Off topic

One of the dilemmas I created for myself when I started this blog and gave it the title The Walking Fool was what to do during those extended periods when I was not only not walking, but also not thinking much about walking. Back when I'd completed the Nakasendo walk and was really into running, I even considered starting up a completely new blog called…The Running Fool.

As you can see from the list of labels at left, I have written on quite a few different topics over the years. However, many of these topics are either directly or indirectly related to walking, and as I've mentioned previously, a lot of my posts (including this one) are composed at least partly in my head while I'm out walking (in this case to the supermarket and back). In the end, it just doesn’t feel right to write in this blog about things not related to walking in some form or another.

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that since I got back from walking the Tokaido nearly two months ago, I've hardly done any walking at all. So what have I been up to?

One thing I've been doing is refining my cooking skills. I'm working on perfecting recipes for a couple of things I've always wanted to have in my culinary repertoire: one a good vegetarian curry, and the other a good dahl. Judging by Mrs Fool's reaction, I'm definitely making progress on both.

I've also been reading quite a lot. I finally got around to reading Edmund White's The Flâneur, which is one of the books I bought in Wellington when I was up there for the Wellington Jazz Festival. It's a quirky and well-written volume, more a personal guide to and history of Paris than a book about walking per se. The Paris Commune was mentioned a couple of times, but there was no mention of the Situationists, surprising given the similarities (superficial though they may be) between the "drifting" of the Situationists and the favourite activity of the flaneur, described on the back cover as "someone who ambles without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the street he walks - and is in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic."

I've also read a couple more John Rain thrillers (including one I bought in Tokyo at the end of the Tokaido walk), which means I've now read all but one in the series. Incidentally, on my last day in Tokyo I'd intended to have lunch at one of the real-life restaurants frequented by John Rain, Las Chicas. I spent ages roaming the backstreets of Aoyama searching for it (I'd checked its location on the restaurant's website before leaving New Zealand and was pretty sure I knew where it was) but to no avail. Next time I'll take a map.

With my pile of unread books severely depleted and the New Zealand dollar the strongest it's been for many months, yesterday I logged onto Amazon and ordered three items from my Wish List. The first is Werner Herzog's Of Walking in Ice, the account of the film director's journey on foot from Munich to Paris to which I've previously referred. The second is Rain Storm by Barry Eisler (yes, it's the one John Rain novel I haven't read). And the third is Revolution in the Head: The Beatles' Records and the Sixties by Ian MacDonald.

That third item probably demands some explanation. Well, I was a serious Beatles fan in my teens, and I've recently started listening to their music again and watching some of their live performances on YouTube, a medium that wasn't around when I was at high school (this was back in the days of vinyl). I read about this book, which is a song-by-song analysis of every song ever released by the group, in a discussion in the comments section of Russell Brown's blog, Hard News, and thought it sounded really interesting. Coincidentally, another post on the same blog made just a few days earlier led to an equally fascinating discussion about food, with dahl featuring prominently.