DEAD MAN IN DEDHAM

My mate Richard and I went walking in ‘Constable Country’ – Manningtree, Flatford, Dedham, that kind of thing – about 7 miles round trip with stops for coffee and a beer.

 

I didn’t imagine the landscape would look exactly like a Constable painting

 

and that was just as well

 

 

On the walk we discussed

 

the political situation in Brazil

the Atacama desert

Richard’s experience with a dodgy scout master

smoothies for breakfast

Keith Waterhouse and Billy Liar

Sheffield Wednesday

the consolations of fandom

our shared indifference to the coronation and the local elections

who would be our head of state if chosen by the electorate – my guess was Judy Dench

muscular Christianity

notions of agency in children’s fiction

JK Rowling

‘magic’ in the bible

LS Lowry

the only time I’ve ever been thrown out of a pub when I was 18 for snogging –

Constable said, 'Landscape is my mistress - 'tis to her I look for fame.' It seems an odd thing to me, to look to your mistress for fame. 

RAGE WALKING

The picture above is of Reginald Farrer who I only found about from Nicola Shulman’s wonderful book, A Rage for Rock Gardening: The story of Reginald Farrer, gardener, writer and plant collector.

 

That subtitle doesn’t designate him as a walker per se, however as a young man in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century he and his friends walked and occasionally climbed in the mountains of Italy, France and Switzerland, as men of a certain type and class did. On July 22 1908, he sent a letter to his mother from Rosenlaui in Switzerland, in which he wrote,

'It is extraordinarily pleasant to be in the mountains again, and I find that vigour has so increased upon me that toilsome expeditions of three years ago are now strolls as easy as our favourite walk to the kitchen garden.’

This was worth noting because Farrer had been a sickly child, born with a cleft palate, a hare-lip and what he himself described as ‘a pygmy body.’

 

After a patchy, short career as a novelist (I think 99% of novelists have patchy careers, though not necessarily short ones) he dedicated himself to gardening, horticultural writing, and expeditions on which he collected plants and seeds that could be brought back and grown in English rock and alpine gardens.  This was a commercial enterprise.

Later he writes, ‘It may come as a shock and a heresy to my fellow Ramblers when I make the confession that, to me, the mountains … exist simply as homes and backgrounds to their population of infinitesimal plants.  My enthusiasm halts ... with my feet, at the precise point where the climber’s energies are first called upon.’  So he was definitely a walker, not a climber, though he certainly found himself in some lofty places.

His travels took him to Ceylon (where he became a Buddhist), Japan, Korea, China, Tibet, China and ultimately Upper Burma, where he died of diphtheria aged 40.  EMH Cox, who was with Farrer on that last expedition, and didn’t get on especially well with him, wrote ‘His stocky form was clad in khaki shorts and shirt, tieless and collarless, a faded toupee on his head, old boots and stockings that gradually slipped down and clung about his ankles as the day wore on.’

 

You know, I’ve read a certain amount about those men, colonial adventurers I suppose we might call them, who ‘walked across Africa.’ And it’s surprising how often this ‘walking’ involved being carried or stretchered after they’d come down with some strange and devastating illness.  So they didn’t walk all the way, though their bearers did.  Some of Farrer’s travels involved variations on this.

 

Sometimes he traveled in a sedan chair, which enabled him to read as he travelled: he was a great fan of Jane Austen.  But this was problematic. The sedan carriers, walking on wildly uneven terrain, kept dropping the chair.  In his diary Farrer wrote; ‘Crash went the chair again and again, and out flew Northanger Abbey into the mud.’

      Such are the trails of the long distance reader, to say nothing of the walker.

 

 

LOST IN SPACES

 I know I’ve led a sheltered life but even so I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to find out that the line ‘Not all those who wander are lost,' which I think is a pretty good line, comes from Tolkein’s poem  "The Riddle of Strider," written for The Fellowship of The Ring.

 

I’ve always found Tolkien pretty much unreadable, but somehow his reputation has survived this obstacle, and that quotation (with variations) has thrived on a lot of those ‘inspirational quotation’ sites around the Interwebs.  

Now, there’s nothing quite like an inspirational quotation to bring out the cynic in me, so you can imagine how pleased I was, while looking for something else, to find this, which I subsequently found in various other versions :

 

And finally, to prove, as if proof were needed, that not all who walk are noble, moral or decent, here is a picture of a walker, in fact power walker, whose name shall not be spoken.

 

WALKING THE WALK

 And so to Gray’s Inn Garden to see Sir Francis Bacon’s The Walks with my own eyes. It looked like this: 

As a “design feature” The Walks don’t look as though they took all that much designing, and the casual viewer might also observe that nobody’s actually walking in or on The Walks, but I suppose walking is not mandatory. Though there were was the couple in this picture, walking on the grass.

 

Also you’ll notice in the background that fine magnolia tree (at least I’m reasonably sure it’s a magnolia), and there was this splendid sculpture by Richard Renshaw called “The Bird Sculpture.” It was, apparently, presented to the Inn by Master Leighton Williams and installed at the end of 2022

And just around the corner was this statue of Sir Francis Bacon himself, but it’s not the best picture because there was a “keep off the grass sign” and although in general I’m not averse to a bit of light trespassing and rule breaking, I did think that being pursued by the lads from the Inns of Court might be more trouble than I could handle.

 

I was there with fellow flaneur Ashley Biles and as we walked around the area he took me to the Lincolns Inn Chapel which is a magnificent thing and looks like this from ground level (not my photo):

 

And at home later that very same day I watched the Persauders on TV, the episode titled “Take Seven” and I’m reasonably sure that some of it was filmed very close to the chapel.  Like this:

 

I mentioned this to Ashley and he wasn’t surprised. He said he used to work in that area and crews were filming there all the time and he said in an email “They still do a lot of filming in the area, particularly in and around Lincoln’s Inn. I have been told off before now, ignoring signs and impolite requests to not interrupt the filming. I did receive a broad grin once from Olivia Coleman, by the MI6 building for telling a ‘runner’ to fuck off. I was late for work and they had over run their license to film. A rather pointless act, but needs must.’

 

He added “she gives a good smile” - Just another reason to love Olivia Colman.

 

 

 

ABSTRACT WALKING

Willem de Kooning is not an open book to me but that’s him above, walking, and I just read this story, about him, from Bill Berkson’s memoir Since When.

  De Kooning was at dinner in East Hampton and somebody at the table said to him, ‘So, you take walks with your dogs.’

    And he answered, ‘No. I’m a man. MY dogs walk with me.’

  Sometimes I think those Abstract Expressionists weren’t all bad.

 

      I haven’t been able to find a picture of de Kooning and his dogs.  There’s this one of him on his bike with just one dog.  Doesn’t really count, does it?