THE CONTROLLED WALK

 I always enjoy the post-Christmas, pre-New Year walk; it’s never very serious or arduous but among other things you do get to look at other walkers.  Some no doubt are fully paid up pedestrians, but some definitely aren’t, and I imagine a certain percentage are having their only walk of the year. Still, a little’s better than nothing.  (The picture below is from a  different Christmas walk).

We didn’t go very far, up to the estuary, past the WW2 pill box, and home via the supermarket, which we surprised to find open. But along the way we did see these things, were new to me, a couple of what at first looked like pig sties, though this isn’t pig keeping territory, and they were in with grazing sheep, so I suppose they were sheep shelters, and I thought they had a lot going for them as examples of minimalist architecture.

 

I’m not pretending this was one of the great walks of the year, however as you know by now, I’m a sucker for the detritus, the flotsam and jetsam that you find while walking.  It was a good day for that.  First, this nicely distressed metal plate from a Ford – my old Escort had one of those, and it did fall off but only on the driveway so I could retrieve it, and I still have it in the archive.

The second, far more inscrutably, is the label, complete with staple marks from (I assume) a package of legally obtained drugs.  I mean I don’t suppose a real drug pusher would bother with that kind of labeling, but I could be wrong.

PROMENADING WITH PEPYS

Finding myself near the Tower of London, I decided to walk to (and in) Seething Lane Garden, a place I knew a little about but had never been to.  

Chiefly what I knew was that Samuel Pepys had once had a house there, in the Navy Office, his place of work.   Both house and office are long gone, and Seething Lane Garden, is a sliver of land tucked in beside the Four Seasons Hotel, what used to be the headquarters of Port of London of Authority.

The garden is far too small for a ‘serious’ walk: by some accounts it’s a ‘pocket park,’ which only adds to my confusion about the difference between parks and gardens, but a walk doesn’t always have to be serious.

On the day of my visit the garden was wintry and windswept, which was only to be expected in December.  Presiding over it is a very fine bust of Pepys, created by Karin Jonzen and put up by the Samuel Pepys Club in 1983.

   On the ground are some even finer paving slabs showing a map, 

 

a plague doctor, 

 

among others, but best of all is a parmesan cheese, like the one Pepys buried in his garden to save it from the Great Fire of London.

I suppose the pavers are there be walked on but I and the few other people I saw in the garden seemed to take pains to avoid them as though they were too precious for tramping feet.  The pavers were made by past and present students of City & Guilds London Art School under the direction of Alan Lamb of Swan Farm Studios Ltd. 

 

I was pleased to have walked in the Seething Lane Garden but it didn’t take long and isn’t one of the great London walks.  Rather more fun can be had in and around St Olave’s church just across the road, though the address is Hart Street rather than Seething Lane, and best known (to me, anyway), for its skull-festooned gateway.

 

Dickens liked it too apparently.  The churchyard and the garden were again wintry but there was a labyrinth – some walkers do enjoy a labyrinth: 

 

Inside the church there are memorial busts of both Sam Pepys and his wife Elizabeth; their bodies are buried in the vault, away from prying eyes.But you know, the thing that really delighted me, the small thing that made the day for me, was a piece of stained glass in the church – showing teasels.  Nature it gets everywhere

 

In fact, as I soon found out, the teasel is a symbol of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, of which Samuel Pepys was Master, but I’d have been perfectly happy for it to remain an enigma.

 

Pepys himself was, of course, a great walker.  The word walk and its derivatives appears 1068 times in the Diary.  There’s a really good book by Jacky Colliss Harvey titled Walking Pepys’s London.  I recommend it, though your feet will get tired.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IT'S NOT JUST THE GRAMMATICAL ERRORS ...

Oh wait, it is ...

AN OCCASIONALLY WEARY AND SOMEWHAT LONESOME TRAVELLER

Life being as it is, it turns out I’m in the current issue of National Geographic Traveller, writing a very short piece about walking in the American desert.  The opening is below.

 

More than that they’ve got an illustrator (Jaqui Oakley) to do my portrait – from photographs not from life - a perfectly decent-looking man who only very very vaguely resembles me.

The first two paras of the article:

Geoff Nicholson

NOTES FROM AN AUTHOR

The memories of my first encounter with the California desert are so clear and intense that sometimes I wonder if I invented them, but I don’t believe so. I was hitchhiking across the States —it was the 1970s —and I was a young Englishman ‘on the road’, having read too much Jack Kerouac. My lift dropped me at a gas station near Barstow, a city in the Mojave Desert, in the south of the state. The car was air-conditioned and as I got out, I was hit by a wall of heat as strange and thrilling as anything I’d ever experienced.            

I was wearing a cotton T-shirt, and I went into the petrol station’s bathroom to drench it in water, then went out looking for a place to hitch. By the time I found one, the T-shirt was completely dry. It was a learning experience, proving that the desert has to be treated with huge respect. It isn’t a monster, it won’t bite you, but it does demand that you’re on your mettle. That was the start of a long relationship with the American desert, chiefly the Mojave, especially Joshua Tree National Park, Yucca Valley and Death Valley. I’d always lived in cities and done lots of urban walking, but the moment I set foot in the desert I knew it was a very special place for me. Nothing in the English landscape moved me the way it did. I began to make regular desert trips and for a decade and a half I lived in Los Angeles. I had many reasons for moving there, but the fact that I could be in that landscape in a couple of hours was a large part of the attraction.

RUSKIN ROCKS, AND SO DO I

Last year, at LAX airport coming back from a trip to the States, my luggage and I got pulled aside by security. I’m one of nature’s worriers but I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, and I knew that I had, a little reluctantly, left my legal recreational marijuana behind.

 

It turned out that the security woman had looked at the X-ray of my bag and seen something worrying in the side pocket. I unzipped the pocket and found that the thing worrying her was a rock that I’d picked up while walking in the Mojave desert.

 

Fortunately I did not end up being interrogated in a small room by uniformed men with small mustaches.  And when I showed the rock to the security woman who’d pulled me over, she seemed to find the situation, and me, rather quaint and charming, and she let me go on my way with my rock.  But I couldn’t help worrying that maybe a stricter woman or man might have taken it more seriously and accused me of trying to steal part of America, like it was the Elgin Marbles or something.

 

I think this is the rock in question but I’m not 100 per cent sure.  I really need a cataloguing system.

 

This year the inamorata and I were walking in the Saguaro National Park, in Arizona, on the Broadway Trailhead, a very dramatic-looking but incredibly safe- feeling bit of walking territory with people just going for an afternoon stroll or exercising their dogs, 

And we saw a man heading towards us who was jogging rather than walking and he had something in his hand and he slowed when he got near and he said, far more to the inamorata than to me,  ‘It’s turquoise and copper.  I collect pieces to give to people,’ and he handed her a very small rock he was carrying, perhaps just a pebble, that looked, and stills looks, like this

 

To my untutored eyes it didn’t look much like either turquoise or copper but it was a nice little gift.  We had no problems at all at airport security.

And the two weeks later in Sheffield, England we saw some of the Ruskin Collection, and it turns out, and I did sort of know this anyway, that John Ruskin was quite a collector of rocks, displayed in the museum like this:

They seem to have a very adequate cataloguing system