THE PERFUMED SUBURB

 For my sins, which I would say are not especially heinous, and to plug my new book, which is hardly a sin at all in a writer, I’ve agreed to conduct a literary walking tour in Richmond, for Books on The Rise bookshop, though not for a week or three.

 

Knowing next to nothing about Richmond, I went down there at the weekend, with my trusty amanuensis, to do a reccie and hope for inspiration.  I knew there were some literary connections with Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Dickens and Pope, but that all seems a bit done.  And I had been there once and seen the obelisk in the deer park, but I accept that not everyone shares my intense love of obelisks.

And then something clicked.  I happen to remember that Sir Richard Francis Burton had gone to school in Richmond, and more than that, his archive was housed in the Orleans House Gallery, though I’d only ever seen it online.

And prize of the collection were two plaster casts, one of a Burton hand, one of a Burton foot.  I believe they were made by Albert Letchford in 1890, the year of Burton’s death.  Since Letchford painted Burton on his deathbed, I imagine he did the casts at the same time.

 

 Wouldn’t it be a fabulous climax to my walking tour, I thought, to any walking tour, to end up staring at a plaster cast of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s foot?

 

So we set off from Richmond station, down the main street, heading for Orleans House, over the river, through Marble Hill Park.

 

Of course I hoped to spot some curiosities along the way, and obviously I think walking is all about finding curiosities: as with all these things, the journey is in part the destination. The question is whether those things that I find curious and fascinating are the same as the things that would fascinate a group on a literary walk.

 

I mean, I was encouraged at the very start by a sign for a Nicholson’s pub, but I can see that not everybody would be.

There were a couple of gennels and I do love a good gennel, but I accept that not everybody does.

 

And I spotted another obelisk, this one on the bridge, with a stern warning:

A circuitous route also took us down Orleans Road, past some some fine, patinated garages

 

and there was a bit of post-modernity in a house designed by Evans and Shalev who also designed the Tate, St Ives.

Walking through the garden of Orleans House there were the sounds of an installation by Phoebe Boswell titled A Tree Says (In these Boughs The World Rustles) which was fine though obviously it didn’t please everybody.

As we entered the Orleans House Gallery there was no sign of Mr. Burton and his archive. An enquiry to the woman at the front desk confirmed that the collection was there but not on display, and although it could be seen on request, the gallery was in the process of changing curators so things were a bit chaotic and there’d be no chance of seeing it until the autumn.  

 

We wandered around the gallery which was fine and we did meet a guide in one of the rooms who said there’d once been a big portrait of Burton right there but the curator had taken it down.  I supposed this was the old, and soon to be departed, curator, but who knows what the new one will make of it? I don’t have enough information to say that Burton has been ‘cancelled’ but it certainly looked like he’d been sidelined.

 

         In any case my plan to conclude my literary walk with a sighting of Burton’s plaster foot was obviously not going to come off.  I need a Plan B.  I’m working on it.

 

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: