Free,” can you help me?’  

FYI, 'I Feel Free' does contain the lyrics, ‘I can walk down the street, there's no one there/Though the pavements are one huge crowd ..’ - but that’s not what drew me to the song.

 

In a perfect world Jack Bruce would have scribbled the chords on the back of an envelope and sent them to me, but in fact I received the sheet music, which looked (and still looks) like this:

 

I was knocked out by the photograph on the front – which (I now know) shows the band in front of the dinosaurs of Crystal Palace Park (there are 2 dinosaurs in the picture but you can only really make out one) – though I had no idea of that at the time, and it took a couple of decades before I found out.

 

It was even longer before I went and walked round Crystal Palace Park and its dinosaurs, which in fact I did last week.  I wish I’d gone sooner.  It was a great walk: chilly, bright, muddy, and the park was full of runners and people with dogs and babies.  The dinosaurs weren't hard to find:

And the pavement was not one huge crowd.  And I saw the very dinosaurs that the band were posing in front of.  These ones, though very much not from the same angle.

 

The band got much closer than I could; they’re standing on an island right next to the beasts, but that area is now out of bounds.  I don’t know whether the dinosaurs were more accessible back then or whether the band got special permission because they had a photographer with them.  And I’ve not been able to find the name of the photographer.  Can anybody help?

 

And OK, I admit that Cream were not actually going for a walk in Crystal Palace Park, though I guess they must have done some walking to get to the dinosaurs.  So here’s a picture of the lads walking elsewhere. 

NB - I did eventually own and wear a fringed jacket but (obviously) it wasn't as cool as Eric's.

 

WALKING IN COMBINATIONS

 I’ve been reading an essay by Alan Bennett on A.E. Housman, an author who is not an 

open book to me, though I know he wrote 'A Shropshire Lad,' and that he looked 

somewhat like this.

 

Bennett writes in the essay, ‘At Cambridge, where he was professor of Latin, he took a daily walk and after it would change all his underwear – a habit he shared with Swinburne.’  Swinburne is not an open book either, though I believe he looked somewhat like this:

 

But I have a few questions. The first of course is how does anybody know the details of Housman and Swinburne’s walking and underwear habits?   The answer may be that literary biography has reached such a state of perfection that we know just about everything about everybody.

 

A further question – why does Bennett say ‘all his underwear’ – as though Housman might be expected to change some of his underwear while keeping other bits on.  Which leads to the question of just how many pieces of underwear Housman and Swinburne wore. It must be more than two because otherwise Bennett would have said ‘both’ rather than ‘all.’

 

An online search for ‘Victorian Underwear’ brings up the images below: (And yes I know that both Swinburne and Housman outlived Victoria – the latter didn’t die until 1936).

 

I also suspect Housman and Swinburne didn’t do their own laundry.

This is Alan Bennett: one day literary biographers may tell us all about his underwear arrangements.

OF WALKING AND GAZING

Note the legs.

 I’ve been thinking about Music to Watch Girls By, the 1966 tune composed by Sidney ‘Sid’ Ramin and recorded as an instrumental by The Bob Crewe Generation. The trumpet on it sounds like a faux Herb Alpert.

 

Then in 1967 there was a version with lyrics by Tony Velona, recorded by Andy Williams. Some of the lyrics run

‘The boys watch the girls while the girls watch the boys who watch the girls go by
Eye to eye, they solemnly convene to make the scene’ 

 

Words from a different age obviously – how rarely anybody ‘makes the scene’ these days - And we all know that the male gaze is bad and wrong, but here I guess there’s a certain gender equality – the male gaze encounters the returning female gaze.  Cool.

 

Music to Watch Girls By  was, in some sense, a kind of update of the song

Standing on the Corner 

by Frank Loesser from the 1956 musical The Most Happy Fella, originally recorded by a group called the Four Lads.  The girls were no doubt walking, the men just mooching.

 

The lyrics here run

Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Standing on the corner watching all the girls go by
Brother you don't know a nicer occupation
Matter of fact, neither do I

 

Sounds innocent enough, it even sounds ‘nice,’ but is it?  Later lyrics in the song run:

Brother, you can't go to jail
For what you're thinking
Or for the woo look in your eye

But it seems possible that you can.  Here’s a sign that was up in the tube station at Walthamstow. I assume it must be in other places too:

 

‘Intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated.’  I’m sure our courts will make some clear and prudent definitions of when a look becomes a stare, and when a stare becomes an ‘intrusive stare.’