OH, THE INHUMANITY

It's interesting, isn’t it, how many ‘walkers’ have been created by the lockdown. Once people were told they could walk for an hour a day, people started walking for an hour a day, as though they couldn't possibly have done it unless the government told them to.  Jeez.
          In last Saturday’s Times Magazine there was Caitlin Moran, who can be very funny, writing a rather serious piece under the headline ‘Escape from Suburbia – in 41,000 steps: I walked from home into the city – and a London I no longer knew.’ That headline is so thorough that you don’t altogether need to read the article itself but I did.  Her home is in ‘the north London suburbs’ which seems gloriously unspecific, and she goes into central London, evidently with somebody unnamed (though maybe Pete Paphides) and concludes, ‘Now that it’s empty, you can admire the sets.  God, this place is beautiful.  The people who made this town are geniuses … You can fall in love with humanity all over again – even though there’s no one here – just by looking at the things it’s done.’

Couldn't find a pic of Caitlin Moran walking exactly, but this isn't too far off the mark.

         Of course it’s much easier to fall in love with humanity when it’s not there, a view that I think Jeremy Clarkson would share.  There was in the Sunday Times with a piece headlined, ‘Oh dear, I’ve realised I’m a ramblin’ man.’ Actually it sounds like was always something of a walker but having become a farmer he’s walking a bit differently these days. He writes, ‘I’ve been told many times by fellow farmers that it’s important once in a while to do a “perimeter walk”. And obviously I’ve nodded enthusiastically and left the conversation thinking, “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

          ‘I can walk for miles in a town, but I’ve never really seen the appeal in the countryside. What’s the point of going for a walk when you just end up back where you started? You go past a tree and then, shortly, you go past another exactly the same. And then you get hay fever.’

Probably there’d be no point telling him that no two trees are exactly that same, or that you get can get hay fever in the middle of the city. Still, he does manage to find some humanity on his walk – ‘a fat youth in an anorak, walking straight through my barley,’A heated argument ensues, and Clarkson says, ‘I’ve never had an argument ’with another pedestrian in London,’ though personally I’ve had several. Then he meets a woman whose dog is off its lead who told him he couldn’t throw his weight about just because he was on television.  See: humanity is nothing but trouble.

Of course one of the things about walking in a crowded city even when there are lots of people there you don’t actually have to engage with them, in fact you spend most of time trying to keep out of their way. They may be within 6 feet of you, but as you walk you try to avoid having them impinge on your consciousness.

Then as fate would have it my Facebook feed led me to an interview on Urbanautica with the walker and photographer Paul Walsh, who again was clearly a walker long before the lockdown.  ‘Walking taught me to be at ease in my own company, to understand myself, to conquer the fear of the unknown and gave me self confidence. The combination of walking and photographing taught me to analyse my surroundings and to try and understand my place in the world.’

All of which sounds right to me, though he often walks with other people ‘I am currently working in Finland with The MAP6 Collective, where we are exploring themes surrounding the world happiness report. I am walking with people who live locally, but I am allowing them to guide me through a walk of their choice, whilst I record our conversations and document the walk photographically.’

Well I guess that’s all right.  This is one of Walsh’s photographs of a fellow walker:

And here’s a photograph of his I like better, from a project titled Insomniataken on a night walk. You know there are people up there in the block of flats, you just don’t have to see them.

This is the Urbanautica interview:  

https://urbanautica.com/interview/paul-walsh-the-sense-of-walking/1804 

This is Paul Walsh’s website: 

https://paulwalshphotography.co.uk/home

WALKING THE CLARKSON WAY

Recently I’ve realized that the only reason I ever buy the English Sunday Times is for the Jeremy Clarkson column. Now, Clarkson is a serious hate figure for the British bien pensant liberal classes (which in many circumstances would include me), but I also think he’s one of the great ironists.  

He never says exactly what he means and he never means exactly what he says, which is great, but it means the reader actually has to tease out his actual meaning, which of course is a terrible punishment for many readers. 

Clarkson’s column last week was a masterpiece as he went to town on walkers and walking, under the headline ‘I leave the pointless promenading to the French.  A walk is not a walk without a pub at the end.’

There are some pretty good lines as he lays into flaneurs – he doesn’t mention psychogeographers.  I’m sure he knows what they are but maybe he doesn’t want to alienate his core readership with fancy words.

He says, ‘I couldn’t care less about almost everything, and I’ve always never wanted to spend two hours stroking the brass of a faded plaque in Spitalfields.

‘I’ve tried walking with no purpose.  I’ve simply left my London flat and set off without knowing where I was going, and when I’d be back, and I always, always end up in the Ladbroke Arms.  The other day I was in Mayfair and I decided to walk back to Holland Park which was about three miles away, and I ended up in the Ladbroke Arms, again, using rosé wine to water my remaining chins.’

Well this is marvelous, isn’t it?  He obviously cares about a great many things (he’s a writer).  He obviously knows the attractions of faded plaques in Spitalfields, and obviously if he’s prepared to walk three miles home, he’s more of a walker than most.  Ending a walk in a pub is no kind of disqualification.

In fact Clarkson has some form in the abuse of walkers and walking, not least an article, again in the Sunday Times, from 2005 titled ‘Jackboots rule the countryside.’

He wrote, ‘Walking is something that I will gladly do when the car breaks down. In London I have been known to pop out for the papers and not stop until I get to Dartford in Kent. But the notion of treating the exercise as a noun, of going for "a walk": that has always seemed faintly preposterous.’

And then he goes for a walk, because it gives him a chance to abuse the then new Countryside Code, a thing that passed me by completely at the time.  And in general it occurs to me that the kind of people who need a book telling them how to behave in the countryside are exactly the kind of people who aren’t going to read a book telling them how to behave in the countryside, but that’s just me.

He writes that the countryside ‘now looks like Camp X-Ray. You're marshalled by signposts telling you where the footpath goes and, just to make sure that you stay on it, you're fenced in by miles of electrified razor wire. 

       ‘Every few hundred yards you are reminded of your responsibilities by slogans that would not look out of place in a Soviet tractor factory. "Kill nothing. Only time", said one.
         ‘There was another which said "No dogs". But before I turned to my faithful labrador and said, "For you ze valk is over."’ Yeah, his irony is sometimes way better than his jokes.

But then he concludes,  ‘If you must go for a walk, forget the green bits that have been colonised and sanitised by Tony Blair's urban army; do it in the middle of your local city. 

‘There is no mud, there are more visual diversions, you can go where you want without fear of electrocution, your dog is welcome and you won't come home covered from head to foot in shit.’

         In other words, be a flâneur or a psychogeographer.  Good old ironic Jeremy.

Incidentally, or coincidentally, last week’s Sunday Times ran a review of a book titledIn Praise of Walkingby Shane O’Mara, which according to the review is a book that says that walking is a good thing, which to some of us seems about as profound and suprising as saying that the pope defecates in the Vatican.  O’Mara, apparently, collects together all the recent research which says that walking is, you know, a good thing, which no doubt is in itself a good thing.  The reviewer called it ‘Convincing and compelling stuff.”  Yes, honestly.  They couldn’t have got Clarkson to write the review?  Nah, he’d have been way too ironic.

         Incidentally, there’s something about the jacket of In Praise of Walking that looks oddly familiar, can't quite think why.

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