BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE

 

Does everybody but me know the term ‘backshot’? I took the photograph below, in 

London, somewhere near Limehouse, thinking it was the name of a ‘street artist,’ and I 

suppose it may be, but I now understand it’s also the word for a sexual practice, not an 

especially unfamiliar one, but I had no idea there was a word for it.  Ah London – always an 

education.

Yes I was back in London last week, after (OMG!!!) a 9 month absence.  The best thing I can say is that apart from people wearing masks it didn’t look or feel very different from pre-Lockdown days.  Yes, the pubs offer table service only, but I reckon that’s an improvement.

 

I wasn’t on a walking trip per se but of course I ended up walking all over the place, through Soho to the Photographers Gallery to see two exhibitions, again neither of them specifically about walking, although walking featured in both.  One was titled From Here to Eternity by Sunil Gupta, about being gay in India – apparently it’s a lot easier than it used to be, 

 

though not as easy as it was in New York in the 70s:

 

There was also Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea – Stories from the Russian Arctic which was just fabulous.  I think there’s only a limited amount of walking to be done in those parts, but when you get out there it’s pretty spectacular:

Then a walk with an old mate from Sheffield who took us to the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.  Is it a cemetery?  Is it a park?  It's BOTH!!

    You want obelisks?  They got obelisks.

 

And the next day a walk along the King’s Road to the Chelsea Physic Garden - I had a coupon.  There was a plant sale (if you like that kind of thing). There was also a bloke standing next to a speaker.  

 

I think he had a microphone, but there were no turntables, which was a shame in some ways.  In other ways perhaps not.

 

WALKING THE SOIL

 I was doing some idle googling along the lines of ‘What makes a good walk?’ ‘What do 

people look for in a walk?’ and so on, because I’m not certain that I really know.  Growth, 

good mental healthy, inspiration, enlightenment, communion with nature, all seem to be in 

the frame, and I’m not so crass as to belittle these things, but other people’s absolute 

certainty about walking does worry me a bit.  Isn’t there room for ambivalence and doubt?

 

In my googling I found a 2016 article by Kevin Rushby in the Guardian headlined  ‘What makes a great walk.’  Kevin is not trouble by uncertainty. He writes, ‘What makes a great walk remains the gift of nature: the subtle alchemy of landscape, elements and path that is transformed into a dramatic stage for your pleasure and experience by the magical spell of your own tramping feet.’

 

Well, I dunno. What I currently look for in a walk, as I pursue two of my ongoing minor obsessions, are obelisks and bunkers.  So imagine my delight when I discovered that Great Oakley in Essex has one of each.  My amanuensis and I set off on a field trip.

 

The obelisk, as I discovered, is part of a war memorial right in the center of the village, in the middle of a very small car park.  It’s solid and a bit stubby but it’s most definitely an obelisk.  A plaque on it says it was originally dedicated in 1920, then restored and rededicate in 2009, which seems rather a long time.  It was wet when I was there.  It used to look like this, when it was dry:

 

 

I read on the Imperial War Museum site that it was designed by an architect name of Vincent Brown about whom I can find no information

 

The ‘bunker’ is in fact a World War 2 pillbox, a fortification against the possible invading German troops. According to a notice board on the side of the structure, there were steel cables running across the road from the pillbox to a couple of concrete posts (which must really have thrilled the local farmers), and there were also barrels of petrol buried in the ground nearby. The inside looks like this

 

But what makes this pillbox special, as you may have spotted, it’s in somebody's front garden.  I think I’d like to have a pillbox or bunker in my garden.  Think of the photo-shoots, the parties, the ‘sound experiments’ with Theremins and drone machines, the war reenactments, the Sadean high jinx.

 

You might have to put up with people staring into your garden but that’d be a small price to pay.

 

Of course any good walk contains a mystery.  Walking east along the main road, past a new stretch of suburbia you come to a sign for The Soils.  Again, my research has failed me.  I don’t know is this refers to the earth, as in the Parable of the Soil, or whether it’s as in ‘I soiled myself’ and might be the site of a former dung heap of midden.

 

Nearby there is Soils Wood, so maybe it’s the name of a local grandee.  

 

Back in the village, should you need an encounter with nature (and agriculture) there was a big field of rape, with mud that looked like it would have swallowed you up to the knees.  That’s some subtle alchemy all right.

WALKING AND SUPINITY

 I’ve been reading Jonathan Meades’s Pedro and Ricky Come Again, Selected Writing 1988-

2000. I think it’s great.  

 

Admittedly it’s rather light on references to walking though there is this, ‘Our cities are full of people hurrying, their narrow pavements are not made for promenades at snail's pace; they are for getting from A to B rather than civic recreation. Walking for its own sake may be further discouraged by the climate and, equally, by the work 'ethic'. This week I put in several hours' sterling loitering interspersed with energy-saving bouts of farniente supinity. Observant sloth is its own reward. Just hanging around and seeing what happens …’  Fair enough.

 

And there’s a piece, not in the book, from the Quietus by John Doran, which describes Meades as ‘the slowest strolling human being I've ever met, even manages to be a flâneur at 380 feet above Tottenham Court Road, pointing out buildings and an amazing sunset to me as we head at snail's pace from our table towards the lifts.’  

 

And perhaps I’m getting a little obsessed with the man, because since I was walking across my local supermarket carpark yesterday and there walking alongside me was a guy who looked very much indeed like Jonathan Meades.  He did look a bit whiskery (he wasn't wearing a mask) but it seemed perfectly possible that Meades might let his beard grow between public appearances.

 

This is a picture of the car park (for obvious reasons I didn’t photograph the man):

 

Now, it was obviously surprising that Jonathan Meades would be heading into my local supermarket, since we know he lives in Marseille in Le Corbusier’sCité Radieuse – that’s the picture at the top.  On the other hand he has written and made films about Essex, so his presence wasn’t completely inconceivable, especially in these confused, socially disrupted times. Here’s a still from The Joy of Essex  (yes, you can see the joy in his face):

 

I still couldn’t quite believe it was him but I looked again and the fellow looked SO much like Mr. Meades that I found myself saying, ‘Excuse me, do I know you?  Is your name Jonathan?’

He seemed surprised by this though not offended and he said with a smile, ‘Oh, I’m Robert’s father,’ as though that solved everything, which it did not.

Once we’d made eye contact, he looked considerably less like Mr. Meades, but you will note that he didn’t say his name WASN’T Jonathan.

 

 

 

WALKING WITH CARS

 

Motorists versus pedestrians: it’s a false opposition if you ask me.  I enjoy both driving and 

walking.  When I’m walking I try not to hate drivers.  When I’m driving I try not to hate 

walkers.  Sometimes it takes a bit of effort, but on balance I manage to stay tolerant.

 

The fact is I do like cars very much, the stranger and cooler and more patinated, the better.  I’ve lived with one or two ‘interesting’ cars in my life, but I’ve concluded that the more interesting a car is, the more trouble it’s likely to be. I still like cool cars, I just don’t wish to own one.  And when I’m out walking and I see one, then I go across the street and have a look, and in some circumstances take a picture.  As vicarious pleasures go, I think it’s harmless enough.

 

Naturally there was more scope for this when I lived in Southern California. Old cars last longer there because of the lack of rain and snow, and only high in the mountains do roads get gritted and salted. 

And cars there continue to be driven even when they look like absolute wrecks.  These are things magnificent and if I found myself by some chance driving one of them I’d be perfectly happy, but I wouldn’t seek one out, I wouldn’t deliberately buy one.  I just like to look.

Meanwhile here in England ... 

 

.... interesting cars are fewer and further between but they’re not completely absent.  They do a lot to make me happy when I’m walking.  Here’s one I saw earlier (Texas plate, I know, but it was in Mistley, Essex):

 

 

 

 

 

TALKING ‘BOUT MONROE AND WALKIN’ ON SNOW WHITE

 “When at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind’s heaven.’

That’s Jean Genet, in The Thief’s Journals.  Good stuff, I’d say

 

Genet makes an appearance in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School.

    Of course that isn’t Kathy Acker on the cover – it’s Peggy Moffat, photographed by Bill Claxton. 

I don’t know if Kathy Acker was much of a walker.  There’s some footage of her walking in the lower East Side that appeared in a 1984 South Banks Show, but far more pictures show her in the gym or on a motorcycle.  

Still, walking crops up in more or less interesting ways in the book, when for instance, in Manhattan, Janey the book’s heroine and, I suppose, Acker’s alter ego, ‘walks up and down the same street as the hookers walk only the hookers make some money.’

 

    Then Janey is in Tangier and, lo and behold, she sees Jean Genet walking along the street.  Despite being warned that he has a reputation for being aloof and difficult, she decides she MUST talk to him, which she does and Genet is charmed by her.

She quotes him in her diary ‘Loneliness and poverty made me not walk but fly.’

 

In fact it appears that Acker did meet Genet, introduced by William Burroughs, though that doesn’t have much to do with what happens in the book.

Janey sees Genet again, ‘He walks along the white dust slowly, like he did yesterday.  I lift my hand.  His eyes light up and he smiles.  I stand up.  We shake hands for a long time.’

 

They travel together and after many difficulties and much experimental prose they end up in the desert outside Alexandria. ‘The desert is absolutely brilliant’ says Janey, who’s a sharp observer.

 

Genet tells her to get some sleep. ‘Sleep, she says ‘If I’m walking across rocks … it’s murder to my everlasting sleep 

 

When they get to Luxor, Genet gives her money and goes off to see a production of one if his plays.  Literary result:  ‘She dies.’

 

I don’t know that Genet was much of a pedestrian either, though here he is in the company of some literary flaneurs:

But I do know he was briefly besotted with an 18 yeartightrope walker, Abdallah Bentaga, and eventually wrote a short piece titled The Tightrope Walker (Le Funambule). 

It contains the lines ‘I would not be surprised, when you walk on the earth, if you fall and sprain something.  The wire will carry you better, more surely that a road.’

 

This is irony.  Genet paid for Bentaga to have high wire lessons but Bentaga fell and destroyed his knee, ending his tightrope walking career. Genet then bought him, what’s referred to in sources as a ‘small circus,’ the way you do.  But then Genet started seeing somebody else, so Bentaga killed himself.  How different from the home life of … well, of anybody you care to mention.

 

I did once spend an afternoon in Tangier, Genet having been dead for some years by the time I got there, and I remember almost nothing about it, but I know that I did do some walking and I also bought a postcard.