War of the Walks
Often I see clusters of people on those guided walking tours around Montmartre. I watch as the different tour groups clash together in a bottleneck on Rue Lepic, wondering if perhaps a hapless Amelie fan tracing the steps of her idol from the Amelie cafe to the Sacre Coeur, is going to get disorientated in the mosh, and find herself walking away with the wrong tour party on the sex and dragons tour through the brothels and strip clubs of Pigalle.
I think back to my own foray into chartered walks when I was living in London. My mop-headed sleuth friend decided it might be interesting, criminologically speaking, to take the Jack the Ripper tour around London's east end, run by a company called London Walks. Quite liking the idea of being spooked in the London fog, one evening I tagged along with him to the appointed meeting place, somewhere on the banks of the Thames.
London Walks seems to have the monopoly on walking in London. If you're going to walk, London Walks will show you how to do it. When we arrived we realised that what we thought was going to be a cosy, night promenade with one or two other people, was in fact going to be an efficiently operated walk in rows of ten (a bit like the distinction between chatting and conversation we would definitely be walking not ambling). Mild-mannered gore-seekers would finish as objective scholars of this nineteenth century whodunnit, which mysteriously pokes out of the history of London's east end.
At least forty or fifty people had assembled for the walk, and as we watched the cruise ship of people set sail down the road in the direction of the murder sites of Jack the Ripper's victims, we had doubts as to whether to bother following.
Below the voices of the departing crowd, we heard a `psssst psssst' and turned to see a portly man in his mid-fifties, dressed in sweaty clothes, with straggly greyblue hair and eyes which seemed to be stinging from alcohol or knowledge. He was holding above his head a torn and sweat-stained sign that said "The Real Jack the Ripper Walking Tour, over here", with an arrow pointing down at himself.
"Come here, quick", he said with a fearful glance over his shoulder to make sure the gods who operated the London Walks weren't watching. "I'm not supposed to do this," he explained, "it's London Walks who have this timeslot and the authorisation to take a tour from this point, but i'm a direct descendant of Jack the Ripper."
"I thought they don't know who Jack the Ripper was?" I said.
"There are theories," he swiped my words out of the way like they were belligerent wasps, "and mine is the definitive theory and I am the authority on the truth, a truthsayer. Plus with my walk you get to visit one extra murder site for one less pound!" Then he began to rant that London Walks was the Mcdonalds of walking: "like fries and shakes and sundaes, they are all made from the same substance, just cut into different shapes and sizes. All of the London Walks are the same, just packaged differently."
As the London Walks group was now gone, heading towards the belly of the East End, a couple of fresh-faced American girls and a few other wannabe walkers who had arrived late, assumed that this guy was the tour leader for the London Walks of which they had read such spankingly good reviews in their guide books.
As we commenced our tour I noticed yet another even more crumpled man standing nearby, feebly holding a post-it note with the words: "The REAL Jack the Ripper tour over here". The war of the walks.
Perhaps alarm bells started dinging for the other people in the tour party when our tour guide produced a dirty old scrap book full of, well, scraps - scraps of paper a bit like vegetable peelings with words scurrying across them written by a hasty pen, as well as haggard newspaper clippings. "I'm a ripperologist," he said proudly, "a true Ripper scholar. I've written a book on who did it, why he did it, how he did it, he explained as we walked down endless dark east end streets. One woman's scrap is another man's authority.
I guess I don't remember most of his theories, I was just content to be walking and exploring in the dark. But our guide had a lot of theories on Jack the Ripper and a lot of theories on London Walks and a general desire for its demise. Apparently as well as being a Jack the Ripper expert he was an expert on east end botany, beachcombing the Thames, and a whole host of other specialisms which were monopolised by London Walks, the daddy of walking.
My quiet harmony was disrupted when a drunken guy hanging out the door of a pub tried to physically attack our unruffled tour leader (who was really just an eccentric and passionate ripperologist rather than a malicious ghoul), accusing him of disrespecting the dead and us of being morbid for going to look at the sites where working women had been murdered. I started to feel uneasy. Always interested in history and walking around in the dark, i'd never seen my curiosity as disrespect.
Already jittery from the near death of our tour guide, things took another unruly turn down a black alley. Our guide grabbed one of the fresh-faced girls in the darkest point of the street and used her as `volunteer' victim to demonstrate how Jack the Ripper committed a lust murder in this spot, vigorously aiming his plastic knife in the direction of her groin with relevant sound effects, while the unimpressed (and downright frightened) girl's face glowed white in the dark.
Things could have gone awry there, but our bold tour guide's pace started to quicken and it appeared his interest in ripperology had started to wane when he vaguely indicated another dark bridge in the distance `there was a murder over there', before hurrying us all into what now manifested itself as the ultimate and most important goal of the tour - a beer at the pub en route.
Over a pint and his provided snack of sultanas and cheese (which he cut with the same plastic knife he had used for his earlier demonstration), we came to the conclusion that people who go on Jack the Ripper walks aren't necessarily the most socially skilled or don't necessarily have anything in common. About six of us, wannabe ripperologists, were just worn out mouses, with nothing to say. Until someone made the mistake of mentioning London Walks and our guide went hurtling down his favourite tangent, cursing and spitting out sultanas to punctuate his words.
I think back to my own foray into chartered walks when I was living in London. My mop-headed sleuth friend decided it might be interesting, criminologically speaking, to take the Jack the Ripper tour around London's east end, run by a company called London Walks. Quite liking the idea of being spooked in the London fog, one evening I tagged along with him to the appointed meeting place, somewhere on the banks of the Thames.
London Walks seems to have the monopoly on walking in London. If you're going to walk, London Walks will show you how to do it. When we arrived we realised that what we thought was going to be a cosy, night promenade with one or two other people, was in fact going to be an efficiently operated walk in rows of ten (a bit like the distinction between chatting and conversation we would definitely be walking not ambling). Mild-mannered gore-seekers would finish as objective scholars of this nineteenth century whodunnit, which mysteriously pokes out of the history of London's east end.
At least forty or fifty people had assembled for the walk, and as we watched the cruise ship of people set sail down the road in the direction of the murder sites of Jack the Ripper's victims, we had doubts as to whether to bother following.
Below the voices of the departing crowd, we heard a `psssst psssst' and turned to see a portly man in his mid-fifties, dressed in sweaty clothes, with straggly greyblue hair and eyes which seemed to be stinging from alcohol or knowledge. He was holding above his head a torn and sweat-stained sign that said "The Real Jack the Ripper Walking Tour, over here", with an arrow pointing down at himself.
"Come here, quick", he said with a fearful glance over his shoulder to make sure the gods who operated the London Walks weren't watching. "I'm not supposed to do this," he explained, "it's London Walks who have this timeslot and the authorisation to take a tour from this point, but i'm a direct descendant of Jack the Ripper."
"I thought they don't know who Jack the Ripper was?" I said.
"There are theories," he swiped my words out of the way like they were belligerent wasps, "and mine is the definitive theory and I am the authority on the truth, a truthsayer. Plus with my walk you get to visit one extra murder site for one less pound!" Then he began to rant that London Walks was the Mcdonalds of walking: "like fries and shakes and sundaes, they are all made from the same substance, just cut into different shapes and sizes. All of the London Walks are the same, just packaged differently."
As the London Walks group was now gone, heading towards the belly of the East End, a couple of fresh-faced American girls and a few other wannabe walkers who had arrived late, assumed that this guy was the tour leader for the London Walks of which they had read such spankingly good reviews in their guide books.
As we commenced our tour I noticed yet another even more crumpled man standing nearby, feebly holding a post-it note with the words: "The REAL Jack the Ripper tour over here". The war of the walks.
Perhaps alarm bells started dinging for the other people in the tour party when our tour guide produced a dirty old scrap book full of, well, scraps - scraps of paper a bit like vegetable peelings with words scurrying across them written by a hasty pen, as well as haggard newspaper clippings. "I'm a ripperologist," he said proudly, "a true Ripper scholar. I've written a book on who did it, why he did it, how he did it, he explained as we walked down endless dark east end streets. One woman's scrap is another man's authority.
I guess I don't remember most of his theories, I was just content to be walking and exploring in the dark. But our guide had a lot of theories on Jack the Ripper and a lot of theories on London Walks and a general desire for its demise. Apparently as well as being a Jack the Ripper expert he was an expert on east end botany, beachcombing the Thames, and a whole host of other specialisms which were monopolised by London Walks, the daddy of walking.
My quiet harmony was disrupted when a drunken guy hanging out the door of a pub tried to physically attack our unruffled tour leader (who was really just an eccentric and passionate ripperologist rather than a malicious ghoul), accusing him of disrespecting the dead and us of being morbid for going to look at the sites where working women had been murdered. I started to feel uneasy. Always interested in history and walking around in the dark, i'd never seen my curiosity as disrespect.
Already jittery from the near death of our tour guide, things took another unruly turn down a black alley. Our guide grabbed one of the fresh-faced girls in the darkest point of the street and used her as `volunteer' victim to demonstrate how Jack the Ripper committed a lust murder in this spot, vigorously aiming his plastic knife in the direction of her groin with relevant sound effects, while the unimpressed (and downright frightened) girl's face glowed white in the dark.
Things could have gone awry there, but our bold tour guide's pace started to quicken and it appeared his interest in ripperology had started to wane when he vaguely indicated another dark bridge in the distance `there was a murder over there', before hurrying us all into what now manifested itself as the ultimate and most important goal of the tour - a beer at the pub en route.
Over a pint and his provided snack of sultanas and cheese (which he cut with the same plastic knife he had used for his earlier demonstration), we came to the conclusion that people who go on Jack the Ripper walks aren't necessarily the most socially skilled or don't necessarily have anything in common. About six of us, wannabe ripperologists, were just worn out mouses, with nothing to say. Until someone made the mistake of mentioning London Walks and our guide went hurtling down his favourite tangent, cursing and spitting out sultanas to punctuate his words.
posted by pinochiette at 12:38 PM
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