WALK, DON'T WALK

 

A headline in yesterday’s Sunday Times asks ‘Do I really need to take 10,000 steps a day?’

 

Now, we know that journalists don’t usually write their own headlines, but surely somebody at the Times has heard of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines which states, ‘Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.’

 

In this case you might also answer, ‘No of course it doesn’t ya bloody fool. That whole 10,000 steps a day thing was a gimmick put out by Japanese pedometer company Tamasa Tokei Keiki trying to flog its wares around the time of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.’

 

To be fair the article does acknowledge this, while not quite accepting what any ‘fule kno’ that you should walk the way you want to walk and not let some silly bugger tell you you’re doing it all wrong.

 

The very best thing about the 1964 Olympics was that it gave rise to the 1966 movie Walk, Don’t Run, a rom-com avant la lettre, starring Cary Grant with a slightly torturous McGuffin about flat-sharing in Tokyo and featuring an American Olympian played by Jim Hutton, an actor I’ve never seen in any other movie although apparently he did a lot of work including The Green Berets) .  

 

Because it’s a comedy they obviously couldn’t make the Jim Hutton character a serious athlete so they made him a contestant in the most absurd event they could think of – the 50 kilometre walk, which is a lot of steps.

 

Hilarity ensued.

In the interests of you history might like to know that the real 1964 Olympics 50 kilometer walk was won by Abdon Pamich of Italy who clocked in at 4 hours, 11 minutes, 12.4 seconds.  This is him:

PERMITTED WASTED WALKING

 

You’ll no doubt be wanting to hear more about my flaneuring in Swansea, and no, that isn’t me in the picture above, though I do like his style.  He was just one of the walkers I saw.

 There was a lot of interesting architecture, the old rubbing shoulders with the new, as TV documentarians sometimes used to say.

 

I do love metal buildings of any kind but a chapel or in the two cases below, a former chapel, really floats my  boat.  I might have thought this was corrugated iron but I'm told that in fact it's galvanised steel. 

I always wonder what it must be like being inside in the rain.  Reassuring or scary?  And of course there’s no shortage of rain in Wales, as I discovered.

On a rainy Saturday morning it seemed necessary to get out there and not be a fair-weather drifter.  So first there was this fine structure supporting a road bridge, not far from Harry Secombe Court (honestly).

And then, and this is the beauty part, there was the Danygraig Cemetery with its many, many obelisks.  Below is just a small sample.

You know, flaneurship may have a few things to offer that are more fun and frolicsome that wandering around a cemetery in the rain looking at obelisks, but not so very many, I think.

 

Oh yes, and probably you knew this already; but those Welsh have a different word for everything:

BARDIC WALKING

 Need I say that, being of sound mind, I haven’t read Prince Harry’s Spare, but an article in the New Yorker by Parul Sehgal about the nature of narrative quotes a passage from the book that runs, ‘I considered all of the previous challenging walks of my life – the North Pole, the Army exercises, following Mummy’s coffin to the grave – and while the memories were painful, they also provided continuity, structure, a kind of narrative spine that I’d never suspected.  Life was one long walk.’  Yeah, metaphors are hard.

 

Elsewhere, at Phillips in London, Damien Hirst has a new exhibition titled Where the Land Meets the Sea, yeah, titles are hard too, but maybe it’s an allusion to Clare Leighton:

 

The Hirst exhibition consists of Coast Paintings, Sea Paintings, and Seascapes,and in the exhibition notes Hirst says, ‘Where the Land Meets the Sea is an exploration inspired by the seaside in gray British winters; I grew up in Leeds in West Yorkshire and often holidayed in Scarborough, Filey, Whitby, where Count Dracula landed, Robin Hood’s Bay, and Skegness. I have always spent a lot of time walking and thinking on the beach and watching the sea, witnessing the powerful action of the crashing waves in winter. It gives me a feeling of unimportance and vastness and inevitability, that this whole world and everything in it will eventually wear out to nothing.’

I’m not sure I ever pictured Hirst walking on the beach, walking into the Groucho Club sure,

 but there’s no argument about the general principle, and as a Yorkshire lad from Sheffield I’ve had similar holiday experiences walking in two of those places:  Filey and Skegness, though not the others.  

 

This is me and my mum on the beach at Lytham St Annes – I think she thought Blackpool was a bit common. The land is very definitely meeting the sea, and admittedly neither of us is walking, but we definitely walked to get there.

 

And then having recently been in Swansea, where Dylan Thomas is ubiquitous, 

 

I got back and dug out one of his poems titled ‘Poem In October’ which contains the lines

 

‘And I rose in a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days’

 

Sounds a bit like a day at the seaside.  And later in the same poem: 

‘And I saw in the turning, so clearly, a child's forgotten mornings
When he walked with his mother through the parables of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels.’

 

Now obviously I’m not saying that only artists and poets should be allowed to write about walking but maybe princes and/or their ghost writers should hold back.

 

 

 

 

MOVING OUR FEET, LESS EXCITED BY TRAVEL

 I was taught (actually the word used was ‘supervised’) at university by J.H. Prynne, where he was known universally as Jeremy, and I often used to see him walking across Caius Court where he had his study.  In my memory I see him with a black gown flapping behind him but that may a distortion.

 

At other times, various Chinese men in Mao suits could also be seen walking through the court.  The master of the college was Joseph Needham, a Sinologist among other things, and a "friend" of Mao, with all the difficulties and contradictions that implies.  Here are Needham and Mao.

 

Prynne was a friend of Needham, and he’s spent a fair amount of time in China, and in his interview with the Paris Review he professes himself to be a fan of Mao’s 1937 essay ‘On Contradiction.’  Sample sentence, "But the struggle of opposites is ceaseless, it goes on both when the opposites are coexisting and when they are transforming themselves into each other, and becomes especially conspicuous when they are transforming themselves into one another."

 

Also to be seen in the college, not walking but being pushed (as I remember it, though I could be wrong about that too and the chair may already have been motorized), was a poor afflicted soul in a wheelchair, and people would say, ‘That’s the most brilliant man in England.’  At the time we were inclined to be skeptical but it was, of course, Stephen Hawking.

These things come to mind, obliquely, because I’ve been reading an essay by Bill Symes titled “Subject/object Amphiboly in (mostly) English Poetry from Gray to Prynne.”  On the off chance that you’re not familiar with the term amphiboly, I can tell you it may be defined as “verbal ambiguity, especially from uncertainty of the grammatical construction.” Wikipedia offers an example from Ray Davies. “I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola.”

 

I don’t read a lot of academic essays about poetry but this seems a pretty good one, jumping off from Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity but it also references poetry and poets I’m actually familiar with, some of them who mention walking.

 

There’s a reference to Gary Snyder’s poem “A Walk” – discussed elsewhere in this blog, and also to Frank O’Hara – who I know best as the author of Standing Still and Walking in New York.

 

The O’Hara poem is “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems.

 

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun


and have a hamburger and a malted and buy


an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days 

 

This is the kind of poem that makes me think I understand and love poetry but then we come to Prynne, whose work I love without ever claiming to understand, specifically his poem “A Gold Ring Called Reluctance,” from Kitchen Poems, the first work of his I ever read or bought.  To before fair this is probably Prynne for beginners, and I love the opening:

As you drag your feet or simply being
Tired, the ground is suddenly interesting;
Not as metaphysic but the grave maybe
That area which claims its place like
A shoe.

 

After that it gets trickier. Here is a shoe on the ground – I think it may have something to do with what I think Prynne might have had it mind.  

And here is my one piece of Prynne-iana, a typed thank you note. He didn’t just dole out signatures in those days, at least not to the likes of me.

NICHOLSON ON NICHOLSONS

Let us again consider the concept of the Nicholson – which as regular readers will know is defined as a manmade object, preferably a single vertical – a street lamp, a telegraph pole, a fence post - that has been taken over by natural growth, so that a plant is using the manmade object as a climbing frame and support.

This is not my invention (obviously), but I came up with the name, you know the way Adam came up with names in the Garden of Eden

 

Some things, once you start looking, you see them everywhere, but in my experience this isn’t true of the Nicholson. As I walk through the world looking for them they’re just uncommon enough to be interesting but not so uncommon as to be frustrating.

 

Of course some Nicholsons are purer than others.  In some cases a plant may climb a manmade post and then get tangled up in nature, like these below, but I think they still fit the definition.  Purity isn’t everything.

 

And this has become one of my very favourite Nicholsons – greenery climbing up a graveyard obelisk – two of my milder obsessions combined.

Below I think is definitely a Nicholson because the ivy (or whatever) is climbing up the fence posts but then it’s also climbing along chain link which isn’t quite as impressive as climbing a single upright, but you can’t have everything.

 

And I would love this to count as a Nicholson: greenery climbing up a bridge, which is certainly a manmade object - but on balance I’m really not sure it fits the bill.

 

 

And here for your viewing pleasure is a photograph of Nicholson photographing some Nicholsons.

 

Photo by Caroline Gannon.