The Blasted Heath

This is probably a cliche by now, but always look up when you are wandering. Here's a little example, which you could carry out yourself, not necessarily in the same order.

Stand at the northern end of Leicester Square. Look straight ahead and up, and then move your gaze to the left. after this direct your vision to the left and pan along the top of the Square until you have Cranbourn Strret and the Vue Cinema in your sights. Repeat this experiment facing south at the southern end of the Square. By the way,  did you know that the centre of the square with its lawns has its own name-Leicester Fields and that duels were once frequently fought there?

No matter how uninviting or foul smelling or sinister they might be, always make sure you go into any alley, court, narrow lane or passage you see. I have rarely been disappointed by the discoveries I have made. Do it soon, because increasingly many of these byways are being stopped up and privatised.

Finally always enter upon your wander, ramble, or drift or whatever you want to call it with a sense of adventure, playfulness, wonder and enquiry, if you like with the eyes of a child. Happy Blind Chivvying! ( See my entry on Blind Chivvy for April 5, 2005).

Labels: Blind chivvy, Leicester Fields, Leicester Square, London, Psychogeography, wandering

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