THE ENGLISH ECCENTRICS

 In the days when I was trying to entertain my mum on Sunday afternoons, we once went 

for a walk around the grounds of Renishaw Hall, home of the Sitwells,  and a short drive 

from my mum’s house in Sheffield. 

 

We were greeted at the entrance, not all that warmly, by some venerable old party who may have been Sir George Sitwell, though I suppose it could have been some other venerable old party.  

 

I can’t remember anything else about the gardens or the walk.

 

I’m not sure that many people read the Sitwell’s these days (I’m not sure very many people ever did – though I seem to remember enjoying Osbert’s Great Morning) - but I did just find a quotation from Edith Sitwell about walking (more or less).

 

She writes

‘The great sins and fires break out of me 

like the terrible leaves from the bough in the violent spring. 

I am a walking fire, I am all leaves.”

 

Here she is walking her dog – some leaves, no fire:

 

 

How very different from the home life of our own dear Tilda Swinton who has done a photo-shoot for Tim Walker at Renishaw Hall, dolled up as Edith, to whom she is apparently distantly related.

 

She's wearing some schmutter by Michael Kors which I don’t think Edith, for all her eccentricity, would have been seen dead in.

 

 

 

WALKING IN GARDENS

Look, I’m not trying to turn this into a project or anything but last weekend I was walking 

around The Cotswold Sculpture Park, near Cirencester (the actual address is Somerfield 

Keynes) - my third sculpture park of the year. 

 

You could argue I was actually walking in two sculpture parks – see the Google map below-

 

the other one being the Elemental Sculpture Park, but I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. There was also the Zimbabwe Loop, home to this very fine pangolin by Tonderai Sowa.

 

Now, some people have told me they think a sculpture park is a good walk spoiled.  The walk in the park or garden, they say, would be more enjoyable without the art.  I don’t agree with that, obviously, but I think there’s something to be said for a comparatively small and crowded park.  The Cotswold is ‘just’ 10 acres and contains about 200 pieces.

 

 I like the experience of walking along, turning a corner and seeing, for example, an old engine transformed into a dragonfly.  This one is by Ed Hill.

 

How different from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (500 acres) where you see a chunk of art half a mile away and have to yomp over hill and dale to get there.  Though maybe that’s the point.

 

Admittedly the art in the Cotswold did not have the name-brand recognition of the art in Yorkshire – not a Moore or a Goldsworthy or a Hepworth in sight.  But brand recognition isn’t everything.

 

Back in the day when I occasionally used to find myself in a room with Benedikt Taschen, the very rich publisher and art collector, he always said he didn’t enjoy going to major art museums because you couldn’t buy any of the art on display.  A Giacometti would catch your eye at the Museum of Modern Art, but no amount of haggling would allow you to snap it up and take it home with you.  No such problem at the Cotswold Sculpture Park - with a few exceptions, the art was for sale.

 

And if they weren’t in the Damien Hirst price bracket some were not cheap at all – the polar bear below titled ‘Boris’ was quoted at 250,000 quid (‘will consider offers’).

Of course I liked some of works of art more than others, but I think what I liked best were some sculptures made from car exhaust systems – in the US they’d be ‘Muffler Men.’  I couldn’t see that these were attributed to any artist but perhaps they were and I missed it.

 

They weren’t hidden, but they were kind of lurking in the woods and the undergrowth.  And some of them were walking.  Not very far or fast, but definitely walking.

 

Also, while in Gloucestershire, I met a man who told me I really should go to a sculpture park in Trenton New Jersey, called Grounds for Sculpure.  It sounded well worth a visit.

 

OK, so maybe I am, kind of, turning it into a project. 

 

STAINS ON THE STREET

 Below is the best opening to an essay about walking and cities that I’ve read in a long time.  

It’s titled ‘Key to the City’ and is in the spring 2022 issue of the Los Angles Review of Books Quarterly Journal.  (I’ve got a piece in there too should you be interested in such things.). 

 

This is Lisa Teasley: 

 

This is the opening of her piece:

 

 

“Walking the streets of Los Angeles, wandering determined, puts me more intimately in touch with the map than driving ever could. It makes plain where my identity shifts in the city, reveals the infinite ways to read and reread place. 

“I was born in this city and raised in Baldwin Hills since midway through second grade, after the family spent a six-and-a-half-year interval in Durham, North Carolina. I went from racing turtles and hiking in woods lit by fireflies to banana-seat biking the Dons — as all of Baldwin Hills’s street names begin — where many Black TV, film, and music stars lived long before the recent influx of white residents. I was not walking the neighborhood streets until after a family friend’s 18-year-old kid tried to rape me when I was 13 and babysitting his kid sister. A month or so afterward, he died doing a motorcycle trick in front of his house, which was the scene of the crime. I then walked past to see how I would feel — and if the street itself might describe the terror of him crawling through the window, grabbing his sister, and locking her in her room, and then dragging me into his. I wondered if I would feel proud of how hard I fought for the hour and got away, or if because he was now dead it might feel like it never happened.  There was blood on the street. I was shocked to see the stain and wondered how many days of rain it would take to wash away the evidence of his existence.’ 

 

That’s damn good.  And there’s much more to come but you’ll have to find it for yourself.

 

And just to prove how well-connected I used to be in LA, here’s a very, very low res pic of me and Lisa waiting to read at a Black Clock event at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA.  Looks like we were having fun:

SPRUNG

 There is, evidently, some crossover between walking and scavenging.

 

When I walk I often pick up objects I happen to see.  Depending on where and when I’m walking these may be interesting rocks, the very occasional bird skull, a discarded shopping list or two, even bits of mechanical hardware.

 

The items end up in my shed which one day, I promise, will turn into the Nicholsonian Wunderkammer.  Visits strictly by appointment.

 

This is not exactly what the American conceptual artist Mark Dion gets up to but I like to think it shares of some of the same impulses.  Dion’s enterprise, I think we can say, is to question the whole nature of collecting, curating, organizing, hierarchies, and so on, and also the change in status that comes about when  an object is put in a cabinet or under a bell jar, or in a museum:

 

This kind of thing:

I don’t claim Dion as a soul brother or even fellow traveler – I’m really just a fan, but by definition I do reclassify, reorganize and recontextualize the objects I find.

 

So when I was doing my now legendary A10 walk for the Stoke Newington Literary Festival, the route started in this rather unpromising though intriguing bit of territory: 

And I picked up this spring as a souvenir.

 

I wouldn’t claim it’s the most wonderful or significant find but I didn’t have time for a full archeological survey.  It's now in the collection:

Obviously Mark Dion doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground, but blow me down, on his Instagram feed a couple of days ago there was this image.

 

Coincidence?

 

Is there any such thing?

BUT IT'S OK

 You know I’ve always felt ambivalent about Sergeant Pepper.  For every cracking song like 

‘A Day in the Life’ there’s some horror like ‘Lovely Rita.’

 

But without wanting to appear perverse, the song I really used to like and still do is ‘Good Morning,’ which apparently John Lennon hated, saying ‘It's a throwaway, a piece of garbage, I always thought.’  I can see his point, the words are  all over the place, but throwaway isn’t always bad, the song does rock, and there’s some tasty lead guitar by Paul.

 

The song was on my mind when I was in Sheffield recently, especially the lyrics.

 

After a while you start to smile now you feel cool
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school
Nothing is changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's OK

Good morning, good morning
Good morning ah

 

They had some resonance because I did indeed take a walk by, and to a limited extent inside the grounds of, the old school: King Edward VII, Glossop Road, Sheffield.  And an awful lot had changed.

 

For one thing, they’ve built a stonking great extension, and there were some forbidding security gates, though not all THAT forbidding because you could easily walk through whenever they opened to let a car in and out, which happened all the time.  I assume I was being filmed.

 

Other changes: some art in the car park:

 

And they even have a school mini bus:

 

Many changes, though the main school building still looks like the same forbidding satanic mill that it always did.

 

It was early evening when I took most of these pictures so I had no reason to sing, or say,  ‘Good morning.’  But it was OK.

The Beatles version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ru3O23zqqaE

And, hold on to your hat, the Micky Dolenz version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nyA_xBYUPw