BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN

 War involves endless movement, getting civilian and military personnel from one place to 

another, getting to the right place and escaping from the wrong place  Very often 

machines are involved – cars, trains, tanks, planes, armoured vehicles.  And yet for many, 

especially (though not exclusively) refugees, war involves a great deal of walking.

 

These are Ukrainians:

 

These are Afghanis:

These are Rohinya refugees:

 

And obviously it's not just civilians. In the Falklands. British soldiers referred to ‘yomping.’

My dad was in his teens when Sheffield was bombed in World War 2.  The day after a round of bombing he still went to work, walking over bodies on the way. 

 

In the same week that a war started in Europe there was a piece in the papers about researchers in Canada who had discovered that - and I'm quoting from the Times here 'that the prevalence of obesity among adults living on "highly walkable" neighborhoods was 19% lower than in those living in areas with 'low walkability.'"

And yeah, you might think, trivial First World problems, although until recently we tended to believe that Russia and Ukraine were firmly in that first world.

 

Also at times like this it might be reasonable to remember Ed Ruscha's line, (which I don’t imagine he invented) the phrase ‘Brave Men Run in My Family.’

"NOTHING ENDURES BUT CHANGE"

 Who could disagree with Heraclitus when he said, “No man ever steps in the same river 

twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”  (Incidentally, “steps” is 

sometimes translated as ‘walks,’ but that sounds off to me.  I mean who walks in a river?  

Wade at best). 

 

Anyway it seems to me that Heraclitus’s notion applies to streets as well as rivers, though judging by this picture, old H. found walking a bit of a strain.  Scholars are reasonably sure that he suffered from dropsy.

 

Living as I do in small town Essex there’s a strictly limited number of nearby streets to walk down.  Even so, by definition, and not just Heraclitus’, every street is different every time I walk down it, as am I.  And I think you can say something similar about photography: you can’t photograph the same subject twice because the subject will have changed, as will the photographer.

 

There’s a certain street I walk down reasonably often and the first time I did it I was taken by this strange and interesting and rather attractive juxtaposition of plant life and dog statue. 

 

A year or so later it looked like this.  

 

I wasn’t sure what had happened to the plants but, as you see, snow was on the ground, and it did occur to me that the plant might have simply come to the end of it’s life or perhaps just receded for the winter.  I suppose a better plantsman would be able to tell you the names of the absent plants.  

 

And then, not so long ago, I walked down the street again and things had taken chaotic a turn – no snow, no plant, and a significant pile of rubbish.  The dog, however, endures, for now.

 

WALKING AND FIELDING

 

I’ve been sorting my books – not ‘unpacking my library’ – I did that years back but 

I’m still trying to find a reasonable order for them.

 

And I happened to find my copy of The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2004) by Robert Shoemaker.    I opened it not quite at random and came across this extraordinary passage:

 

‘In 1776 John Fielding warned new arrivals to the city of the dangers of walking at night: “he will sometimes be liable to the more dangerous attacks of intemperate rakes in hot blood who occasionally by way of bravado, scower the streets, to shew their manhood, not their humanity; put the watch to flight; and now and then have murdered some harmless and inoffensive person.”’ This is from A Brief Description of the Cities of  London and Westminster.

 

The passage is illustrated by the engraving (anonymous as far as I can tell) ‘High Life At Midnight’ which is at the top of this post.

 

Shoemaker could have had left it there,  but he goes on:

 

‘The common themes of these attacks, which were public, unprovoked, committed by elite young men, often targeted at strangers (especially young women), involved an element of playfulness and were often described using the imagery of blood, suggest that the perpetrators were adolescents, possibly confused about their sexuality ..’

 

Well thanks Bob, that explains everything.

 

This is Sir John Fielding 

I don't know how much of a walker he was but he was an amazing man; half-brother of Henry Fielding (together they set up the Bow Street Runners), blinded in a naval accident at the age of 19, became a magistrate known as the Blind Beak and was supposedly able to recognize 3,000 criminals by the sound of their voices.

STANMORE SAUNTERING

 

You want to know why Modernist architecture never really took off in England?  I’ll tell you 

why Modernist architecture never took off in England.  It’s the lack of blue skies, which is 

perhaps also to say lack of sun. 

 

I was walking in Stanmore last week, peering at some modernist houses (only the outsides) with flaneuse and professional walking tour guide (Jen Pedler) and we arrived in the morning when the sky was grey and there was rain in the air.

It was easy enough to see that these houses on Kerry Drive and Valencia Road, designed in the 1930s, were architecturally special but under a low grey sky they really didn’t look as fantastic as they might have.  

 

In fact the houses are mostly built of brick and coated with Snowcrete which is still easily available.  I wonder if a pure Modernist might think that was cheating.

 

So we wandered around Stanmore, looking at this and that, and we ended up in the Stanmore Country Park, which was surprisingly muddy in places but worth it because in the end we got this extraordinary view of London – in fact it’s called the London Viewpoint.

 

         While we were up there the sky brightened and by a circuitous route we returned to our starting point, by which time the sun was out, the sky was blue, and the Modernist houses looked absolutely magnificent.

 

Of course whiteness isn’t everything. We had also taken a detour to see the house at 2, Aylmer Close, designed by Gert Kaufman in the sixties (he also designed one of the houses in Kerry Avenue).

It looks like this; not so much modernist as Brutalist

 

From Pinterest

Not that we saw it with our own eyes.  The owners obviously want their privacy, and the best view we could get of it was this:

 

Other attractions in Stanmore, well I can’t guarantee it’ll be there for long, but this car on Stanmore Hill, a Buick Eight:

 

It’s cool enough in itself but the rear number plate said “A Quinn Martin Production.  Quinn Martin was the producer behind The Fugitive, The Streets of San Francisco, Cannon among many other fine TV shows.

 

What Quinn Martin's name (and just conceivably his car) were doing in Stanmore, I have no idea.

I'M NOT AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, JUST A BIT WARY

Mrs Dalloway in a hat

                 

I’ve been trying again to read Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.  I’ve tried before and I gave it up as a bad job, but this time I got to the end of it.  It confirmed, what I already knew, that Virginia Woolf and I are not destined to be soul mates.

 

Mrs Dalloway has a reputation for being something of a walking novel. In Flaneuse Lauren Elkin says, ‘Mrs Dalloway is perhaps the greatest flaneuse of twentieth-century literature.’  She was wise to put in ‘perhaps,’ I’d say.  

 

True, Mrs Dalloway does do a bit of walking - she goes out to buy flowers because the servants are too busy preparing for her party (really - 'What a lark.   What a plunge!'),  but it’s a very short walk; she’s home by 11 am, apparently walking for an hour at most, and John Sutherland has pretty convincingly argued that she takes a taxi home.

 

But there’s a interesting line in the book.

“I love walking in London," said Mrs Dalloway. "Really it’s better than walking in the country!"

The line is unchanged from the way it appeared in the original short story version of the opening section, published in The Dial, in 1923, titled ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street.’

I do wonder if this was an unusual or even a startling or subversive thing for a woman (or anybody) to think and say in 1923 (short story) or 1925 (novel).

 

We do know that Woolf had read, or had tried to read, Joyce’s Ulysses  (1922-ish), but she didn’t rate it because it was written by a ‘a self-taught working man’ – self taught at University College Dublin.

 

         And I suppose it’s possible that Woolf was aware that Baudelaire described the flâneur in his essayThe Painter of Modern Life (1863), but I think it’s highly improbable that Mrs. Dalloway was.

 

Fortunately, there is some fabulous unintentional humor in the novel, which had me shorting Guinness through my nose

Mrs. Dalloway is not the only walker in the book. Her daughter walks too, to the Army and Navy Stores along with her one-time nanny Miss Kilman, who is a communist, a committed Christian, and commentators seem to insist that she’s a lesbian, hence perhaps the name -- Woolf was such a subtle writer.

 

         The hilarity comes when Woolf describes Kilman’s conversion, which came while out walking some time earlier.  ‘Bitter and churning Miss Kilman had turned into a church two years three months ago.’

         Walking can be a great source of metamorphosis.

Liz Taylor, acting