A WINNER IN PINNER

 

So off we went to Pinner, primarily to visit the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial 

Park, but also for the chance to have a walk in Pinner, terra incognita, a place I’d never set 

foot, though Elton John, Michael Rosen and Ivy Compton Burnett had all been there before me.

 

It’s not much of a walk from Pinner tube to the museum, and I’m not sure that Heath Robinson was much of a walker but images of walking do feature in his work, both in his own fantastical creations:

 

and also in his illustrations for others.  Until I went to the museum I didn’t realize he’d done so much illustration for authors – Poe, Rabelais, Cervantes, Kipling, among them.

 

Actually I think the best part of the museum was probably the ceiling:

 

In Pinner we’re in Metroland – the tube opened in 1885.  Heath Robinson lived there from 1908 to 1918 and one assumes it was less suburban then than it is now, although Robinson’s House in Moss Lane, now with a blue plaque, and actually a fair hike from the tube station, looked plenty suburban, as did many of the other (perhaps later) houses in the street.  

Robinson and family left Pinner in 1918 to move to Cranleigh in Surrey.

 

Finally a word to the wise, if you type Heath Robinson into a search engine there’s a reasonable chance it will autocorrect as Death Robinson, which has its appeal but doesn’t really fit the man himself.

SHAKEN IN WANSTEAD

 I was in Wanstead, being an author, doing a double act with fellow drifter and 

psychogeographer Travis Elborough, at a great venue in a railway arch, The Wanstead Tap.  

So of course I tried to have a short exploratory walk on the way there:

 

Wanstead is on my mental map of London, but only just – in the past I’ve walked across Wanstead Flats but it was some time ago.  And it seems to me the topographical delineations get a bit convoluted out in those parts.  You don’t have to walk very far to may be in East Ham, West Ham, Forest Gate, Newham, and at times you may be in at least two of these places at once.

 

I’m always fascinated by the hows and whys of the naming of streets and getting to the venue involved walking up Dames Road, from which Anna Neagle Close and Vera Lynn Close, named after a couple of great dames and local lasses.  Anna Neagle was born in Forest Gate, Vera Lynn was born in East Ham.

 

Parked in Anna Neagle Close was this very cool Ford Capri.  You know, if there’s one thing brightens up the average urban drift, it’s the presence cool classic cars.  I wish there were more of them:

There was also a bit of leaseable ruin:

 

 And a cat - which I think always adds to the tone of a place:

Come the Q and A at the event, an audience member (Fiona, if I remember correctly) mention Dubai, where the two side of the street looked like a mirror images of each other.

 

I promised to look this up when I got home and I have done, and although I’m not 100% sure that I’ve found the place she was talking about, I did find this, Sheik Zayed Road: 

 

I certainly doesn’t look pedestrian-friendly though it seems that parts of it are walkable (there are Youtube videos if you want to see them).

 

This was Sheik Zayed (I think I’ve got the right one):

 

I mean, he had his moments, but he was no Vera Lynn.

LOST

 

This has been floating around the interwebs.  I thought it sounded like an urban myth, or perhaps wishful thinking, but it seems real enough.  Apparently it happened on Mount Elbert, about a year ago and the guy eventually found his way back to his car after 24 hours.

According to the New York Post, the rescue team posted on Facebook 'If you’re overdue according to your itinerary, and you start getting repeated calls from an unknown number, please answer the phone; it may be a [search and rescue] team trying to confirm you’re safe!”  Which has the implication, of course, that it may not.

But they didn't name the hiker.  I'd have named him. But maybe they didn't know his name, only his number.

STONE WALKING

 In the current issue of The Wire magazine the very wonderful Carl Stone is interviewed by 

the very wonderful Emily Bick.  This is one of the pictures accompanying the article.

 

Carl Stone

I can’t describe Carl Stone’s work any better than Emily Bick does: ‘snatches of sound sampled and looped, layered and time-shifted, decontextualized and transformed … The results are as mind-melting as you’d expect if you fed tape loops through a psychedelic Cuisinart, followed by a hacker-modified replicator from Star Trek.’

 

I also happen to know, because I follow him on Instagram that Stone something of walker and he takes photographs as he goes, and since he divides his time between Tokyo and Los Angeles this produces some very interesting results.

 

In Tokyo this kind of thing:

In Los Angeles this kind of thing:

 

Since both these places are his home I don’t suppose this counts as ‘traveling’ but I found this interesting remark of his from a 2016 interview with the magazine LA Record from 2016

‘When I travel, unlike tourists who might have a camera strapped on, I walk around with a portable recorder looking for interesting sounds. I don’t necessarily have a goal in mind. Sometimes there are certain places that I know should have interesting sounds. I’m very attracted to marketplaces and things like that. And I especially like urban soundscapes, so when I go to a city, I will always have my recorder handy. I think I mentioned earlier that I lived in Tokyo for six months back in the late 80s, and at that time, I had a portable digital recorder. It’s what’s called a DAT recorder and a stereo microphone and a pair of headphones, just walking around soaking up the sounds.’

 

There are two photographs accompanying The Wire article, the one at the top of this post and also this one:

 

It does not strike me as the most flattering picture of Mr. Stone, and then I saw that the photographer was Michael Schmelling who is a top photographer, but I too have been photographed by him, and flattery is really not what he does.  We can live with that.  We have to.

 

 

INCANDESCENT WALKING

 As you may have worked out by now, I like walking in the desert, and I like deserts even 

when I’m not walking in them, and I have a tendency to buy books about the desert and 

then leave them unread on the shelf for a few years.

 

And so, very belatedly, I’ve been reading my copy of The Desert Is No Ladysubtitled ‘Southwestern Landscapes in Women’s Writing and Art,’ edited by Vera Norwood and Janice Monk.  It’s great.

 

There’s a chapter in it about about Nancy Newhall titled ‘Walking on the Desert in the Sky’ – you can see why I was drawn to it.

 

Wikipedia says Nancy Newhall is best known for writing texts to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, which is fair enough, though she was also a critic, designer, editor, and a very good photographer in her own right.  These are a few of her photographs:

 

The texts that accompanied Adams’ and Weston’s works weren’t just prefaces or introductory essays but poetic utterances.  Some of the pages look like this:

 

The perfect balance between words and images always seems like a great idea but offhand I can’t think of many (OK, any) books where the text and the photographs have equal weight and importance. And the proof of the pudding may be: Adams and Weston are still regarded as great photographers. Nancy Newhall is not regarded as a great writer.  I don’t think this is entirely the fault of patriarchy.

 

Still, I find myself fascinated by some lines of Newhall’s This Is The American Eartha book she did with Adams:

‘you are shut in by distances of light.  You walk in the focus of the sun’s rays.  You are clothed in sun; sun glows in your blood, until even your bones feel incandescent. …

‘Night clings, paling to your body, until once more day is limited, and you are walking in the desert in the sky.’

 

I alternate between thinking this is a bit too artsy fartsy, and then thinking this is a very wonderful description of walking in the desert.

I shall continue to think about this, sometimes while walking.