THE BEARD AND I

A good few years back I interviewed Peter Beard ‘on stage’ in a bookshop in New York.  (Yes, yes, my life used to be far more glamorous than it is now). Beard was absolutely the easiest man to interview.  Any question, whether about Africa, or Andy Warhol, Karen Blixen or the elephant that gored him, produced a long, articulate and (naturally) highly opinionated answer.  I could just have held up flash cards.  I now realize I should have asked him about walking.

I didn’t walk with Beard but I often walked in SoHo and went into his gallery-cum-archive: The Time is Always Now.

But he was obviously something of a walker.  He was known to his friends as Walkabout for his tendency to wander off on adventures.

And when he wandered off from his home in Montauk a little while ago, and we know that wandering is a symptom of dementia, a number of us thought he might have decided to end it all by walking into the sea – a very brave and elegant way to go.  But in fact no, he walked into the woods, where he was found dead not so very much later, by a hunter.

But the thing I remember best about my Beard ‘conversation’ was when he said he’d been into a toy store in Manhattan, probably Toys-R-Us which was still in business at the time, and tried to find a toy animal that in any way resembled a real animal.  He had of course failed to find one because all the toy animals were cute or cuddly or anthropomorphic.  This made him very angry.  And as the years have gone by I’ve come more and more to think that his anger was absolutely justified.  And if an elephant gores well, that’s exactly the kind of occupational hazard an animal lover has to expect.

          This is him, recently gored:

WHITE SANDMAN

As we try to fill our days by tidying up our lives, I was digging through the archive and I found this old picture of me, not looking my very cutest, at White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

I was walking there, as you do, and I found the thing that I’m holding, which I think is a piece of some experimental aircraft or rocket or missile, found among the dunes, and I only picked up for the photo op, although sometimes I wish I’d put it in my back checked luggage and brought it home to England.

After I’d done my walk, I called in at the Ranger Station to look at the postcards and souvenirs, and I said, casually, to the ranger behind the desk that I’d seen bits of aereonautical debris among the dunes, and the ranger said sternly, ‘Whatever you do don’t pick them up.’  He didn’t say why, but I'm assuming it was because the debris had all kinds of weird and dangerous chemicals on it.

I said nothing but I’m still glad I got the picture.  I got this one too.  It's arty.  You can take the man out of the Volkswagen, but you can't take the Volkswagen out of the man.

DRIFTING STILL

Just so you know, I’m keeping on walking – in accordance with government guidelines, naturally.  There are lots of cats and birds just walking in the road – because there’s so little traffic.  There is also an increase in road kill – not cats, but pigeons, plus the occasional rabbit and hedgehog.

But how about this for a surprise – growing up in the road between the tarmac and the kerb – garlic!!  Or so I thought.  Greener people than me have suggested it's probably chives, and they're surely right.  But it does smell very garlicy.

So I don't know if it’s some wild variety or an escapee from somebody’s garden.  It smells great, and in general I believe in foraging but somehow gutter garlic or even gutter chives seems a bit unappealing.  Call me overdelicate.
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And I talked to my neighbor a couple of days later - she tells me they're all escapees from her front garden - and she doesn't like the taste of chives!!

AWAY FROM THE RABBLE IN WRABNESS

The weekend before the start of the lockdown (aka Final Countdown of possibly The Big Gundown) we walked from Wrabness to Manningtree, part of the Essex Way, though we strayed from that route from time to time.  We knew that we'd strayed, we just didn't know how to get back on it.

There was plenty of social isolating going on, though dogs still have to be walked, children too, apparently.

There was all kinds of cool stuff; flotsam and/or jetsam

and a shipwreck

And of course things were already getting a bit frantic in the supermarkets, but there on the beach at Wrabness you could pick up an oyster or two and take it home for domestic enjoyment. What’s a good walk without a bit of foraging?  And the thing about foraging is – you don’t have to stand in a queue.

The guys in the pub at Mistley were obviously a bit sour:

And it took a surprisingly long time – four hours to walk 6 and a half miles. But once home the oysters did the job they were supposed to do.

THE DOG WALKER

In these troubled, self-quarantined times, reading a book seems like a very good idea, and although War and Peace beckons, there’s also an urge to dig out something that you haven’t looked at in a good many years.  And so I’ve found myself rereading The Dog Chairman, a collection of writings, some of them very short indeed, by Robert Robinson.  It’s a book I used to keep in my loo.

Robinson doesn’t get much respect these days.  If people remember him at all it’s likely to be because of his bad comb-over (are there any good comb-overs) and his tendency to be a clever dick, on programmes such as Brain of Britain, Stop the Week, and Call My Bluff.  He was also anything but inimitable, and he has been much imitated by everyone from the Not the Nine O' Clock news mob, to Fry and Laurie (seen at the top of the post) to Mitchell and Webb.  But I like his book a lot.

Back in the day I used occasionally to see him walking in the streets around Broadcasting House, and he was always wearing a hat, whether to hide the comb over or because he worried that the wind might ruin his comb over.

Anyway there’s a piece in The Dog Chairman titled ‘Watch Your Step’ – it’s a nice bit of people watching, observing how people walk.  ‘Top end of the social scale, people walk as though they aren’t walking anywhere in particular, bottom end of the scale, people walk as though they only had one destination.  Bottom end, people walk as though the movement were being rented rather than outright owned, top-end walks are always freehold.’  I think this is more or less true and he continues, ‘You can no more disguise your walk than your handwriting: I knew a ballet critic who’d been a policeman, and he always walked up the aisle at Covent Garden as though he were going to take Giselle’s name and address.’

         I like that.  But I do wonder who the policeman turned ballet critic was. How many can there be. Any ideas?  Or maybe just made it up.