COME SAID THE BIRD

So we went for a walk in Harwich, where the ‘Secret Gardens of Harwich’ were open and in some sense ‘walkable.’

 

It so happens that the Nicholson horticultural bookshelf contains three books with ‘secret garden’ in the title - The Secret Gardens of Hollywood – but honey ALL gardens are secret in Hollywood; The Secret Gardens of East Anglia – at least some of which have open days, and one book simply called Secret Gardens, which contains at least one garden I’ve walked in. I know there are plenty of other ‘secret garden’ books.

The weekend walk in Harwich consisted mostly of strolling from one small domestic garden to another – private rather than secret I’d have said - but it was possible to clock up a mile or two on the streets.  None of the gardens was large and some were very small, so that once inside visitors shuffled rather than walked.  It was fine, though I can’t imagine Iain Sinclair much less Baudelaire, doing this kind of thing.

 

There is something strange but very appealing about finding yourself in other people’s garden, in their personal space as it were. Obviously you’re not trespassing because they’ve opened their garden to the public, revealed their secrets, but nevertheless there is some mild sense of intrusion. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want a bunch of strangers traipsing around my own garden, though I’m equally sure that not many would want to, not even for charity.

 

Every garden had something of interest

 

But the best, if you asked me, was the sunken garden at Quayside court, attached to a block of flats rather than a house.  It had a slight Alice in Wonderland theme.

Afterwards as went back to the car, you couldn’t say we’d had ‘a good walk’ however defined, but the day had got very hot by then and we were knackered from all the mooching about; since mooching can at least as exhausting as actually walking.

 

Of course there are things in Harwich that aren’t secret and aren’t gardens but are still interesting, especially to wanderers like me.  Hell, I even found a Thomasson:

 

THE AMBLING ASSASSINS

 Perhaps like me you’ve been reading some alarming stuff about walking among cows.  The Sunday Times mag a couple of weeks back had a cover article titled ‘Natural Born Killers’ and inside the shout line was, ‘Ramblers beware: there’s a new killer in the countryside.’  The article was by Sian Boyle.

Now, as you know, I’m all for asserting that walking is not an entirely safe and cozy activity, that there are risks and dangers, and that’s all part of the appeal, but of the various things I worry about while walking, until now cows haven't been one of them.

 

The deal is that whereas you and I might think cows are benign, indeed bovine, creatures, apparently they kill and injure a significant number of walkers in Britain.  According to the Health and Safety Executive,  9 members of the public were killed between 2017 and 2022, along with 23 farm workers, and in the years 2020/1 31 people received cow-related ‘non-fatal injuries’.  This doesn’t seem a huge number, but it’s far more than most of us would have imagined, and according to Sian Boyle ‘Campaigners believe this doesn’t tell the whole story.’  There's a website (see below) called killercows.co.uk which reports and publicizes incidents.

 

Some of these incidents involve dog walkers, where the hound comes between a cow and her calf, and sometimes it’s people who don’t understand the basic common sense rules of walking through fields, but it still seems a lot of deaths and injuries.  That Times article does admit 'there’s something comical about the idea of a herd of cows on the rampage,’ but I do have a friend of a friend who was out walking and had a cow sit on him.  I don't know the precise details but I gather he’s never been the same since.

 

So I’ve been reviewing my own walking practice regarding cows and although I’ve never had any trouble, I’m always  wary and I try not to bother them.

 

A commenter on Killer Cows advises, ‘Make a lot of noise, clap your hands and charge at them – but don’t get too close to them when you do i.e. always stay out of kicking range. They always stop in their tracks and if you keep it up they will stay away from you while you get out of their way.’  I hope I won’t have to put that to the test.  A letter in the Times suggested sticking your fingers up the cow's nostrils.

 

I suppose you could avoid trouble by being an urban flaneur rather than a country rambler, but avoiding the countryside altogether seems a bit defeatist.

 

The pics scattered throughout this post were taken in my own wanderings among cows.  I never felt scared, but maybe I should have.

 

This last pictures shows a bull seen while it and I were walking in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It looks, and indeed proved to be, harmless, but I know that doesn’t prove anything.

 

The online group/blog Killer Cows can be found here at https://killercows.co.uk

SHIFTING SANDS

 I was saddened, though hardly surprised, when authorities in California confirmed that the remains found last weekend by a couple of hikers on Mount Baldy were those of the actor Julian Sands.

 

He had set off on a solo hike on January 13, in severe weather conditions and hadn’t returned. 

 

Media reports seem to say Sands was both a walker and a climber, and although of course you can be both, I think people are generally one or the other.  Some of the paths on Mount Baldy look pretty terrifying to me but it does look like hard walking rather than full on mountaineering.

 

Conflating the climbing/walking dichotomy still further, Sands once said in an interview, ‘Climbing mountains, a lot of time people who don't climb mountains assume is about this great heroic sprint for the summit. And somehow this great ego-driven ambition. But actually it's the reverse. It's about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It's not so much a celebration of oneself but the eradication of one's self consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony hopefully with your environment.’

 

I suppose in the end we all become one with the environment, Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

 

THERE WAS A YOUNG WALKER

 My cyber pal Jane Freeman, a painter, miniaturist, author ofSmall Worlds and How to Make Them, a New Yorker who loves walking and language, sends me a limerick about walking

There was a young lady of Twickenham 
Whose shoes were too tight to walk quick in ’em.  

She came back from a walk 

Looking whiter than chalk 

And took ’em both off and was sick in ’em.

 

You might argue that this is in fact a limerick about shoe fetishism, which is OK with me, and in fact there’s another version of the limerick extant that substitutes boots for shoes.

 

The limerick is credited to Oliver Herford who I’d never heard of, but I looked him up and he’s an Anglo-American writer, artist, and illustrator who also did a nice stock in one liners: ‘Many are called but few get up.’ ‘Only the young die good,’ and many more.  This is one of his illustrations:

I also discover he was born, in 1860, in Sheffield, my home town, though he isn’t one of Sheffield’s more famous sons; that would be Sean Bean and Jarvis Cocker.

  

         In other news, fellow walker Travis Elborough sends me the image below, to be found on the back of buses in Dublin apparently.

‘Just because I’m a pedestrian doesn’t mean I’m a nobody.’  

  Did I ever say you were a nobody? 

 

 

THE SOUND OF ONE FOOT WALKING

I was digging through the bargain bin at Café Oto, the ‘home for creative new music that is outside the mainstream’ and came across an album which seemed to be just for me.  It was titled Walk…Stay…by Yan Jun.  I hadn’t heard of either the album or the artist but that title meant I had to buy it, so I did.  A fiver well spent.

 

Yan Jun, I now know, is a Chinese musician, poet and occasional ‘dancer’ who uses noise and field records, and has been known to say, ‘I wish I was a piece of field recording.’ Well, don’t we all?

 

Walk…Stay…has 8 untitled tracks, and I’m quoting from the album notes here, ‘Tracks 1, 3, 5, and 7 were Recorded by Yan Jun in Liulichang and Dongsi Beidajie, Beijing; Zhujiajiao, Shanghai; and Lashihai, Yunnan, walking with an Edirol R09 digital recorder in hand. Yan Jun suggests you listen to them while taking a walk.’The other tracks are ‘sound fragments ... Most of them are residue from editing. Some are recording disorders. Yan Jun suggests you listen to them while taking a break, sitting, lying down, or daydreaming.’

Well, the CD soundsmuch as you might expect: voices, street noise, distant unidentifiable drone and whines – but you know it’s really quite listenable. I can't find any pictures of Yan Jun walking, but here he is sitting at a desk making noise.

Sound walks now seem to be everywhere, they may even be a ‘thing.’  I understand the term was first used by members of the World Soundscape Project led by R. Murray Schafer  in Vancouver in the 70s.  The first one I went to was in Long Beach in 2007.  I still have the CD and even the map:

My memories of the event are understandably patchy, though I know I walked the whole area.  I don’t play the CD very often and I don’t recognize the names of most of the performers – though one I do recognize is Steve Roden, a visual and sound artist who lives, or at least used to live, in a dome in South Pasadena, actually a ‘bubble house’ designed by Wallace Neff.  

 

Roden, I understand, is a proponent of ‘lowercase music,’ a name that speaks eloquently for itself. I can’t say how much of a walker Roden is, though his blog, not updated recently, makes various references to walking and he quotes John Cage on elevator music ‘perhaps you did walk around inside of it (the music in the elevator): the architecturality of music is now a technical possibility and a poetic fact.’

 

Steve Roden

In more recent times I remember, during lockdown, an online performance by Carl Stone and a couple of other performers that involved ambient sounds recorded in Tokyo.  Of course, I can’t find it now.  But I do know that when Stone was first in Japan in 1988/9 he collected many hours of city sounds, that became the basis for his piece Kamiya Bar.  

 

I can't find it online but here's a piece of Stone's that I like very much - you could definitely listen to it while walking.

And do I know from Stone’s Instagram feed, that he does a lot of walking around Tokyo at night, and I understand he still takes his mobile recorder with him. And here is walking, though not in Tokyo and not at night.