BATTLE OF THE BULGE

 I don’t imagine this is the worst ever description in a novel of a woman’s walk, but it’ll do for now:

 

“You walk with a headlong rush, there is an electric energy in you, a rhythm that gushes from your mouth in a broken Bronx college-girl jargon, that tilts your narrow hips, that drives the blossoming female bulge of you, full and achingly free beneath the black skirt."

 

It’s from Evan Hunter’s Buddwing, a novel that in general I’m inclined to like, not least because it has a fair amount of walking in it, but even so I mean really.

 

Others must have liked the book too. It was made into a film as Mister Buddwing, starring James Garner (who hated the end result), with Jean Simmons, Suzanne Pleshette, Angela Lansbury and Katherine Ross.  The description above describes a character named Janet, played by Katharine Ross.

 

It has not been easy to find a good picture of Katherine Ross walking.  Here she is in Mister Buddwing with Garner:

 

and here she is shopping in Malibu (during Covid, I imagine) with her husband Sam Elliott:

 

And here she is some time ago by herself.  I’ll leave you to decide about the blossoming female bulge.

AIRY BUT NOT FAIRY

 Just so that the blog is current

herewith the new Nicholson tome, well its cover image anyway.

It's 'available' from today, though the official publication date is August 28th

Go on, you know you want to

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.