Scarp

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Most of this is delicious nonsense; Reginald, at least, we know to have once been a real thing as well as a regular object of ridicule for Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Jerrold had guided me when I walked out from Sudbury Hill over Horsenden Hill through Perivale to Hanwell and in the course of that walk had teased me with descriptions of early 20th Century Hanger Hill and Twyford Abbey. The mixture of desultory adventure, hallucinatory encounter and close attention to detail and junction irreversibly transforms whatever it was we may have thought `mundane' to be. The experience of looking was greatly altered by the haze of snow, steadily falling as my walk began, and continuing for the rest of the day. Maxwell described a day spent here in 1927 in Just Beyond London under the heading of, ‘The Monks of Middlesex – a haunt of Ancient peace at Twyford Abbey, missed by the growth of the mighty city’.I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw. Posted in Home | Tagged Affinity, archeaology, Charles Swain, Christopher Houlder, Edmund Gosse, Felix Baumgartner, Felix: Lighter V. Merops is an eternal spirit narrating the past and future events in Scarp from his aerial perspective whilst Nick weaves in his own experiences as he comes as close to the ants, hedgehogs and herbs as humanly possible.

This bridge instantly triggered memories of walks with Nick Papadimitriou, starting in the summer of 2005, that often took us over this metal bridge with the Hendon Way pulsing below and views of the distant high ground that would later become the subject of Nick’s celebrated book, Scarp. The prose is sometimes edgy, fast-paced and visceral - but is equally prone to longer passages of lush descriptive work - not least when Papadimitriou strays from a well-worn personal path and finds a new vista just feet from his more routine walks. Some of the prose is interesting, and his observational detail is superb (often too detailed for me). My only demurral is that Papadimitriou repeats the trick a little too often and once he is on the hectic escalator he struggles somewhat to get off meaningfully, ramping up his method while his well-observed concrete specificities crumble away: "I became a squirming toad-like energy spewing forth rats and roaches, disused fire extinguishers rusting in Hemel Hempstead or Stevenage. A counterpoint to the English countryside books written by landowners with meadows and orchards that I will never have.the half ruined half conserved countryside on the edge of London where I started my hiking career with my dad in the 1950s. His great achievement is demonstrating how a long walk can be a meditative healing process where one can forget what is mundane, and reconnect not only with one's inner self, but also with something deeper and even more tangible.

We’re told a great deal about this arrest, but much of his life remains unclear; he is not especially interested in detailing his time in prison or afterwards. Next up in This Other London by John Rogers, a lighter but similarly intentioned account of ten walks – ‘a plunge into the unknown’ – around fairly random parts of London that were previously just strange names on old maps to the author, a film-maker and good egg. It does not surprise me this book won an award, what does surprise me though is the lack of Nick Papadimitriou 'out there' so to speak. Years of study and dreaming in the spare bedroom of his flat have given birth to a series of fantastic journeys .But today the bench was empty and I used it as a place to set up my camera equipment to film the walk for my YouTube channel. If you have not discovered Scarp you are in for a treat and a fabulous journey through Middlesex/south Hertfordshire in a form both different and entertaining. I also ended up listening to some 1970s prog rock ( Kevin Ayers, Egg ) which was mentioned in the strange story of the Gloria Queen of the Psychedelic Ancients of Lower Saxony cult.

I’m trying to get below the surface into something that’s moving in my mind as much as in the landscape,’ he says, which doesn’t say a great deal and is therefore as neat a summary of his obscure methodology as you are likely to find. London is impossibly beautiful in the snow, perhaps because snow seems to cleanse and purify; it softens blemishes (cloaking some of the more horrendous examples of misguided architecture) and renders what is already imposing, such as St Paul’s and the Houses of Parliament and Southwark Cathedral, with an even greater majesty. Unlike Sinclair he doesn't simply talk about his mates or the same worn-out literary connections that he's repeating from earlier books. Ash suspended in the air cast a yellow haze across Montserrat; heavier gray particles settled silently on the windshield as we parked in a clearing at the top of Baker Hill. Scarp utilizes a decidedly unusual thematic throughout, and it's a mixture of memoir, travelogue, fantasy and psychogeography, all taking place within the 17-mile north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment .Our walking buddy Peter Knapp was there taking photos and we ended up on an even greater quest to find IKEA meatballs on the Wembley Trading Estate (the meatballs had all gone by the time we got there). Here the storage vats are hard-drives of footage shot on a series of walks through Nick’s territory around West and Northwest London – Finchley, Stonebridge Park, Perivale, Feltham, Wormwood Scrubs.