WALKING WITH ADDITIONS

 

A note comes over the transom from Jane Freeman, one of my regular correspondents, also walker and top artist (she did some extraordinary pictures inspired by Jane Eyre) like this, 

 

“Thank you, Mr. Rochester, for your great kindness. I am strangely glad to get back again to you: and wherever you are is my home—my only home.” 

I walked on so fast that even he could hardly have overtaken me had he tried.

 

Jane reminds me about William Burroughs' ‘psychogeographic practice’ described as ‘Walking on Colours.’

Let Old Bill explain,“Pick out all the reds on a street, focusing only on red objects–brick, lights, sweaters, signs. Shift to green, blue, orange, yellow. Notice how the colors begin to stand out more sharply of their own accord. I was walking on yellow when I saw a yellow amphibious jeep near the corner of 94th Street and Central Park West. It was called the Thing. This reminded me of the Thing I knew in Mexico. He was nearly seven feet tall and had played the Thing in a horror movie of the same name, and everybody called him the Thing, though his name was James Arness.  I hadn’t thought about the Thing in twenty years, and would not have thought about him except walking on yellow at that particular moment.”  This is James Arness:

 

(The Thing of course is a Volkswagen Type 181, and if you think that sucker is amphibious, well good luck)

         

A lot the time I think I’m ‘over’ Burroughs, but then I reread something like that I think I’m not so over him after all. That passage is from “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars” and appears in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays, 1985.  This is a man with an actual Burroughs adding machine:

I’ve never done the walking on colours thing and I suppose I’m unlikely to, being red/green colour blind.  I’d be following what I thought was a red fire engine and then I’d suddenly realize, or somebody would tell me, I was actually following a green bus.  I exaggerate, but only a little.

 

Admittedly blue and yellow should be less of a problem.

WHEREAS I ALWAYS THOUGHT THAT WOULD BE THE BEST PART

 

WALKING WITH ARCHITECTURE (AND CARS)

 And so we went to Frinton on Sea, in Essex, and not for the first time.

Like many people I usually go there to walk around and stare at the modernist architecture in the Frinton Park Estate and although we certainly did do that, I thought I needed a new angle, or at least variation on an old one.  So I continued my comparatively recent obsession with circular windows, of which there was no shortage. 

 

That was fine, but then I noticed there were also quite a few cool old cars on the street, which I hadn’t been expecting.

 

It’s an odd thing isn’t it, any walk, every walk, is improved by the presence of interesting or curious architecture and any street is improved by the presence of cool old cars

 

This is why American Street Photographers of the 1960s and 70s, most of them walkers by necessities, had life so easy in one sense.  Point your camera towards a mid of mine-period architecture or even a garage, and include a car with fins, and it’s hard to go wrong.

 

Winogrand

Maier

But times change, I find modern architecture, whether good or bad, infinitely fascinating, whereas modern cars rarely look like anything at all.  And it must be said that in Frinton I never found a cool car and a cool piece of architecture in the same frame, unless a marquee counts as architecture.

 

 And I see there’s also a new book forthcoming from the modernist titled A Time ⋅ A Place, a book in which 'every "Car of the Year" (1964-1982) is paired with a building completed in the same year' - photographed by Daniel Hopkinson, researched and written by John Piercy Holroyd.  

 

OMG, I can barely imagine the amount of work that went into that and I certainly didn’t put that amount of work into a day trip to Frinton, obviously.

 

There used to be a trope that said ‘Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the Incontinent’ a sneer directed at old and weak-bladdered Essex holidaymakers.  But insult or not, I found Frinton to be very well supplied with toilets, and just as important, very well signposted.

 

And the architecture of the main toilet on the sea front is understatedly epic – though you do have to pay 20 pence to get in there.  A small price to pay.

TO BE A WALKING PILGRIM

 Some folks walk the Camino de Santiago:

Some folks walk the Great Wall of China:

Some folks head for the deep north, like our pal Basho:

Me, I went to Walthamstow and walked from the tube station to see the Banksy mural on the side of Bonners Fish Bar (no apostrophe).  It looked just like this – protective Perspex in place.

The shop was closed, and obviously had been for a while, perhaps for an annual summer holiday, and a great pile of mail had been pushed through the letterbox and was lying all over the floor.

 

It was a great missed commercial opportunity, I’d have thought – ‘Get your Banksy chip butty right here!’

 

But Banksy wasn’t the only artist whose work could be seen as you walked the streets of Walthamstow.  Here for example is the Walthamstow Sculpture Park, in somebody’s front window:

 

And here’s whatever this is:

Sometimes it feels good to be a pilgrim.

THE PERFUMED CASCADE

 

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) may remember that about a year ago I agreed to lead a literary walk based in Richmond, and I had the idea of doing a route that took in the school where Sir Richard Francis Burton was educated (or at least taught), and ended at the Orleans House Gallery which houses the Burton Collection, an archive which among other gems contains plaster casts of one of Burton’s hands, and one of his feet – the left in both cases.  I thought it would be a fitting climax to a walk if we ended up staring at a plaster cast of someone’s foot.  The case looks like this on the Orleans House website.

 

The idea didn’t come off because although the Burton Collection could, and can, be seen on request, the gallery at that time, they told me, was in the process of changing curators so things were ‘a bit chaotic’ and there’d be no chance of seeing it for a few months.  So I led a different walk.

 

For some of us, Burton is a fascinating though paradoxical and contested figure, on the one hand an intrepid explorer, a proto-anthropologist and sexologist; on the other a man with some less than enlightened views on race and sex. I couldn’t have said that Burton had been ‘cancelled’ by Orleans House, but it certainly seemed he’d been sidelined.

 

Still, thanks to the good people involved with the Sir Richard Francis Burton Society, chiefly Martin Norris, a small group of us went into the collection recently and we were allowed an hour to look at, though not touch, items from the collection. These included, among other things, writing implements, a sword, photograph albums, a cigar case and a fez.

 

And there, sure enough, were the casts of Burton’s hand and foot.  I took a photo - not a very good one because of the overhead lighting and all reflections - but at least it proves I was actually there.

 

I’m still working out how much of a walker Burton was, but one of the great things about our archive visit was a chance to look at some of Burton’s shoes. I’m sure you can tell a lot by looking at a dead man’s shoes.  I recall being horrified as a kid when my grandfather died and various male relatives started trying on his shoes to see if they fitted and whether they could use them. Now it seems a perfectly reasonable and rather touching thing to do.  There was definitely no trying on of Burton’s footwear, obviously.

There were fencing shoes, slippers, a wooden clog, some very fine boots. The patterns of wear were interesting, at least one pair looked as though it might have been reheeled.

 

It was a great afternoon.  The visit wasn’t exactly a walking expedition but we did walk to Orleans House from the pub where we met near Twickenham  station, and on the way we saw a pair of marble buttocks peeping out at us over a wall and behind railings. So on the way back we took a closer look.

 

The buttocks belong to one of a number of Carrera marble statues, the Oceanides, part of the York House Cascade, in York House Gardens. 

Like Burton himself these do have a convoluted history. As I understand it, they were carved somewhere near the turn of the 19^th to the 20^th century by Oscar Spalmach, and they passed through the hands of Whitaker Wright, who intended to use them at his estate in Surrey. However, in 1904 Wright was found guilty of fraud, and committed suicide by swallowing cyanide in an anteroom of the Royal Courts of Justice. 

 

York House belonged to Sir Ratanji Tata, described by some sources as ‘an Indian merchant prince’ and he bought the statues in 1909, still in packing cases, to adorn his property.  Tata died in 1918, and when his wife returned to India she sold York House to Twickenham Urban District Council for use as municipal offices, and  the statues were part of the deal.  After many decades of neglect and vandalism the statues were eventually saved and restored.

 

And there they are today, naked, shameless, uncancelled.  Sir Richard Francis Burton would surely have loved them.  The Oceanides – not a pair of shoes between them.