THE BOOKISH DESERT

  

I can’t tell you exactly how much of a walker Alberto Manguel is.  Most photographs of him, as above, show him sitting or standing surrounded by books. But we know he certainly walked in Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges, and he wrote a terrific piece for the Guardian about Ahasverus,the Wandering Jew. 

Even as a child, says Manguel, ‘The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I didn't feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly … above all, to be able to read any book that fell into your hands …

‘And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong … it is hard to believe that a merciful god would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting-room without reading material.’

Here is Manguel, not walking but at least photographed outdoors, so I suppose he must have walked to get there.

 

In his book The Library At Night Manguel talks about the way in which, unless you’re a wanderer, you never have enough shelving for your books.  You find you’ve too many books and so you buy a new bookcase but the moment you get the bookcase, it fills up and then you need to buy another one and so on and so on.

 

I never doubted this was true but the point has been driven home since I bought myself a shiny new, and I’m quoting here, ‘Vasagle Bookcase, Bookshelf, Ladder Shelf 4-Tier, Display Storage Rack Shelf, for Office, Living Room, Bedroom, 80 x 33 x 149 cm, Industrial, Rustic Brown’

 

I hoped this would give me loads of extra shelf space and free up some room in other bits of the house, and now of course it’s full.

 

    Manguel also talks about the problems of arrangement, or perhaps more correctly classification.   I have a lot of books about walking and a lot, though not as many, books about deserts, so I thought I’d put all my books about walking in the new bookcase, so that I could put my books about the desert in a smaller case on the other side of the room, but then the walking books more than filled the space I’d allotted to them, while the desert bookcase still had a bit of room in it.

 

    Now, it so happens that I own some books that are about walking in deserts, so these made a move across the room out of the walking bookcase into the desert bookcase, which doesn’t seem ideal but it’ll do for now.  Reclassification is always a possibility, in fact a necessity.

 

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about walking and deserts is because I’m not quite sure when I’ll next be walking in a real desert. But recently, mostly by chance, I did find a pretty fair simulacrum of the desert in Norfolk, in the garden of the Old Vicarage in East Ruston, the lifetime project of Alan Gray and Graham Robson. This is them, suited up:

The simulacrum is an area they call the Desert Wash designed to resemble parts of Arizona, a place neither of the gardeners has been, apparently.

 

This was my favourite spot: the sculpture is by Ben Southwell.

 

And there, in amidst the rocks the cacti and succulents, keeping his eye on things was (unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am) Graham Robson himself.  He was not chatty, but why should he be? 

     Of course it wasn’t a walk in a real desert, but on a damp and chilly day in Norfolk it wasn’t bad at all.  

I bought a guide book obviously – now, where to shelve it?

 

DISPROPORTIONATE WALKING

Spare a thought for Auriol Grey, the pedestrian who was recently jailed for manslaughter after the death of a cyclist she encountered on the pavement in  Huntingdon.

 

I have no information other than what I’ve read and seen in the media but the story seems to be that Gray, aged 49, who is partially sighted and suffers from cerebral palsy, was walking along what looks, from the not very good security footage, to have been a very narrow pavement when she saw 77-year-old cyclist Celia Ward riding towards her.

 

By all accounts Grey swore at Ward, told her to get off the pavement and according to the BBC ‘gestured in an "aggressive way” towards her.’  She didn’t assault her, didn’t push her, didn’t touch her, but Ward fell off the bike, off pavement, into the road, into the path of a car, and was killed.

 

Grey got three years, though she’s apparently appealing against the sentence.

 

After the trial one Detective Sergeant Dollard (I wonder what his nickname is) said: 'Everyone will have their own views of cyclists on pavements and cycleways, but what is clear is Grey's response to the presence of Celia on a pedal cycle was totally disproportionate and ultimately found to be unlawful.'

 

It’s a terrible and tragic case all round but the reason it stays with me is because on at least a couple of occasions I believe I may have sworn at cyclists who I thought were going to run into me.  Whether I’ve gestured at them I’m not sure, but I may well have.  Of course these cyclists didn’t fall off the bikes to their death, but who can say whether my swearing and gesturing was proportionate, disproportion or ‘totally disproportionate?’  I think some clarification might be necessary. 

Of course I have also been sworn at by cyclists.

 

Worst of all according to the BBC report,‘The trial was told that police could not "categorically" state whether the pavement was a shared cycleway.’  To which one might reasonably ask, ‘Why the hell not?’

 

 

 

 

 

 

WALKING WITH OBELISKS

 Did you know there’s an area of Norwich called Tombland?

I suppose a lot of people do, but I didn’t until I found myself in Norwich last weekend, having been to a disappointing exhibition, and was looking for entertainment.  And although I wasn’t expecting Tombland to be some sci-fi, horror, zombie theme park, I was still disappointed at first to find that Tombland is pretty much the public square in front of the Cathedral entrance. 

 

In fact Tombland is the Old English or possibly Viking (scholars differ) word for empty space, though of course it’s not as empty as it used to be.  And right there in the middle there’s an obelisk, and I think you already know about my mild but ongoing obelisk obsession.  This one is actually a drinking fountain.

 

So it hadn’t been a wasted afternoon, and then because I’d looked at a map earlier, I’d seen that Rosary Cemetery was nearby, and so (being something off a taphophile) it had to be investigated. We had to walk through Old Library Woods which was not much of a wood, though there was a wayside library and a 'community chatting bench,' and some fine bookish sculptures complete with real live, unsculpted, fungi.

       And then into Rosary Cemetery which was, OMG, obelisk central - far more than you see in these pictures – Obeliskland, if you will.

 

         It was established in 1819 by Thomas Drummond, and various sources say it was the first non-denominational burial ground in Britain, though I’d have thought Bunhill Fields – resting place of Bunyan, Blake and Defoe - first used as a burial ground in 1665 would have some claim on this.  Other sources simply say Rosary was the first private cemetery in England. 

         I like walking in cemeteries, I find it a pleasure, and I do spend a certain amount of time wondering what exactly is the nature of this pleasure.  I don’t think it’s a form of gloating.  I don’t walk around thinking how lucky I am to be alive when all these other folk are dead, because I know that my luck will run out and sooner or later I’ll be joining them.

Partly I enjoy the mysteries of cemeteries. The people in these graves all had complex and nuanced lives and you can only imagine what these were because even the most elaborate headstone never tells you much. And even though an obelisk doesn’t tell you any more, it does make a statement.

 

         In fact I’ve considered buying an obelisk so that I can have it my back garden now while I live, and then loved ones can move it to the cemetery when I’m gone, so that others can walk around the graveyard see my obelisk and think what a great man this Nicholson must have been.  

 

Or I suppose if these same loved ones set up the Nicholson Memorial Museum of Curiosities, we might have something like this:

 

Of course since I’ll be gone I won’t know whether the loved ones have actually done this or not.

 

HOLY WALKING

D.J. Waldie (that's him above) is a pedestrian and the author of Holy Land: a Suburban Memoir, an excellent book about growing up and living in the suburban hinterland of Los Angeles, in Lakewood.  In the interests of clarity it’s probably worth saying that he’s not an actual DJ.

Recently on his website he published a piece titled ‘Walking in LA: Los Angeles is the second-most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.’

 

Waldie is a pedestrian by default, and a non-driver. As he says in the article, and as he’s often written about elsewhere, he suffers from various sight problems which prevent him from driving, though as he also says in the piece, ‘If I could, of course I would drive.’

 

In fact you do meet a certain number of non-drivers in Los Angeles. There are various reasons – from environmental showboating to having been banned from driving, to simply being poor, though it always seemed to me that many of the poorest people in LA still found a way to scrape together the wherewithal to buy a car.

More often than not. non-drivers in L.A. aren’t so much pedestrians as people who want to cadge a lift.

 

I was taken by that sub-headline in the Waldie piece saying that LA is the second most dangerous city for pedestrians in the U.S.  I’ve done some non-exhaustive research on this – looking at lists of ‘America’s most dangerous cities for pedestrians’ – not least because if LA is number 2, I wanted to know what was number one.

But it seems there’s no simple and agreed upon answer. I’ve found stastics where Los Angeles is number one, other statistics where it’s not even in the top 50.  

Still, the dangers are real enough for an LA walker. Waldie writes, ‘I’m a good pedestrian however, staying within the marked crosswalks and never jaywalking, even when the next crosswalk is a long walk away. Free-range pedestrianism is dangerous, Anti-war activist Jerry Rubin was struck and killed in 1994 while attempting to cut across Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The head of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, crossing the seven lanes of Olympic Boulevard, was killed.’

I do like that phrase, ‘Free-range pedestrianism.’

 

Then Waldie adds, and I thought this was the real kicker, ‘Fewer streets are marked by crosswalks today. The city has sandblasted away hundreds since the mid-1970s when traffic engineers showed, not surprisingly, that more pedestrians are killed in crosswalks than out of them. The engineers said the painted lines gave pedestrians a false sense of security, making them less attentive to danger. Risk managers had another reason to eliminate crosswalks. Their presence makes cities vulnerable if the city is sued by injured pedestrians or their survivors.’

 

Well that makes a lot of terrible and shocking yet all too predictable sense, doesn’t it?

 

Waldie’s website is here.

 

WALKING WITH BACON

 I was reading about Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1662), philosopher, writer, begetter of the Baconian method of scientific investigation, and latterly a disgraced politician in the days when politicians were capable of grace.

 

He also had a lot to say about gardens, and from the late 1590s he was responsible for the grounds of Gray’s Inn,  known as The Walks.  In 1702 it looked like this:

 

Like this in 1804:

currently like this:

 

Bacon’s Walks were a place to go for a walk, and a fashionable one at that, as recorded by Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn.  I suppose they're less fashionable now; a private garden but open to the polloi sometimes.

 

Polymath though he was, Bacon seems not to have been much of a walker.  John Aubrey’s Brief Lives contains this passage, ‘I remember Sir John Danvers told me that his lordship (Bacon) much delighted in his curious garden at Chelsea and as he was walking there one time he fell down in a dead swoon.  My Lady Danvers rubbed his face, temples etc and gave him cordial water: as soon as he came to himself, said he ‘Madam, I am no footman.’” I can’t help feeling I might be missing something in that reply.

 

And here’s an illustration by Joseph Ratcliffe Skelton titled, ‘Accompanied by a friend to jot down his thoughts, Sir Francis Bacon takes a walk in his garden.’

 

I made a note to go for a wander around The Walks just as soon as the weather warms up, and while I had this in mind a couple of days ago as walking in London, around the back of the Royal Academy, what was the old Museum of Mankind, and blow me down, there was a statue of Sir Francis Bacon, which of course I'd seen before but never took any notice of:

Sir Francis Bacon was a quotable man – “knowledge is power” that’s one of his - but of course he is not the only Francis Bacon in the world.  This is how he’s remembered on goodreads.com:

 

That, of course, is the wrong Francis Bacon, the one seen below, ‘Francis Bacon Walking on Primrose Hill’ by Bill Brandt.