WALKING STRANDED

 

Look, I find this whole renunciation of the gender specific pronoun thing as perplexing as 

anyone else does, and this headline on the BBC website didn’t help much:

 

The first confusion here is obviously whether it was one person or several people, but as you read on it becomes apparent it was just one, which was a partial clarification, and then the sub headline read: ‘A walker who was left stranded on a sandbank had not heard warnings from lifeguards because they were wearing headphones,' - so far so gender-neutral but then, 'his rescuers said.’

         ‘They’ suggests multitudes, ‘his rescuers’ confirms it was one bloke.  

The report in the Telegraph, which didn’t doubt that it was a dude, reported an RNLI spokesman (NB) as saying ‘Please be aware of the tide when visiting the beach.’

         Given that the RNLI had been called out to rescue this (male) walking fool who was too busy grooving on his playlist to notice that the effin tide was coming in, I think the spokesman might have said something a bit gamier.  But he, or possibly they, is or are, a model, or models, of restraint.  

          That’s a good thing, right?

 

JUST LIKE CROSSING OVER

I wouldn’t say I ever had serious ambitions to be a ‘real’ photographer, but I did used to 

fantasize about it once in a while.  I suppose I still do. I never wanted to be a fashion 

photographer or a war photographer or a landscape photographer: I wanted to be a street 

photographer, you  know like Winogrand, Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Gilden.  It’s a genre that 

allows, in fact demands, the photographer does a lot of walking.

 

Susan Sontag backs me up on this. ‘The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world "picturesque".’

 

Well that’s good enough for me, although over the years people have come to disapprove of the term ‘shooting’ to describe taking pictures so lord knows how we’re supposed to feel about being ‘armed.’

 

Therefore, given the previous post about Rainbow crossings, I thought you might like to see some street photography of people crossing the road, in some cases waiting to cross the road.

CROSSING THE CROSSING

  

What better way of celebrating International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia than by painting a pedestrian crossing blue, white and pink?  

Councillor Jake Short, lead member for Equalities, said: ‘I’m delighted to see this celebration of the richness and diversity that our transgender community brings to Sutton.  Our hope is that this trans crossing will pave the way for more trans crossings around the UK which in turn would lead to more inclusivity in our society at large.’  Pave the way – you see what he did there.

In fact Sutton already had a Rainbow Crossing in St Nicholas Way:

 

There are a few of them around the place – this one’s in Nottingham:

        Gotta say all those crossing look a bit straight.

        I don’t know much about Sutton but I do know that the Rolling Stones were ‘spotted’ 

there by the legendary Giorgio Gomelsky.  Yes, they walked diversely:

And I know that Sutton was the birthplace or temporary home of Sally Bercow, Joan Armatrading, Noel Coward and Quentin Crisp.  What a rainbow of talent!

I haven’t been able to find a photograph of Quentin Crisp crossing the road, in Sutton or anywhere else, but I dare say he didn’t need a special crossing – he took a rainbow with him everywhere he went. 

 

 

^I 

 

 

BACK IN THE HIGH LIFE

 

Does everybody but me know the term ‘backshot’? I took the photograph below, in 

London, somewhere near Limehouse, thinking it was the name of a ‘street artist,’ and I 

suppose it may be, but I now understand it’s also the word for a sexual practice, not an 

especially unfamiliar one, but I had no idea there was a word for it.  Ah London – always an 

education.

Yes I was back in London last week, after (OMG!!!) a 9 month absence.  The best thing I can say is that apart from people wearing masks it didn’t look or feel very different from pre-Lockdown days.  Yes, the pubs offer table service only, but I reckon that’s an improvement.

 

I wasn’t on a walking trip per se but of course I ended up walking all over the place, through Soho to the Photographers Gallery to see two exhibitions, again neither of them specifically about walking, although walking featured in both.  One was titled From Here to Eternity by Sunil Gupta, about being gay in India – apparently it’s a lot easier than it used to be, 

 

though not as easy as it was in New York in the 70s:

 

There was also Evgenia Arbugaeva’s Hyperborea – Stories from the Russian Arctic which was just fabulous.  I think there’s only a limited amount of walking to be done in those parts, but when you get out there it’s pretty spectacular:

Then a walk with an old mate from Sheffield who took us to the Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park.  Is it a cemetery?  Is it a park?  It's BOTH!!

    You want obelisks?  They got obelisks.

 

And the next day a walk along the King’s Road to the Chelsea Physic Garden - I had a coupon.  There was a plant sale (if you like that kind of thing). There was also a bloke standing next to a speaker.  

 

I think he had a microphone, but there were no turntables, which was a shame in some ways.  In other ways perhaps not.

 

WALKING THE SOIL

 I was doing some idle googling along the lines of ‘What makes a good walk?’ ‘What do 

people look for in a walk?’ and so on, because I’m not certain that I really know.  Growth, 

good mental healthy, inspiration, enlightenment, communion with nature, all seem to be in 

the frame, and I’m not so crass as to belittle these things, but other people’s absolute 

certainty about walking does worry me a bit.  Isn’t there room for ambivalence and doubt?

 

In my googling I found a 2016 article by Kevin Rushby in the Guardian headlined  ‘What makes a great walk.’  Kevin is not trouble by uncertainty. He writes, ‘What makes a great walk remains the gift of nature: the subtle alchemy of landscape, elements and path that is transformed into a dramatic stage for your pleasure and experience by the magical spell of your own tramping feet.’

 

Well, I dunno. What I currently look for in a walk, as I pursue two of my ongoing minor obsessions, are obelisks and bunkers.  So imagine my delight when I discovered that Great Oakley in Essex has one of each.  My amanuensis and I set off on a field trip.

 

The obelisk, as I discovered, is part of a war memorial right in the center of the village, in the middle of a very small car park.  It’s solid and a bit stubby but it’s most definitely an obelisk.  A plaque on it says it was originally dedicated in 1920, then restored and rededicate in 2009, which seems rather a long time.  It was wet when I was there.  It used to look like this, when it was dry:

 

 

I read on the Imperial War Museum site that it was designed by an architect name of Vincent Brown about whom I can find no information

 

The ‘bunker’ is in fact a World War 2 pillbox, a fortification against the possible invading German troops. According to a notice board on the side of the structure, there were steel cables running across the road from the pillbox to a couple of concrete posts (which must really have thrilled the local farmers), and there were also barrels of petrol buried in the ground nearby. The inside looks like this

 

But what makes this pillbox special, as you may have spotted, it’s in somebody's front garden.  I think I’d like to have a pillbox or bunker in my garden.  Think of the photo-shoots, the parties, the ‘sound experiments’ with Theremins and drone machines, the war reenactments, the Sadean high jinx.

 

You might have to put up with people staring into your garden but that’d be a small price to pay.

 

Of course any good walk contains a mystery.  Walking east along the main road, past a new stretch of suburbia you come to a sign for The Soils.  Again, my research has failed me.  I don’t know is this refers to the earth, as in the Parable of the Soil, or whether it’s as in ‘I soiled myself’ and might be the site of a former dung heap of midden.

 

Nearby there is Soils Wood, so maybe it’s the name of a local grandee.  

 

Back in the village, should you need an encounter with nature (and agriculture) there was a big field of rape, with mud that looked like it would have swallowed you up to the knees.  That’s some subtle alchemy all right.