TIME OF THE SIGNS

I enjoy a good sign while I’m walking. Who doesn’t?  They can be informative, decorative, perplexing, absurd, and no doubt many other things too.

 

Suppose you were walking in Myland (it’s part of Colchester) and you saw this one ‘Myland Welcomes Careful Drivers,’ 

 

Would you think, 

a)   that they don’t welcome careful walkers?

b) that you can walk as carelessly as you like, and you’re still welcome?

Or would you have better things to think about?

 

Signs with missing letters are always fun and in this case there’s no doubt what the sign means, but it does make me wonder how many letters a sign can lose before it becomes utterly incomprehensible.

 

That temporary bus stop sign had obviously seen a lot of use but nearby was this absolutely pristine sign telling me that the crossing was out of use.  I suppose time will take its toll.

Not so far away was this, a signal, rather than a sign.

 

And here’s a sign from the company in charge of the discarded lights, temporary bus stops and out of order crossings, and no doubt much else:

I didn’t even know there was any such thing as the ‘Traffic Industry.’  ‘What you doing these days Bob?’ ‘Oh I’m working in the Traffic Industry, you know, supporting it.’

 

Of course it’s always good for a walker to be warned when the footpath (or indeed footway) ahead is closed:

 but it’s a little disappointing when you get there and find it’s not so much closed as very slightly diverted:

 

Now, if you’re looking for the ‘site compound’, it’s no doubt very useful to have a sign directing you there, though this one does seem to be up in the sky.

 

As for parking regulations – forget about it:

 

And finally in the Asda car park, at the end of my walk, there was a sign telling me to have a safe journey, which I’d already had, but no doubt there are other journeys ahead, which I hope will be safe, and maybe signs will play their part.

BRIGHTER THAN DORIS DAY? WELL NO, DON'T BE RIDICULOUS, HOW COULD IT BE?

 So off we went for a walk at the seaside, in Brightlingsea.  I’d never been there before.  When I was doing an MA in Modern European Drama at Essex University, thereby guaranteeing my unemployability, I used to see many buses with Brightlingsea on their destination boards, but I never got on one of them.  So off we went.

 

It was a hot Sunday afternoon.  There were a lot of people walking, some more stylishly than others.  

Now I’m no body fascist, much less a fat-shamer, but I mean, really some things are just better covered up.

 It’s not only the groynes you need warning against.

There were some top quality beach huts, this one with a skull and crossbones.  Everything’s better with a skull, IMHO:

 

And on the beach we found a Henry-Moore style rock.  I’ve noticed before that on the beaches of Britain you used to find endless rocks and stones with holes going right through them.  These days there are a lot fewer.  The obvious reason is that people pick up the ones with holes and take then home and put a string through them and hang them up, but no doubt there are other possible explanations.  This one stands, or I suppose reclines, alone without need of string:

In the town there was a marker for the ‘1953 surge,’ part of the devastating East Anglian floods.

 

And there was a place to put your not quite extinguished cigarettes, which looked to me as though there had been a certain amount of after-the-fact combustion.  

 

Will it surprise you to learn that this was at the fire station?

 

And we walked in The Lozenge – a ‘nature area … bringing you closer to nature, 9am till dusk March to end of November.’

 

You know how I like maps, this one in dappled sunlight, with a teasel, was the business – mapping the bench and the bin; the important stuff:

 

The best thing about the Lozenge: me and the inamorata were the only ones there.  I suppose some people wanted to be closer to the food trucks than to nature.  And here was a gentle reminder to make up your bloody mind about what you want before you get to the front of the queue.

 

WHITE WALKING

I went to London to see my doctor who told me I was still alive, which seemed like good news.  So the next day I went for a walk in and around White City, with my boon companion Ashley, flaneur of that parish, more or less. The temperature and the humidity were punishing so we didn’t walk as far or with as much zest as we might have in other circumstances.

Reader, it felt, at first, like walking in the future.  There were shiny, fresh-out–of-the-box buildings with no indication of what went on inside them.  There was free wi-fi outdoors in public spaces that had lots of places to sit. There were chain restaurants I’d never heard of before - Potager and Dear Grace – and the latter had set up a giant screen outside for those who wanted to watch the cricket.  On a different day that would have been me.

 

In fact there were some buildings I could tell the purpose of; a mighty concentration of places where people lived, developments with names like White City Living, Cascade Apartments, Belvedere Row and the improbable Bowery Apartments.  These mostly looked pretty good architecturally, and completely unaffordable.

 

I’d been to White City once or twice in the past, when I’d had some business or other at the BBC TV Centre. The BBC building remains, but is also converted into swanky flats, though there’s still a naked golden statue of Helios at the centre of the garden.  If the sun god isn’t permanent, what is?

 

 

Although this White City walk was just a meander, there was a general plan to go and look at (and walk in) the Japanese Garden in Hammersmith Park – which dates from 1910, and was originally part of the Japan-British Exhibition held to strengthen the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.  It’s a long story which I won’t tell here, though it's worth noting that White City was then part of Shepherd's Bush, which in many ways it still is.

  

Photographs from the time show it to have been a wild and complex affair, and it must have required a huge amount of work for what was a very short-lived exhibition. 

 

There were two gardens at the exhibition, The Garden of Peace and the Garden of the Floating Isle. Now there’s only one: ‘The Garden of Peace was converted into a more traditional British public park named “Hammersmith Park”’ – I’m quoting here from the Japanese Garden Society. 

 

I’m surprised, and pleased, by how many Japanese gardens there are in Britain - at least thirty open to the public – from Lowther Castle to the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, from Dartington Hall to the National Botanic Garden of Wales, and so on. I confess I haven’t walked in all that many of these. 

 

I suppose this prevalence of Japanese gardens may possibly be because the features of a Japanese garden are easy to identify and easy to replicate:  like these lanterns in Hammersmith Park, sponsored by various Japanese corporate interests.

 

There is also a type of Japanese garden called (at least by English speakers) a ‘stroll garden.’ just right for walkers, or meanderers, like me.  This one’s in Kew.

 

In the Japanese Garden in Hammersmith Park on the day I was there, a few homeless people were setting up camp, and a few young women in bikinis were sunbathing but I thought it best not to photograph them.

 

Adjacent to, or possibly part of, the Hammersmith Park is something called the Wood Crescent Playground: you know, for the kids.

 

And as we walked around, a moment came when I looked at the mound in the playground (above) and it reminded me powerfully of this other mound in the Jencks Garden of Cosmic Speculation, near Dumfries, (below).

Possibly the heat was getting to me.

 

 

 

 

EDDIE AND ME

 More than half a lifetime ago, I was (for want of a better term) a security guard at the Hayward Gallery for their Thirties exhibition, and one of the items I had to guard was this head of Sir Edwin Lutyens. (Sometimes it’s referred to as a bust.)

 

I might just about have heard the name Lutyens before I worked at the Hayward, but only just.  Nevertheless I loved that head: how could you not?  And to be fair it didn’t need much guarding.  

 

My job was by no means a walking job but we weren’t allowed to sit down and so we paced up and down the galleries hour after hour, day after day, as a deterrent.

 

Walking in galleries can be hard work even when you’re keen to see the exhibition; walking back and forth when you’re just a deterrent is much harder.

 

I gather that the head belongs to the Victoria and Albert Museum and it incorporates Lutyens’ design for the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, now the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

 

And then last week I was walking round the Victoria and Albert as a punter not a security guard, there to see the Tropical Modernism exhibition, and there was old man Lutyens again.  It felt like meeting an old friend.

Judge for yourself whether it's a good likeness.

 

 

DRIFTING WITH WITH DEAKIN

 

I’ve been reading Iain Sinclair’s Pariah Genius, his ‘psychobiography’ – partly fictionalized - of John Deakin, in which he ‘follows in the footsteps of the famed Soho photographer. kept man, primitive painter and secret witness.’  I’m quoting from the blub there as you probably guessed.

 

The writing’s great of course – it’s by Iain Sinclair, but it’s not a pacey read.  The problem I personally may have with it, is that I’m not all that fascinated by the gilded seamy glamour of Soho, the much recorded nexus of Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, Daniel Farson, Muriel Belcher, the Colony Club, the French House, all the booze and the gay sex with dodgy geezers, some of them in scarily sharp suits. And it seems to me that Sinclair isn’t entirely fascinated either, though I’m sure both he and I have done our miles pounding the streets of Soho.

 

The book picks up a lot of energy when Deakin, because of Bacon, becomes an habitué of Limehouse where he ‘walked.  Alone. Uncommissioned. His patrons, the indulgent editors, had no part in this.’ The section is titled ‘Deakin as Psychogeographer,’ and Limehouse is Sinclair territory too - see Ludheat - and so he can walk the same streets as Deacon, and many others.  Some of Deakin’s archive can be seen on Instagram. 

Sinclair mentions the photographer and ‘compulsive pedestrian’ Harry Diamond, who sometimes modeled for Lucian Freud. Sinclair writes, ‘The lengthy sessions Freud demanded interrupted his (Harry D’s) eternal stamping across London. … Harry had no use for taxis.  He knew that blisters were the surest route to Enlightenment.’   Somebody, not me, should have that tattooed across their instep. This is a self-portrait of Harry Diamond in Brick Lane in 1973.

 

There is no doubt a mighty book to be written about photographers who walk and walkers who take photographs, though how would the poor author ever be able to afford to pay for the use of the images?  We might quote Julio Cortazar, as Sinclair does, ‘But in all the ways when one is walking about with a camera, one has almost a duty to be attentive, to not that lose that abrupt and happy rebound of sun’s rays off an old stone.’  

         I don’t understand why it’s almost  a duty rather than entirely a duty, but maybe it loses something in the translation.