Monday, October 31, 2022

HARD WALKING

 We know that all great enterprises, not least great walking enterprises, contain elements of danger and absurdity. Even so, walking 4000 miles from Spain to Qatar, for the World Cup does seem to be asking for trouble.



But that 4000 mile walk is what Santiago Sanchez (that's him above on the right) is doing, or at least was doing, and let’s hope he’ll soon be in a position to continue doing it.

 

In fact that route does look, in some sense, ‘walkable.’ Google maps suggested this way if going by car but says ‘Sorry, we could not calculate the walking directions.'




 

As you will see, it doesn’t require going through Iran, but it seems that Sanchez took a detour there and he ‘disappeared’ at the beginning of October, which in modern parlance means that he stopped posting on Instagram: the last one was dated October 1st.




It now appears that the detour took him to the grave of Mahsa Amini, the young woman whose death in police custody gave rise to the current anti-government protest movement in Iran.


Credible sources now suggest that Sanchez was arrested at the graveside by security forces and is being held in a detention centre in Sanandaj, capital of Kurdistan Province in western Iran, a fine-looking place if you're not in a detention centre.



Last week Sanchez's mother, Celia Cogedor, told The Associated Press that she’d heard from the Spanish foreign ministry that there was 'a 99% chance he (was) arrested.’ 'We are filled with hope,' she added.


It seems a strange state of affairs when you’re hoping that your boy is incarcerated in an Iranian prison but I’m sure we all feel the same way,  considering the alternatives.

 

My hopes are with him and his mother, and indeed with all walkers who like their walking to contain risk, even if I myself am a complete wimp in these matters.  Walk on brother.  Enjoy the football when you get to Qatar.

Thursday, October 27, 2022

39 AND COUNTING

   


This is from John Buchan’s 1914 novel The Thirty-Nine Steps.  The narrator is Richard Hannay.


‘The night was fine and clear as I walked back to the flat I had hired near Portland Place. The crowd surged past me on the pavements, busy and chattering, and I envied the people for having something to do. These shop-girls and clerks and dandies and policemen had some interest in life that kept them going. I gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer. At Oxford Circus I looked up into the spring sky and I made a vow. I would give the Old Country another day to fit me into something; if nothing happened, I would take the next boat for the Cape.’

 

The ‘real’ job I held down longest was managing the paperback department of a bookshop near Oxford Circus.  Most days I walked up Portland Place on my way to work, and I walked down Portland Place on my way home.  Sometimes I walked up and down it at lunchtime.  I was often bored and unhappy in my job, but I never thought of taking a boat to the Cape. That, I think, was because of lack of funds rather than lack of imagination.

                                                                     *



Most people these days know The Thirty-Nine Steps as a film rather than a book – and the best known, I think is the Alfred Hitchcock version of 1935. Mr. Memory is the invention of Hitchcock and/or his scriptwriter Charles Bennett, credited on imdb with ‘adaptation.’

This is from the Kenneth More version:



 

         The Thirty-Nine Steps is a long way from being a walking book, though there’s a good deal of trudging over the Scottish moors while being pursued, sometimes by an aircraft (not entirely unlike Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, 24 years later), and most of the action takes place a long way from London.  But there’s also this London-centric passage from an early chapter.


 

‘I felt curiously at a loose end … I went to the Savoy and ordered very carefully a very good luncheon, and then smoked the best cigar the house could provide. But I was still feeling nervous. When I saw anybody look at me in the lounge, I grew shy, and wondered if they were thinking about the murder.

‘After that I took a taxi and drove miles away up into North London. I walked back through fields and lines of villas and terraces and then slums and mean streets, and it took me pretty nearly two hours. All the while my restlessness was growing worse.’ 

 

         I think we can safely assume that Richard Hannay was a brisk walker, so that a two hour walk would cover, say, 8 miles.  So where did he go in the taxi? Where did he start walking? Hendon?  Upper Edmonton? Bounds Green?  I wish he’d told us more precisely, then we could walk in his fictional literary footsteps.

 

         Incidentally, when Buchan attended Kirkcaldy High School, he had to walk three miles there and three miles home.  That’ll build character in a boy. Today there is the John Buchan Way, a 13 mile walk between Broughton and Peebles.  That’s quite a lot of steps.


            Here is John Buchan, not walking, though looking ready to walk.




 

 

Monday, October 17, 2022

WALKING CRAZY

 I don’t say golf is ‘a good walk spoiled.’ I say it’s much, much worse than that, but I 

know that other views are possible. 

The earliest appearance of that ‘spoiled walk’ quip, according to Quote Investigator was in a newspaper article in Enniscorthy, Ireland in April 1901. The author was only identified as ‘a northern Gael.’ 

 

In 1905, they say, Henry Leon Wilson tweaked the expression and used it in his novel The Boss of Little Arcady.  No, of course I haven’t read it.  The line there apparently runs ‘This new game of golf that the summer folks play seems to have too much walking for a good game and just enough game to spoil a good walk.’  It’s a much better line.

 

However since golf dates back at least to the 15th century, and the first18 hole golf course was laid out in St Andrews in the 18th century it’s hard to understand how golf is ‘this new game,’ but perhaps it’s poetic license.

 


I’ve never play ‘proper’ golf and I know I’d be no good at it, but there was a short phase of my life when I had a taste for crazy golf.

 


Obviously the great thing about crazy golf is that it doesn’t spoil a walk because there’s really no walking in it to speak of, and there’s no real golf either, which is a real plus.

 


My idea, not one of my best, was that I’d turn my crazy golf interest into a TV format ‘Playing A Round With Geoff.’  We’d get Ian Botham or Helen Mirren or Salman Rushdie, and we’d putter around together and they’d be relaxed enough to lower their guard and say something wonderful.

 


Well, you can imagine how well that went down.  But as ‘research’ I did play a certain amount of crazy golf, mostly in East Anglia, with anybody I could get interested. And I did take some photos – above and below.

 


And then a couple of weekends ago I went for a more or less proper walk in Felixstow, not at all in search of crazy golf, and if you’d asked me if I’d ever played crazy golf there I’d have said no, but it seems I did.  See below, Then and Now: the obelisk doesn’t lie.  Unless it’s been moved.

 



Which brings us to Bing Crosby who died on October 14th1977.  He’d finished a round of golf at the La Moraleja course in Spain, with three other golfers, and he said to his partners ‘That was a great game of golf, fellas, let’s go have a Coca Cola’ which sounds a little unlikely to me.  The picture below is obviously from a different time.

 


But anyway, he was walking back to the clubhouse, full of the joys of the links, had a heart attack, fell over and died.

 

It must really have really spoiled his walk.  It probably didn’t enhance the walk for the other guys he was playing with either.

 

 

Sunday, October 16, 2022

WANDERING CLOUDILY

 Fresh over the transom comes a copy of the revised edition of the excellent The Art of 

Wandering by Merlin Coverley, subtitled ‘The Writer as Walker,’ published ten years after the 

first edition of 2012.

 



As yet I haven’t been through it all looking for changes and updates, but because of vanity and narcissism I obviously did check the index.  There you’ll find 8 references to Geoff Nicholson, as opposed to a mere 2 in the first edition. These are the small things that keep us writers going.

 

On the other hand there is no reason to be smug.  Wordsworth is in there with 12, up from 10; and Walter Benjamin is up from 4 to 8.  But best of all Lauren Elkin is there in with a bullet – 7 citation, up from not there at all in the first edition but that’s because her book Flaneuse wasn’t published until 2016.  So good for her.  Good for all of us.

 


         I can hardly wait to see the next edition of the Art of Wandering in 10 years time.

 

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

A WALK IS A WALK IS A WALK

 



This is new to me but it appeared in the Harvard Crimson in February 1959, written by one Alice P Albright under the Headline ‘Gertrude Stein at Radcliffe: Most Brilliant Women Student.’  Stein died in 1946.

In the article, which (you may be surprised to hear) does not display precisely the same attitudes that are current in Harvard today, Albright writes,

‘As an undergraduate, Gertrude spent her leisure time in argument ("the air I breathe"), at the theatre and opera, and in taking long walks. To the end of her life, she liked walking; someone has said that she moved like a souped-up glacier, or like a mass of primordial mud. Though young ladies did not usually walk alone at night in those days, Gertrude knew she was safe. In fact, she promised to climb a tree at the approach of a masher--then drop on him and squash him!’

 

I can well believe that Gertrude Stein was a walker, but I’m less sure that she was much of a tree climber.

 

Some of those deeply unauthoritative online quotation sites have a few good lines from Stein.  Like this:

 


And this, even better, I think:

 



I’ve not been able to find sources for those two quotations but I did find this in Stein’s‘Mallorcan Stories’ which you can read in Geography and Plays.

 

A walk is not where the door shows a light, a walk is where there is a request to describe a description. A walk is when a place is not to be exchanged. There is a respect in every walk.

‘There is a result in every walk and the turn is there, the foot and the boot have that union that there can be slippers. Talking of the return of that shows that there will not be an opening. There is no reason to exchange the joke.

 

Words to live by, words to walk with.

Thursday, October 6, 2022

A WINNER IN PINNER



 

So off we went to Pinner, primarily to visit the Heath Robinson Museum in Pinner Memorial 

Park, but also for the chance to have a walk in Pinner, terra incognita, a place I’d never set 

foot, though Elton John, Michael Rosen and Ivy Compton Burnett had all been there before me.

 


It’s not much of a walk from Pinner tube to the museum, and I’m not sure that Heath Robinson was much of a walker but images of walking do feature in his work, both in his own fantastical creations:

 








and also in his illustrations for others.  Until I went to the museum I didn’t realize he’d done so much illustration for authors – Poe, Rabelais, Cervantes, Kipling, among them.




 

Actually I think the best part of the museum was probably the ceiling:

 



In Pinner we’re in Metroland – the tube opened in 1885.  Heath Robinson lived there from 1908 to 1918 and one assumes it was less suburban then than it is now, although Robinson’s House in Moss Lane, now with a blue plaque, and actually a fair hike from the tube station, looked plenty suburban, as did many of the other (perhaps later) houses in the street.  




Robinson and family left Pinner in 1918 to move to Cranleigh in Surrey.

 

Finally a word to the wise, if you type Heath Robinson into a search engine there’s a reasonable chance it will autocorrect as Death Robinson, which has its appeal but doesn’t really fit the man himself.

Monday, October 3, 2022

SHAKEN IN WANSTEAD

 I was in Wanstead, being an author, doing a double act with fellow drifter and 

psychogeographer Travis Elborough, at a great venue in a railway arch, The Wanstead Tap.  

So of course I tried to have a short exploratory walk on the way there:

 


Wanstead is on my mental map of London, but only just – in the past I’ve walked across Wanstead Flats but it was some time ago.  And it seems to me the topographical delineations get a bit convoluted out in those parts.  You don’t have to walk very far to may be in East Ham, West Ham, Forest Gate, Newham, and at times you may be in at least two of these places at once.

 

I’m always fascinated by the hows and whys of the naming of streets and getting to the venue involved walking up Dames Road, from which Anna Neagle Close and Vera Lynn Close, named after a couple of great dames and local lasses.  Anna Neagle was born in Forest Gate, Vera Lynn was born in East Ham.




 

Parked in Anna Neagle Close was this very cool Ford Capri.  You know, if there’s one thing brightens up the average urban drift, it’s the presence cool classic cars.  I wish there were more of them:



There was also a bit of leaseable ruin:

 


 And a cat - which I think always adds to the tone of a place:




Come the Q and A at the event, an audience member (Fiona, if I remember correctly) mention Dubai, where the two side of the street looked like a mirror images of each other.

 

I promised to look this up when I got home and I have done, and although I’m not 100% sure that I’ve found the place she was talking about, I did find this, Sheik Zayed Road: 

 


I certainly doesn’t look pedestrian-friendly though it seems that parts of it are walkable (there are Youtube videos if you want to see them).

 

This was Sheik Zayed (I think I’ve got the right one):

 


I mean, he had his moments, but he was no Vera Lynn.