“[A] slow meandering walk without an obvious goal is sometimes much more enjoyable than going in a straight line from one place to another,” argues Geoff Nicholson. “I’m not even all that persuaded by ‘straightness’ as a virtue in writing either.” That much is evident from Walking On Thin Air. Over the course of its 99 succinct chapters or “steps”, the writer reflects on episodes in his personal and professional life, and on his particular obsession with walking, while pointedly rejecting the labels of “psychogeographer” or “flaneur”.
The route he takes is decidedly non-linear, though, with countless diversions along the way: on trying to find Joan Didion’s house in LA; on Jorge Luis Borges’ collection of walking sticks; on Garry Winogrand’s street photography; on the extreme art of the Vienna Actionists; on the perennial youth appeal of Jack Kerouac’s writing (“the openness, the vulnerability, the sense that the world is a place full of possibilities”); on the fact that Andy Warhol’s last public walk, in 1987, was “at a fashion show, on stage with Miles Davis”.
Nicholson was prompted to write Walking On Thin Air because he himself will take his last walk sooner rather than later, having been diagnosed with incurable cancer – but is facing his fate with stoic acceptance. “I wouldn’t say that intimations of mortality and potential immobility have put a spring in my step, but they have concentrated my mind,” he writes. “Every walk, any walk, now seems just a little more intense, a little more urgent, than it used to.” This pithy, erudite yet resolutely unpretentious book is a celebration of the invigorating, inspiring pleasures of strolling just for the sake of it.
Walking On Thin Air: A Life’s Journey In 99 Steps, Geoff Nicholson (The Westbourne Press)
Price: £12.99. Info: here
words BEN WOOLHEAD