LOST IN SPACES

 I know I’ve led a sheltered life but even so I’m surprised it’s taken me so long to find out that the line ‘Not all those who wander are lost,' which I think is a pretty good line, comes from Tolkein’s poem  "The Riddle of Strider," written for The Fellowship of The Ring.

 

I’ve always found Tolkien pretty much unreadable, but somehow his reputation has survived this obstacle, and that quotation (with variations) has thrived on a lot of those ‘inspirational quotation’ sites around the Interwebs.  

Now, there’s nothing quite like an inspirational quotation to bring out the cynic in me, so you can imagine how pleased I was, while looking for something else, to find this, which I subsequently found in various other versions :

 

And finally, to prove, as if proof were needed, that not all who walk are noble, moral or decent, here is a picture of a walker, in fact power walker, whose name shall not be spoken.

 

WALKING THE WALK

 And so to Gray’s Inn Garden to see Sir Francis Bacon’s The Walks with my own eyes. It looked like this: 

As a “design feature” The Walks don’t look as though they took all that much designing, and the casual viewer might also observe that nobody’s actually walking in or on The Walks, but I suppose walking is not mandatory. Though there were was the couple in this picture, walking on the grass.

 

Also you’ll notice in the background that fine magnolia tree (at least I’m reasonably sure it’s a magnolia), and there was this splendid sculpture by Richard Renshaw called “The Bird Sculpture.” It was, apparently, presented to the Inn by Master Leighton Williams and installed at the end of 2022

And just around the corner was this statue of Sir Francis Bacon himself, but it’s not the best picture because there was a “keep off the grass sign” and although in general I’m not averse to a bit of light trespassing and rule breaking, I did think that being pursued by the lads from the Inns of Court might be more trouble than I could handle.

 

I was there with fellow flaneur Ashley Biles and as we walked around the area he took me to the Lincolns Inn Chapel which is a magnificent thing and looks like this from ground level (not my photo):

 

And at home later that very same day I watched the Persauders on TV, the episode titled “Take Seven” and I’m reasonably sure that some of it was filmed very close to the chapel.  Like this:

 

I mentioned this to Ashley and he wasn’t surprised. He said he used to work in that area and crews were filming there all the time and he said in an email “They still do a lot of filming in the area, particularly in and around Lincoln’s Inn. I have been told off before now, ignoring signs and impolite requests to not interrupt the filming. I did receive a broad grin once from Olivia Coleman, by the MI6 building for telling a ‘runner’ to fuck off. I was late for work and they had over run their license to film. A rather pointless act, but needs must.’

 

He added “she gives a good smile” - Just another reason to love Olivia Colman.

 

 

 

ABSTRACT WALKING

Willem de Kooning is not an open book to me but that’s him above, walking, and I just read this story, about him, from Bill Berkson’s memoir Since When.

  De Kooning was at dinner in East Hampton and somebody at the table said to him, ‘So, you take walks with your dogs.’

    And he answered, ‘No. I’m a man. MY dogs walk with me.’

  Sometimes I think those Abstract Expressionists weren’t all bad.

 

      I haven’t been able to find a picture of de Kooning and his dogs.  There’s this one of him on his bike with just one dog.  Doesn’t really count, does it?

WALKING ON ICY AIR

 

I’ve been thinking about Yoko, who turned 90 on February 18th. Towards the end of January, when she was just 89, she Tweeted 

I learned about this from the New York Post which isn’t the most universally reliable news source, but in this case the information seems accurate enough – the Tweet is right there on Yoko’s feed.

 

And I do happen to think Yoko’s walking cure for depression is a very good one, though by no means every walk in New York gives you a high.  And how far was she claiming to walk?  Well that’s tricky.  There are about 20 blocks to a mile running north-south, but east-west there are about 7 to a mile. You do the math; but Yoko couldn’t be doing less than 4 miles, which would be good for any 89 year old.  Here she was walking in New York in 2015.

The Post then pointed out, and again this seems accurate, that Yoko’s in poor health, and has mobility issues.  In 2017, her son Sean Lennon pushed her in a wheelchair to receive the National Music Publishers’ Association’s Centennial Song Award (whatever that is).  

In her acceptance speech she said, “I’ve learned so much from having this illness,” though she didn’t say what the illness was, and personally I’m rather opposed to the notion of illness as a ‘learning experience,’ but that’s just me.

Other sources say she has round-the-clock care and rarely leaves her apartment in the Dakota. So maybe she goes walking in her mind.

I was especially thinking about the song ‘Walking On Thin Ice,’ which  apparently she and Lennon were working on at the time of his murder.

The song contains the lyrics

I knew a girl
That tried to walk across the lake
'Course it was winter when all this was ice
That's a hell of a thing to do, you know
They say this lake is as big as the ocean
I wonder if she knew about it?

That’s is indeed a hell of a thing, a hell of lake, one helluva walk.

THE BOOKISH DESERT

  

I can’t tell you exactly how much of a walker Alberto Manguel is.  Most photographs of him, as above, show him sitting or standing surrounded by books. But we know he certainly walked in Buenos Aires with Jorge Luis Borges, and he wrote a terrific piece for the Guardian about Ahasverus,the Wandering Jew. 

Even as a child, says Manguel, ‘The story of the tireless wanderer haunted my dreams. I didn't feel his fate as a curse; I thought how wonderful it would be to travel alone and endlessly … above all, to be able to read any book that fell into your hands …

‘And yet, almost all the depictions of the Wandering Jew show him bookless, keen on finding salvation in the world of flesh and stone, not that of words. This feels wrong … it is hard to believe that a merciful god would condemn anyone to a worldwide waiting-room without reading material.’

Here is Manguel, not walking but at least photographed outdoors, so I suppose he must have walked to get there.

 

In his book The Library At Night Manguel talks about the way in which, unless you’re a wanderer, you never have enough shelving for your books.  You find you’ve too many books and so you buy a new bookcase but the moment you get the bookcase, it fills up and then you need to buy another one and so on and so on.

 

I never doubted this was true but the point has been driven home since I bought myself a shiny new, and I’m quoting here, ‘Vasagle Bookcase, Bookshelf, Ladder Shelf 4-Tier, Display Storage Rack Shelf, for Office, Living Room, Bedroom, 80 x 33 x 149 cm, Industrial, Rustic Brown’

 

I hoped this would give me loads of extra shelf space and free up some room in other bits of the house, and now of course it’s full.

 

    Manguel also talks about the problems of arrangement, or perhaps more correctly classification.   I have a lot of books about walking and a lot, though not as many, books about deserts, so I thought I’d put all my books about walking in the new bookcase, so that I could put my books about the desert in a smaller case on the other side of the room, but then the walking books more than filled the space I’d allotted to them, while the desert bookcase still had a bit of room in it.

 

    Now, it so happens that I own some books that are about walking in deserts, so these made a move across the room out of the walking bookcase into the desert bookcase, which doesn’t seem ideal but it’ll do for now.  Reclassification is always a possibility, in fact a necessity.

 

One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about walking and deserts is because I’m not quite sure when I’ll next be walking in a real desert. But recently, mostly by chance, I did find a pretty fair simulacrum of the desert in Norfolk, in the garden of the Old Vicarage in East Ruston, the lifetime project of Alan Gray and Graham Robson. This is them, suited up:

The simulacrum is an area they call the Desert Wash designed to resemble parts of Arizona, a place neither of the gardeners has been, apparently.

 

This was my favourite spot: the sculpture is by Ben Southwell.

 

And there, in amidst the rocks the cacti and succulents, keeping his eye on things was (unless I’m mistaken, and I don’t think I am) Graham Robson himself.  He was not chatty, but why should he be? 

     Of course it wasn’t a walk in a real desert, but on a damp and chilly day in Norfolk it wasn’t bad at all.  

I bought a guide book obviously – now, where to shelve it?