BETAVILLE

  

I don’t often feel like a character walking through a Jean Luc-Godard film, but it sort of 

happened the other day in Felixstowe.

 

The film in question was Les Carabiniers (1963) in which two idiot brothers go off to war, having been promised that they can take all the loot and plunder they want.

"Will we be able to slaughter the innocent?" 

"Of course, this is war." 

 

When the war is over they return home, and the only loot they've picked up is a collection of picture postcards.

 

         Now, because I have a deep affection for dying forms, I also have a deep affection for postcards.  I’m not a collector, just a small time accumulator, but I happen to have one that shows ‘Hamilton Cliffs and Gardens, Felixstowe.’  

 

I no longer remember where or when I acquired it – the back is blank and I assume I picked it up in a junk shop somewhere.  This postcard image was on my mind as I walked in Felixstowe.  The Hamilton Gardens now seem to be merged with the Seafront Gardens; certainly I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.  

And there were also the Cranmer Cliff Gardens, which were fenced off and inaccessible and looked as though they might once have contained grottos and possibly hermits.  Also possibly a pillbox.

 

Of course we didn’t only walk in the gardens. We went as far as Felixstowe Ferry – passing two Martello towers on the way.  Also an unexpectedly Ballardian lagoon. 

 

And I tried, not very hard, to buy a postcard but I couldn’t see anything that was as good as the old one I have.

 

I suppose Les Carabaniersis a film about how some of us are just as much in love with the images of things as we are with the things themselves.  I still don’t know if that’s a bad thing or not.

 

 

 

 

NUCLEAR WALKING

 I recently watched the movie Can You Ever Forgive Me?(2018).

 

 

It stars Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant, and it’s about Lee Israel who forged  literary letters and manuscripts in New York in the 1990s.  And the answer to the question in the title is of course we can forgive you.  It’s Melissa McCarthy and Richard E Grant.  If it had been Nicole Kidman and Steven Segal, then probably not.

 

There’s not a whole lot of walking in the movie though there is a little

 

and at one point Paul Simon pops up on the soundtrack performing ‘Can’t Run But’

 

It’s from the era when Simon thought he was a great wordsmith, but the ‘poetry’ is interspersed with a catchy chorus which runs ‘I can’t run but I can walk much faster than this’ which is OK – I don’t ask for profundity in the popular song.

 

But of course the ear pricks up at the verse

 

A cooling system 
Burns out in the Ukraine
Trees and umbrellas
Protect us from the new rain
Armies of engineers
To analyze the soil
The food we contemplate
The water that we boil

 

Here’s a picture of Paul Simon walking:

 

This is certainly not the only song to mention ‘the’ Ukraine – Giant Sand’s ‘Solomon’s Ride’ also gives it a mention – 

 

Solomon fell in love by letter. 
A brain surgeon he never met out
In the Ukraine
Gave it all up here and went out to go get her
Last time I saw him he was making
A run for the plane.

 

So I suppose Solomon wasn’t actually walking at that point.

 

Here’s a picture of Howe Gelb walking, more or less.

And here are some people walking in Chernobyl a few years back – nuclear tourists.  Ah, the good old days.

 

 

 

 

 

BRAVE MEN AND WOMEN

 War involves endless movement, getting civilian and military personnel from one place to 

another, getting to the right place and escaping from the wrong place  Very often 

machines are involved – cars, trains, tanks, planes, armoured vehicles.  And yet for many, 

especially (though not exclusively) refugees, war involves a great deal of walking.

 

These are Ukrainians:

 

These are Afghanis:

These are Rohinya refugees:

 

And obviously it's not just civilians. In the Falklands. British soldiers referred to ‘yomping.’

My dad was in his teens when Sheffield was bombed in World War 2.  The day after a round of bombing he still went to work, walking over bodies on the way. 

 

In the same week that a war started in Europe there was a piece in the papers about researchers in Canada who had discovered that - and I'm quoting from the Times here 'that the prevalence of obesity among adults living on "highly walkable" neighborhoods was 19% lower than in those living in areas with 'low walkability.'"

And yeah, you might think, trivial First World problems, although until recently we tended to believe that Russia and Ukraine were firmly in that first world.

 

Also at times like this it might be reasonable to remember Ed Ruscha's line, (which I don’t imagine he invented) the phrase ‘Brave Men Run in My Family.’

"NOTHING ENDURES BUT CHANGE"

 Who could disagree with Heraclitus when he said, “No man ever steps in the same river 

twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”  (Incidentally, “steps” is 

sometimes translated as ‘walks,’ but that sounds off to me.  I mean who walks in a river?  

Wade at best). 

 

Anyway it seems to me that Heraclitus’s notion applies to streets as well as rivers, though judging by this picture, old H. found walking a bit of a strain.  Scholars are reasonably sure that he suffered from dropsy.

 

Living as I do in small town Essex there’s a strictly limited number of nearby streets to walk down.  Even so, by definition, and not just Heraclitus’, every street is different every time I walk down it, as am I.  And I think you can say something similar about photography: you can’t photograph the same subject twice because the subject will have changed, as will the photographer.

 

There’s a certain street I walk down reasonably often and the first time I did it I was taken by this strange and interesting and rather attractive juxtaposition of plant life and dog statue. 

 

A year or so later it looked like this.  

 

I wasn’t sure what had happened to the plants but, as you see, snow was on the ground, and it did occur to me that the plant might have simply come to the end of it’s life or perhaps just receded for the winter.  I suppose a better plantsman would be able to tell you the names of the absent plants.  

 

And then, not so long ago, I walked down the street again and things had taken chaotic a turn – no snow, no plant, and a significant pile of rubbish.  The dog, however, endures, for now.

 

WALKING AND FIELDING

 

I’ve been sorting my books – not ‘unpacking my library’ – I did that years back but 

I’m still trying to find a reasonable order for them.

 

And I happened to find my copy of The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2004) by Robert Shoemaker.    I opened it not quite at random and came across this extraordinary passage:

 

‘In 1776 John Fielding warned new arrivals to the city of the dangers of walking at night: “he will sometimes be liable to the more dangerous attacks of intemperate rakes in hot blood who occasionally by way of bravado, scower the streets, to shew their manhood, not their humanity; put the watch to flight; and now and then have murdered some harmless and inoffensive person.”’ This is from A Brief Description of the Cities of  London and Westminster.

 

The passage is illustrated by the engraving (anonymous as far as I can tell) ‘High Life At Midnight’ which is at the top of this post.

 

Shoemaker could have had left it there,  but he goes on:

 

‘The common themes of these attacks, which were public, unprovoked, committed by elite young men, often targeted at strangers (especially young women), involved an element of playfulness and were often described using the imagery of blood, suggest that the perpetrators were adolescents, possibly confused about their sexuality ..’

 

Well thanks Bob, that explains everything.

 

This is Sir John Fielding 

I don't know how much of a walker he was but he was an amazing man; half-brother of Henry Fielding (together they set up the Bow Street Runners), blinded in a naval accident at the age of 19, became a magistrate known as the Blind Beak and was supposedly able to recognize 3,000 criminals by the sound of their voices.