SEVEN HILL ARMY

I was walking in Sheffield again. It’s a good place to walk.  It has seven hills (no, not much like Rome), but they do keep you fit, if they don’t kill you.

That isn’t me in the photograph above, in fact I don’t know who it is.  I took the picture years ago while leaning out of the window of one of these towers, where a friend lived at the time.

Sheffield has always had ‘interesting’ architecture, little of it truly great, and very little of it genuinely Brutalist. There’s Park Hill of course, now desired by hipsters, 

and there used to be the terrifying, now demolished, Kelvin flats, 

But those towers always had a certain brut charm about them. I know they weren’t very popular in their day, and my friend was only living there because she was working for the council and they gave her the flat because it was hard to let.  But times change.

Today there’s all kinds of zesty new architecture all over the city, a great many towers, and as far as I can tell as an outsider, these aren’t very well loved either.

So I was wandering around looking at all the new, computer-generated, Lego buildings, and suddenly there they were – those very towers – which have been given cladding to hide their brutish exteriors.  

Purists would have sneered at this under any circumstances but I don’t think we quite feel the same way about cladding as we used to.

I also went to look at my parents’ old house: they died a long time ago. It didn’t appear to have changed a bit, which was in some ways the most surprising thing of all.

AND DID THOSE FEET?

‘Walking in my Cottage Garden, sudden I beheld

The Virgin Ololon & address’d her as a Daughter of Beulah’

Well, it could happen to anybody, couldn’t it?

Yes, I went to the blockbuster William Blake show at Tate Britain – that quotation from ‘Milton a Poem’ can be found on a wall of the exhibition.  

As I staggered out after 90 minutes or so, I’m pretty sure I was displaying marks of weakness, marks of woe. It seems I have a bit of blind spot for Blake.  I mean, yes some of the paintings and engravings are OK, some of the poetry is fine, it’s just is his personal mythology that really gets me down.  I mean I have enough trouble with the convolutions of basic Christian mythology, but when I’m confronted with Orc and Los and Urizen and Nobodaddy and indeed the Daughters of Beulah, and all the other stuff he just you know made up, I want to say enough already.

Clearly this is a minority view, my own failing no doubt, and one not shared by the throng packing into the Tate.

But really, did Albion have to be quite so effete?

And in the illustration below from ‘Paradise Lost,’ what exactly is Adam doing? Saying ‘Hello clouds, hello trees’? And what's with the jazz hands? One thing he’s not doing is paying attention:

And as for what Eve has in her mouth – well I think we know what it’s supposed to be, but I think we also know what it very much looks like.

Incidentally, should you ever find yourself in Manningtree, in Essex and you feel the need for the lineaments of gratified desire, you can always to walk up to Blake close: the walk will do you good.

STROLLING AROUND THE GROUND, FEELING AT HOME IS OPTIONAL

As you know, I like looking at the ground when I walk.  I also like looking at the sky – I’m versatile that way – but I’m working on a probably doomed project to be called Nicholson’s Guide to the Ground, and so the ground often takes precedence.

A few weeks back I was in Bristol staying in a mid-priced hotel, and as I checked in I was aware of some complicated road works right in front of the entrance, of which my hotel room gave a perfect view. There weren’t many signs of men at work when I checked in, but as darkness fell a crew arrived with trucks and lights and jack hammers and went at it, doing something inscrutable to the ground, something that involved but was not limited to, digging a hole.

They worked hard and loud but they did finish by ten o’ clock.  Perhaps they had to.  Next morning I hurried down to see exactly what they’d done to the ground.

They’d done this.  

I was disappointed.  I’d wanted more.

Here, on the other hand is some ground, actually on the bank of the River Avon, which I found much more to my taste. 

SORDID, DOMESTIC WALKING

S.J. Perelman was walking home one night in New York, and when he got to Washington Square Park he ran into poet E.E. Cummings, whom he knew a little.  

They walked along together and came to an apartment building on the edge of the square.  Cummings suddenly stopped and stared up at the building and said, ‘What scenes of sordid domesticity do you think are being played out behind those lighted windows?”

 Perelman protested, ‘Why, that’s my apartment.”

And Cummings said, “I know.’

WALKING WITH SHOES

“A man’s gotta live

A man’s gotta eat

A man’s gotta have shoes to walk out on the street.”

How true those lyrics are.  And it applies to women too. But you know, when I’m on my walking travels it’s strange just how many abandoned women’s shoes I see.  Mostly it’s just one, though not always

It leads to all kinds of speculation about the circumstances in which the shoe (or occasionally shoes) was abandoned: accidentally, deliberately, in high jinks, in disgust.  I just think about the Cinderalla–like possibilities, and take a photograph.

I’m often surprised how elegant some of the shoes look but I suppose that’s the whole thing – the fancier the shoes, the harder they are to walk in, the more uncomfortable they are and therefore more likely to be cast aside.

 When I lived in Los Angeles I happened to walk past the house that I knew belonged to Vince Vaughn on the day he was moving out.  There were a pair of his sneakers sitting out by the garbage can, and I did wonder whether I should take them and try to sell them on eBay.  But I didn’t – I thought that would have been sick.  If they’d belonged to an actress it might have been a different story.