WALKING WITH WALKMEN

Much like old Bill Shakespeare, I have ‘small Latin and less Greek’ which may be why I only just learned a new word for walking.  It’s solivagant, as noun meaning somebody who wanders wandering alone, or as an adjective describe the act of wandering alone, as in ‘I say, that solivigant over there is obviously on a solivigant journey.’It comes from the Latin solivagus, and I suppose I have might have teased out the meaning if given enough time but it was still a new one on me.

Evidently quite a lot of people know the world perfectly well. It’s the name of a band, a website, various bloggers, a teen novel, the title in one form or another of at least two movies, and no doubt much more besides.

Titles, I know, are hard, but it seems to me that titling anything with a word that a lot of people have never heard, may be a problem.

But the French like to have problems. The Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language  (La Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française), is an institutions that tries to keep the French language pure and unsullied by non-French words, at least so far as official written and spoken communications are concerned.  Borrowed English words trouble them especially.

As far back as 2006 they eschewed the word Walkman, and suggesting baladeur, which in fact became a general term for a portable music device, baladeur being a French word up there with flâneur and promenadeur, meaning a walker. See, the English language sometimes embraces foreign words.  Of course Walkman was a trademark of Sony, which may have complicated matters.

But CELF is now fretting about the word podcast. This was already outlawed and changed to diffusion pour baladeur(broadcast for the walker) it has now become audio a la demande (audio on demand) which is OK but not very adventurous.  I’d have liked audio pour la solivigant but I always want too much.

THE ROAD TO HELL, GOOD INTENTIONS AND SO ON

Yeah right! And you know, I'm not sure that people answer 100% honestly when they answer a survey.

NOW, AND NOW AGAIN

I’ve said it before so it must be true – one of the best thing about walking is the way it sharpens up your perceptions – the more you walk the more you look the more you see.  Just basic rocket science.

And I suppose there’s an argument that if you go away from home you may in fact observe with less acuity, because you’re seeing things for the first time, and so you only notice what’s new and obvious.  Whereas if you stay in you own neighbourhood and walk variations of the same old route time after time, day after day, you end up looking at the same things with the different eyes.

And so the lockdown might be construed as some grand experiment in the nature of perception.

This being so, I’ve been walking while paying attention to three minor Nicholson obsessions: benches, arrows, and cars in gardens.  I’ve always looked at these things in various locations, and sometimes I’ve taken photographs of them, but right now I’m only looking at the ones within walking distance of home, although admittedly I’m also thinking about more distant examples I saw in the past.

This for example is a bench at a gibbon sanctuary somewhere up the Interstate 5 in California – pretty fancy:

but now I find myself looking at this one in the neighbourhood:

This is an arrow in the zoo in Tokyo:

and this is an arrow which has suddenly appeared on the road surface very close to where I live:

This is a car in a garden in Los Angeles:

and this is a car up the road by the (now open) garden centre:

And of course there is death with variations everywhere you go. These critters were shot dead in the desert somewhere near Yucca Valley:

and this is a swan on the shore of the River Stour.  I don’t know how it died, but it makes me realize that I never saw a dead swan before.

THE LONG WALK AWAY FROM HOME

As we celebrate hundred year old Captain, now Colonel, Tom Moore for his walking and charity fund raising efforts – 100 laps of his 82 foot garden, 30 million quid, do let’s, spare a thought for the heroic failure of Martin Echegaray Davies, a man who two years ago set off walking from to Patagonia to Alaska.  

         It was intended to be a walk of just under 19,000 miles, but after he’d completed 14,287 of them he arrived at the border between North Dakota and Canada, where Canadian officials, responding to Covid-19 fears, told him his travel was non-essential, and so they wouldn’t let him.

Having sat in a motel for a week, weighing his options, he decided to go back home, and managed to get on a flight organized by the Argentinian government.

There are two unusual aspects to Davies’ walk as far as I’m concerned.  First that he took a trolley with him, containing camping equipment, weighing 140 kilogrammes, and flying Welsh and Argentinian flags, and secondly, that along the way he took 1,718 selfies with people he met along the way. He has a Facebook page where these are displayed.

He said he didn’t think he was likely ever to complete the walk, which of course reminds us of the great Sebastian Snow who planned to walk a similar route (though without trolley or selfies) from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska, but gave up when he reached Panama City.  He was sick and tired and he’d simply had enough.  That sometimes happens to walkers, you know.

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: