VOTING WITH MY FEET

 

I walked up the hill to the polling station yesterday to cast my vote and participate in the democratic process.

 

This wasn’t any kind of politically-motivated derive, but it was a nice day, I felt like a walk, and perhaps the greatest motivation of all, I thought it might be a bugger to park near the polling station.

 

The walk was fine, the polling station was fine, the polling clerks were very friendly and helpful and good humoured.  However, that was at 10 in the morning, and I imagine their humour might have faded somewhat by 10 at night.  And so I presented my photo ID, was given a ballot paper, put my cross in a box on the paper, and put the paper in a plastic box.  My civil duty was done.

 

And the parking?  

Well of course there was enough room to park a bus, several buses, several battle buses.

I walked down the hill again, to await the tsunami.

TRAILING IN HARLOW

One of the best reasons for spending a Saturday night in the Holiday Inn Express in Harlow is that come the next morning you can have a meander round the Market Square and the Broad Walk.

 

You could, and we sort of did, walk around it on Saturday night, but there was a certain amount of police activity which in an unknown town rather deters the casual boulevardier.  Come the morning at about 9 am the place was all but deserted, although by ten it was starting to get busy, though not in a ‘police activity’ kind of way, just people on their way to Gregg’s, Primark and to the many barbers, and on the way strolling past quite a few closed down establishments.

Such a walk, inescapably, covers part of the Harwich Sculpture Trail.  There are pieces of sculpture around the town, including a Henry Moore and a Rodin, though we by no means saw  them all.

 

The sculptures we saw were great; Meat Porters by Ralph Brown, 1959

 

Trigon, by Lynn Chadwick, 1961

 

Vertex, by Paul Mason 1979

 

But for a man with my specialist enthusiasms they all rather fell by the wayside compared with this fine obelisk, possibly a quasi or broken obelisk by Sir Frederick Gibberd, who was one of the chief begetters of Harlow New Town, as well as architect of the London Central Mosque and the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral.

 

We also got a look at the bus station, and at Terminus House, which I thought looked all right from the outside, though according to the BBC it’s a ‘Human Warehouse,’ formerly an office block, and now hot bed of drugs and sex crime: we had to take their word for it.

This is Sir Frederick Gibberd in life:

 

and in sculpture:

THE MOORE THE MERRIER

Here’s a psychogeographic walking project for some bright, fit, young soul who’s got a private income and lots of time on their hands.  Why not walk to, between, and around, every Henry Moore sculpture in the world?  Here’s a map from the Henry Moore Foundation of ‘works in public’ that gives some sense of the task.

 If you wanted to restrict yourself to just the ones in Britain it would be reasonably doable, though not a walk in the park.  

Japan, with a short side excursion to South Korea, would make a fine project too. 

 

Africa needn’t trouble you much, and Russia not at all. 

 

These thoughts are inspired, if that’s the word, by a visit to the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens, (also his house Hoglands) at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. There are 70 are acres of land with 21 major works by Moore scattered across them.  The sculptures are different sizes of course, but none of them is small, and some of them are absolutely massive. 

 

70 acres provides scope for plenty of walking.  The main area that visitors go to is called the sculpture lawn, then there’s a meadow and a large area designated as ‘sheep field,’ complete with sheep.  In the outer reaches of the site, the sculpture thins out considerably, and that’s the evidently way Moore wanted it.

Perhaps the best thing about the gardens is how few paths there are.  There are one or two, but mostly you’re free to walk where you like, make your own way, plan your own route across grassy expanses, and see the sculptures in any order you like, from any angle, from as near or as far as you like. You can even touch them, so long as you’re gentle and you don’t climb on them or their plinths.

 

I was left wondering how much of a walker Henry Moore was?  He grew up in Castleford in Yorkshire, which is near some very good walking territory, and I take it that if you own 70 acres you’re going to do some walking one way or another. 

 

There are certainly pictures of him walking.  In later years he used a walking stick but many do. We know that he liked his sculptures to be placed and seen in the great outdoors, and there are plenty of pictures of him posing with them in wide open spaces, and presumably he walked to them.

 

And I find myself wondering if he ever said to his wife Irina, ‘All right love, I’m just going for a walk round the garden,’ and then she wouldn’t see him for a few hours.  More research required.  I’m working on it.

WALKING WORDS

I do love a good concordance.

 

In Mike Bonsall’s majestic concordance of JG Ballard you’ll discover that the sage of Shepperton used the word walk and its derivatives well over 500 times in his fiction.  I’m somehow glad to know that.

 

Photo by Fay Godwin

Examples:

 

I was walking down Shepperton High Street on my way to the shops

 

The psychiatrist was walking towards the pool with a dry towel.

 

Do you mind walking me back to the elevator? It must sound rather paranoid

 

I actually saw a unicorn walking on the water, its hooves shod in gold.

 

And so on.

 

https://bonsall-books.co.uk/concordance/index.htm

 

 

And now I discover a website called The Flickering Lexicon, which has a concordance of Fall lyrics, mostly by Mark E Smith I assume.  Did he let anybody else get a word in?

 

The scores are as follows

walk - 60

walked - 11

walks - 40

walking  -48

 

there’s one walkin, one walkmans, and one walkman’d 

 

I do like ‘walkman’d’ – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it anywhere else.

 

Examples:

I was walking down the street when I tripped up on a discarded banana skin 

 

Watch out for the lorries as you walk in the gate

You don't see rabbits being walked down the street

They are walking with M&S bags, doing the jingle bell   

 

Hands up Billy you're walking in a crutch, yeah   

 

Photographer unknown, at least to me.

 

https://dannyno.org.uk/fall/w.htm

 

*

 

I’m not sure that either Ballard or Smith were great walkers but so what? The words are there, in the texts, in the literature.  That’s where it really matters.

 

JGB photo – Fay Godwin

 

Photographer unknown, at least to me.

 

Of course it’s not every author who merits a concordance (no, I’m not bitter, and yes I suppose you probably have to be dead) and even when they exist they may be done by individual titles rather than complete works, so I can’t give you the complete countdown for the whole of Virginia Woolf, but thanks to victorian-studies.net I can for Mrs Dallowayoften regarded as the crème de la crème of flaneuse fiction.  It has just 12 uses of walk, but 25 walking, 25 walked, 1 walks.

 

Example:

 

Yes, he remembered Regent's Park; the long straight walk; the little house where one bought air-balls to the left. 

 

I don’t really know what an air-ball is.  Could it be this kind of thing?

 

 

 

JUST ONE WALK

 

Over the weekend I was thinking about two very different walkers, the first a lesser known character name of Konstantin Schoen, a fireman from Manningtree in Essex who’s in the middle of doing a 400 mile walk around all the fire stations of Essex – there are 51 of them, apparently - raising money for Fire Fighters Charity.

 

He looks like a nice lad, though with a slightly unusual biography.  He’s only 26, he comes from Hessen in Germany, and  moved to London in 2017 then to Manningtree in 2023.  There can’t be many young Germans who do that.  

He was quoted in the Gazette News as saying ‘the only challenge I’ve had so far has been predicting what the weather is going to be like,’ and also that he’s been ‘knee deep in mud and water.’  Well yes, welcome to Essex, and good for you Konstantin, but you know there are worse walking problems, as poor Dr Michael Mosley found out.

 

I only knew Michael Mosley as the host of the radio programme ‘Just One Thing’ which at one level proposes an incredibly attractive idea,that we could all improve our lives and health by making just one small adjustment.  However, since the show ran to a hundred and some episodes it sounded as though he really wanted us to change just about everything.  

 

A few of these adjustments did in fact involve walking and/or changing the way we walked.  One suggestion was that you could burn more calories and boost your heart health by walking with Nordic poles, another advised walking backwards, another recommended going out for a walk after rainfall, another said go for a walk early in the morning.  Well OK, sure, but …

 

And then Michael Mosley went missing, having set off on a walk from Agios Nikolaos beach (spellings vary) heading for the port of Symi on the Greek island of the same name, although apparently he intended to take a bus part of the way.

 

However, a) he’d told his friends he wasn’t feeling well, b) the temperature was around 100 degrees F, and c) he got lost. This map may explain some of it:

 

As is now well known, he went missing and after a five day search he was found dead just yards away from the probable safety of the Agia Marina Resort. The autopsy concluded that he collapsed and died of heat stroke and exhaustion some two and a half hours after he’d set off. 

 

I think most of us who are even vaguely serious about walking sometimes feel unexpectedly exhausted when in mid-walk, and it does cross our minds that we might collapse and die in media res.  There are worse ways to go, I suppose if you're a walker.  But when you’re on a holiday island only yards from a bar, where presumably somebody might know first aid, well that just doesn’t seem right or fair, does it? Poor Michael Mosley. Poor Michael Mosley’s family.  Some things, we know, are unchangeable.