YOHJI, BARE

 

This is Yohji Yamamoto 81 year old Japanese ‘master of fashion’ (I’m quoting the Financial Times).  

 

And in an interview in that paper he says, ‘Today my meditation happens when my son visits me in Tokyo and we walk the dog together.  It’s my happiest moment.  I wake up naturally at five in the morning and wait for my son who wakes up at six. Then we walk for one hour. There’s the push and pull of the lead in my hand.  As my dog leads I follow.  In that moment I meditate.’

 

Well OK. Meditation, we know comes I many, many forms.  

 

Elsewhere he says, ‘I have travelled all around the world, mostly walking around, looking at landscapes, rocky sceneries, and plants and flowers. Nature is incredibly strong. I have said to myself that I will never be able to design such beauty.’

    What took you so long, Yohji?

This is a pair of sneakers he designed.  429 quid to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVERY LITTLE STEP YOU TAKE

 

“I believe everything out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.”  ― John Buchan.

 

 I’ve been waiting for this.  The 39th step moment.

 

I have a very, very poor step counting app on my phone.  I’ve always thought that the whole business of having to do a certain number of steps each day was pretty bogus, but I admit there’s a certain pleasure in seeing the numbers rising, or there would be if you could believe in them.

 

My own very, very poor step counting app seems to pluck numbers out of the ether that have little relation to anything, certainly not to any distance I’ve actually walked.  

 

Worse still, the inamorata has the same app on her phone, and there have been days when we’ve walked exactly the same routes and she’s clocked up a couple of thousand steps while I’ve clocked up a couple of hundred.  

 

Since I think the whole thing is bogus I can’t get very upset about it and I wouldn’t say that on the day that my app told me I’d walked 39 steps I actually had but it is just about possible. I’d scarcely left the house that day since it’s been so bloody cold out there. And accurate or not there was pleasure to be had in seeing that magical number of 39 appear on my screen.

 

Just as there was in this sight in Harwich, a set of steps with the number 39 painted on the nearby wall.

 

The world is full of small pleasures.  Am I right, sir?

Quite right, old chap.

 

 

 

DISLODGED

 It was sad to read last week of the death of David Lodge.  He had a significant, if oblique, influence on my life, although needless to say I had no influence on his.

 

When I was in my early teens and had just started to read ‘grown up’ books (whatever that might mean) I borrowed a copy of The British Museum is Falling Down from the local library.  It’s a book about PhD students at London University. At the time I had no idea what people did at universities and if I’d even heard the term PhD I certainly didn’t know what it meant.

 

However from reading the book I learned that there were people in the world who spent all their days in libraries, reading and writing, while working on a thesis. This came as a huge surprise.  It seemed as improbable as the wildest science fiction.

 

Anyway, I eventually got the hang of that.  And a few decades later I was at a literary festival at Dartington College, on a panel with David Lodge.  We were in a lecture theatre that had a balcony, and although the balcony wasn’t being used for spectators, about halfway through the event a solitary figure appeared in the empty seats up there.  It was Malcolm Bradbury!!  

It felt like a visit from a deity and it concentrated the mind no end.

 

After the event I was standing around talking to Lodge and Bradbury and their partners and one of them (alas I forget which one) said, “Geoff, we’re all going for a walk.  Will you come with us?”

 

And I had to say no, because I’d organized for a friend to come and give me a lift to the place I was staying overnight and I didn’t think I could say to him, just hang on for a couple of hours while I go for a walk with these literary luminaries.

It was one of the greatest walking regrets I’ve ever had. 

Photo by Gunter Glucklich