The Blasted Heath

Long before the Situationists went on their psychogeographical jaunts through Paris the decadent poet Ernest Dowson was playing the game of Blind Chivvy. The idea was to find short-cuts or round about routes from one busy area of London to another through "slinking alleys and byways which then were not known to the average London man." (From " A London Phantom by R. Thurston Hopkins).
Hopkins was an acquiantance of the debauched and at times rather nasty Dowson and the above quote is from a ghost story where he and Dowson meet a terrifying figure in the course of their Blind Chivvying. Dowson himself became such a fearful living phantom in the last stages of his absinthism. Anyway, the "rookeries" of St. Giles and Alsatia are gone but it is still possible to play Blind Chivvy in London, if you start off seeing the area you are going to walk through as uncharted territory. I've even done it in my lunchtimes at work. Blind Chivvy is a marvellous game, leading to all sorts of discoveries and also to the pleasure of feeling lost. More about the game and its discoveries in later entries.
Ernest Dowson? See here http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/lost.html

Labels: Blind chivvy, Psychogeography