Despite walking nearly 25 miles, I still hadn’t reached Leighton Buzzard, site of childhood holidays and source of my first Robert E. Howard Conan book (as described earlier). I had gone to sleep in the MK hotel to the sounds of drunken revelry turning nasty, closing-time shouting and what sounded like barking police dogs from seven floors below. No evidence remained in the empty square this sunny morning.

For the second week running, I enjoyed a solitary breakfast, and headed to the station – walking like the Tin Woodman in the aftermath of yesterday’s exertions.

The train took me back to Leighton Buzzard station, actually in Linslade. When we came here on holiday I would have extra pocket money, which I would use to buy various books and comics. I always seemed to find unexpected delights, an unexpected new Jack Kirby comic, for instance, so Leighton has always seemed like the source of abundant blessings. However, as I walked towards it, early impressions were of a run-down town, and I was resigned to the place of idyllic memories having become an unrecognisable Dystopia. For a moment, ‘the borders of life shrivelled and the lines of existence closed in’ as they did for Conan when in the grip of the ‘the unreasoning melancholy of the Cimmerian’

I walked up to WHSmiths, not really knowing what to expect or what, specifically, I was looking for. It was market day, and a stall outside sold graphic novels – a good omen, as if this was some special site for the fantastic, a ley line intersection of pulp imaginings.

Inside, on my patch of personal holy ground, I walked through the modern-day Smiths – dirty, down at heel and directionless (the shop that is). I looked at the fiction shelves, knowing of course that Robert E. Howard books were unlikely to be there for today’s 13-year-olds to find. But… I was wrong. Not only was there an REH book, but one I didn’t already have – The Haunter of the Ring, a collection of supernatural yarns.

Buoyed by this find, I strolled slowly around the sunny market square. The book, the fine day, the trader offering a cabbage and a cauli for one pound fifty, the two old Polish guys smoking on the steps of the Market Cross – all seemed like a reminder that, as Howard wrote (giving his barbarian hero a bipolar upswing), ‘Life was good and real and vibrant after all, not the dream of an idiot god’.

Soon it would be time to get the train back to MK, then home. For now I was glad that the place I remembered seemed in good spirits. Easier to let go of the past knowing that some of its places are carrying on by themselves in a good style.

Wanting an early start, I walked down the empty Midsummer Boulevard to get the first X5 bus to Buckingham at 5.50. The heatwave seemed to have broken, the air an aspic gray.

The bus was quite full of long-haul travellers headed for Oxford and early-shift workers. As we sped along the A421 I realised that I had left my map in the hotel. It would have been perfectly possible to buy a return ticket and go back, but to do so would have seemed somehow… ignoble. I resolved to find one in Buckingham. The bus set me down outside Tesco, where I had finished the last leg. The supermarket was open 24 hours, and I bought supplies for the day. No maps on offer however. Ditto the Total garage. Tesco’s own garage had maps – it even had the orange Explorer maps that I use – just not the one I needed. So I headed into town to wait for WHSmiths to open, a 90-minute wait, watching the town come to life in a gray drizzle – beginning to feel a Conanic ‘gigantic melancholy’.

However, by 8.35 and I had the right map in my hand. Back-up plans involving the library (open at 9.30, would definitely have maps but may have applied strict copyright laws and forbidden photocopying) and the University bookshop (open a 10 and would have been the last resort) were not required. A Subway was open too, so I treated myself to a coffee and set off through parks by the Great Ouse.

Soon the Bernwood Jubileee Way took me beyond the A421 to countryside. In contrast to last week’s sunny walking,the grey wet landscape was cheerless, like Conan’s Cimmeria, as he describes it in The Phoenix on the Sword: ‘A gloomier land never existed on earth. It is all of hills, heavily wooded…Clouds hang always among those hills; the skies are nearly always gray…There is little mirth in that land.’

The fields were lush and wet with rain, so that walking through them gave my legs a cold shower and turned me into a seed-bearer.

Soon my boots were filled with water and I squished the rest of the day (although the boots themselves are waterproof, I’m guessing the socks drew moisture in from my sopping trousers.)

A bit of the dismantled railway line and some road walking took me towards the Padbury Brook. Part of the path crossed a field waist-deep in plants – don’t know what they are, but the flower-heads looked as if they will flower soon – future walkers will be wading through a pink sea, buzzing with bees.

I got lost on the brook and had to navigate my way back on to the route. Moral: it’s never the compass or map that’s wrong, it’s always you.

Fed up now of walking along soaking, vague pathways and roads with cars regularly swishing past, I was contemplating finding a rural bus and giving up. A disused railway came as my salvation. The stretch of the Oxford-Bletchley line still has tracks, albeit broken and grown through with foxgloves and saplings, and isn’t an official cycleway or any kind of leisure amenity. Walking along it seems neither forbidden nor compulsory. I followed it for around 2.5 miles to Winslow, enjoying its overgrown hidden world, like a ruined future or a branch line for ghost trains.

It was brightening up now, so much so that I was able to shed layers of clothing. I walked through Winslow and on to Swanbourne, where I stopped for a drink in The Betsey Wynne. This new pub, built by the Swanbourne Estate and named after a famous diarist of the Napoleonic era, was very pleasant – somehow combining a Milton-Keynes-style spacious anonymity with a rural feel. I wished I had got there early enough to sample their locally-produced food, having lived on oat bars for 10 miles.

And we were back to ’summer classic’, with blue skies and white clouds as I walked on to Stewkley and Soulbury, approaching places dimly recalled from childhood holidays. The countryside resembled that I walked through last week, perhaps because I had resumed the walk too quickly, so that ‘they’ had not had time to assemble any new. “Do not make too much haste on one’s road” says Chilon of Sparta, wisely in my view.

The going was easier now, through green lanes and open fields. The hedges were lush and overgrown, so one never quite knew what a new stile would reveal.

Not much more to say – I was aching from the long walk (GPS clocked over 24 miles, mostly done with sodden feet) and marched through the last few miles of summer fields largely oblivious.

On the final bit of road towards Linslade, I found this drinking fountain, on a stretch of road now fit only for cars, built for Victoria’s Jubilee and restored for Elizabeth’s in 1977. Instead of water it offered me this ‘vomiting lion’ motif.

Limped into Linslade. It was too late to go to Conan’s realm of Leighton Buzzard, so I found the station; chatted about I-Spy with the ticket guy (I now wear the badge); got back to MK and walked up the Boulevard. Decided to eat at Wetherspoons as I didn’t think I’d have the energy to come out again once I reached the hotel. I love this building: newly built, like a giant car showroom, but with corners of wood-panelling like a screensaver of pubbishness. The Atlantis flyer had been replaced with one for an Independence Day beer due to go on sale the next day, July 4th. I put on headphones and listened to Astral Weeks, a favourite summer album, blocking out the soundtrack of the bar. My other senses heightened, I noticed how two separate lone men were muttering to themselves, checked I wasn’t doing the same (maybe mouthing Van’s lines about ‘the viaducts of your dreams’), smelled delicious roll-up smoke drifting in from the bright terrace, tasted the clear brown depths of beer while the young couple next to me drank champagne. As the Buddhists at the nearby Peace Pagoda may do on occasion, I radiated waves of love and compassion outwards in ever-increasing circles, across the MK street grid, the Buckinghamshire fields and the sunken lands where made-up adventures happen.

Map

Photos

Photo-map

The last two days of walking have been triangulated against some kind of literature. The next will be no exception, as I am heading for Leighton Buzzard where, back in about 1974, I bought a book that has retained great meaning for me over the years – Conan of Cimmeria. This paperback, which I have in my bag, was the first collection of Conan stories I read. Robert E. Howard’s sword-and-sorcery hero captivated my teenage imagination – stories about a marvellous world combining every kind of adventure story, full of scary monsters a bit like those of H.P. Lovecraft, but with a hero who prevailed over them rather than passively subsiding into insanity as HPL’s protagonists tended to do. For me, the Hyborian Age started in the WHSmith in Leighton Buzzard, LU7 7DN – accessing a rich seam of pulp literature, and a sense that one should (as the Quakers say) ‘live adventurously’. So revisiting the place is an essential milestone on this walk.

“Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet” wrote Howard, describing what we might now call a ‘portfolio career’ – rather than specialising in, say, ‘reaving’ as a job-for-life, Conan use his transferable skills through many roles – buccaneer, mercenary, king etc. Similarly, I have multiple roles (albeit less colourful – ‘Hither came Mister Roy, a marketeer, a science fiction fan…’ doesn’t set the pulse racing). Whereas Conan tends to progress from one thing to another, my various aspects all seem to coexist, which can make me feel like the leader of a small unruly squadron, always threatening to deploy the wrong technique at the right time: doing a business presentation as a piece of performance art, turning a poem into a marketing matrix.

Life is complex like that and I guess we’re all mashups of diverse elements. As well as multiple identities, there are multiple realities to negotiate. In a great piece about London, Michael Moorcock suggest that creation of virtual identities and virtual living environments is a survival strategy, effective ‘as long as we’re fully conscious’, and talks about psychogeography as the recovery of lost London. Personally, I’m not from London, so I don’t have those particular ancient paths to rediscover. My quest is to stitch together the places and times where I’ve ended up, virtual or otherwise; an assemblage of cities, towns and villages and the unknown tracts of lands in between. Which is why I’m walking, trying to explore my own real/virtual worlds by physically slogging through them. Rather than psychogeography I’m calling what I’m doing autobiogeography – a conflation of ‘autobiography’ and ‘geography’, but also the ‘biogeography of myself’ – my own physical (blood sweat blisters and local real ale) interaction with places. As well as walking I’m creating this meandering document, like Conan in his throne-room, drawing a map of the semi-legendary places he had wandered through, because the official ones were ‘vague and faulty’ concerning his ‘northern countries’.

All of which brings me to be walking up Midsummer Boulevard in Milton Keynes, on a hot midsummer night. I haven’t discovered any evidence of Conan’s prehistoric Hyborian Age, but in a Wetherspoons I find unexpected evidence of an even more ancient world – a flyer for an art show called All Hail Atlantis, vortex of illumination.

Milton Keynes isn’t actually on the walk, but will be my base for two nights while I try a haul from Buckingham to Leighton Buzzard. This is the longest time I’ve spent in MK and the experience of visiting the centre is very enjoyable – I love the spacious walkways and unbroken modern-ness. Perhaps I’m appreciating what J.G. Ballard described as ‘the ambiguous but heady charms of alienation and anonymity’. The Encore hotel, a new sub-brand of simple-cheap-efficient sleeping machines launched by the Ramada chain, seems intent on counterbalancing any alienation with words: they are ‘exciting, passionate, fresh, stylish, vibrant, upbeat and refreshing’. By Crom, that’s a lot of adjectives – qualities I hope will infuse me during a long walk.

On Sunday morning I awoke in the Crown Inn, an old hotel in the market town of Brackley. I resolved to get away quickly rather than waiting for the 8am breakfast. However this plan was foiled by the fact that no-one was around to take my money. Rather than do a runner into the rapidly-heating morning, I whiled away some time in the room, looking out on the backs of other buildings and imagining a desert-landscape in the bad paintjob of the windowsill.

The interlude gave me some time to read the June section of Mere England, a long poem about Buckinghamshire by J.H.B. Peel written in 1946 – switching poets from ‘Northampton’ John Clare as I prepared to switch counties. Peel (minor to the point of subatomicness compared to Clare) wrote ‘What other heaven is there to compare/with noon along the lanes and in the fields?’ but I feared the debilitating heat of ‘the prime of the summer’, wondering if I could carry enough water to keep hydrated through the long hours.

The hotel woke up and I had a solitary breakfast in the restaurant, lachrymose pop providing an incongruous soundtrack, some sad bleating about Avalon that was neither Roxy Music nor Van Morrison.

I got on the way about 8.20, giving Brackley a last look, white balloons on town hall tower and names of old battlegrounds on the war memorial. I get the impression that Brackley is a motor-racing town, with fading photos of Grand Prix winners framed on the hotel walls, pit stop men in the pubs, and high-tech F1 supply chain manufacturers building headquarters on the outskirts.

The walk started through parkland, and progressed through fields and woods…

…I picked up a disused railway for part of the time…

…all beneath what Peel refers to as ‘this gaudy sun, this pith of pomp/this emblem god, this other universe’ – so hot that I could barely think beyond navigating to the next stile.

I made a deliberate detour to visit a tiny village called Water Stratford, because of this passage from Highways and Byways in Buckinghamshire (1910):

Water Stratford was once the scene of great religious excitement. Its rector between 1674 and 1694 was one John Mason. Towards the close of his career he became a fanatic who believed that he was Elias, and he persuaded thousands of people in the neighbouring country to believe this also. They called Water Stratford “Mount Zion”, and great numbers of his disciples sold their property, left their homes and went to live in barns and tents until the day of judgement, which they imagined was only a few months hence. The service included dancing, clapping of hands, and wild shrieking, with singing to the violin, tabor and pipe. Some shouted while they danced “Appear, Appear, Appear.” Mason foretold his own resurrection after three days, and his successor as rector, Isaac Rushworth, actually had his predecessor’s grave opened and the body exposed to the public view in the hope of convincing the deluded people that their “Elias” had not prophesied accurately. Not withstanding this there were followers of Mason assembled here for long years afterwards.

The village and surrounding fields are very quiet now, and it is hard to imagine an ecstatic mini-Glastonbury taking place here. I had assumed that this would be a forgotten episode in Church and local history, but in fact a plaque has been erected to Mason, and a more balanced story of his life and achievements is being told. Time ameliorates many things. There is a carving over the church doorway, presumably Christ with angels, perhaps a second coming.

The face, through some combination of erosion and the artist’s original intention, has been smoothed and simplified to that of an everyman, Buddha-serene in the heart of a lightning-armed Apocalypse, a cosmic Christ as the Human One, forever breaking into the present moment.

I walked on to Tingewick, a village about a mile away, where I stopped for a drink in the Royal Oak. Consumption of Greene King IPA powered an urge to walk on to Milton Keynes, a further 14 miles or so on top of this day’s 10 and the previous day’s 13.5 – partly bravado and partly a desire not to leave any loose ends. Fortunately I thought better of it and, too tired to take many pictures, limped into Buckingham via a golf course, some reclaimed parkland and a university zone – campus of the only private University to be chartered in this country so far, an enterprise beloved of Maggie Thatcher – so you could say I was visiting Thatcher’s Britain for a few minutes.

I found the bus stop (Tesco Stop C) to get to Milton Keynes and the train home, an extra hard mile as the Tesco in question was on the ring-roaded outskirts, rather than the Tesco Express in the town centre.

The busride gave me a chance to finish J.H.B. Peel’s poem, feeling desperately uncool enjoying the rhyming couplets of the foxhunting Lieutenant, but unable not to respond to his passionate declarations about identity fusing with place, so that ‘non-attachment’s shrug is weak to quell/this loving fire that glows and fans itself.’

Three days later and it’s still hot. My bag is packed for the next leg, not quite feeling a Peelish delight with this heatwave (’Giddy the soul in the morning/as week upon week weathers fine,/drunk with delight in the evening,/drunk of a wine all divine’) but it’ll do, it’ll do.

—

Map

Map with photos

Photos

Back to doing an early morning flit to start the walk; first train out of Ormskirk at 5.50, feeling strangely fragile after a headlong week of work and some sad passings. Seeking cheerful energy, I played a song I remembered as a fun summer tune, the Piranhas’ version of Tom Hark – but in my enervated dawn state it sounded like some kind of seaside apocalypse with its talk of ‘World War Three’ and ’slapstick in the pantomime’.

I rallied as we approached Banbury. I had assumed that I would walk out of Oxfordshire into Buckinghamshire, but looking at the map on the train I realised that I would actually be spending most of the day in Northants. This bothered me as I like to have some kind of image-fuel for the journey, a sense however tangential of the mythology of the place I’m walking through – otherwise all I’d be doing is looking at scenery and thinking things like ‘yes, that is indeed a hill.’

‘A bush, I believe’

I put out an appeal on the aether and got a recommendation in the form of a query: ‘John Clare?’. This led me to seek out Books & Ink, a pleasant bookshop that did indeed have some books by Clare, agricultural labourer and poet, b1793 d1864. Armed with reading material I adjourned to The Exchange, a Wetherspoons pub, for a second breakfast and some reading time. In this rather subaquatic early-morning-alcoholic territory, I scanned the Clare pieces. Turns out he made a famous journey home once – escaping from an asylum in Epping Forest and walking for four days back to his home in Northamptonshire. He was also ‘devastated by [the] violation of… the open field system’ resulting from the Act of Enclosure. This process destroyed  common ground, accompanied by felling of trees and the creation of straight-line ditches, and Clare wrote poems mourning the passing of the the open land. I resolved to stay aware of ‘enclosure’ as I might encounter it on today’s ‘Careless Rambles’, see how my attempt to ‘wander at my idle will/In summers luscious prime about the fields’ would intersect with various grids of control by paying attention to the ownership of the spaces I walked through.

Returning to the Castle Quay shopping centre where I had finished walking last month, I arranged myself with sunscreen and other defences against the ‘liquid blaze’ of the sun, and set off along the Oxford Canal. My chosen pastime of spotting ‘enclosure’ is almost redundant as everything seems demarcated, fenced, named, owned and overseen by CCTV.

These areas are like the subconscious or maybe conscience of the town – a place for unwanted and hidden things: clutches of empty cans and bottles punctuating the embankments, residua of drinking exercises too freeform and low-cost to be contained even within the expansive hours of Wetherspoons.

I walked a few miles along the canal, in rising heat, now in fields, the canal lined with monsterium plants. After a  while I reached the M40, where I found a small door to some kind of inspection tunnel, monastic night stair or Jefferies Tube within the motorway.

Thinking back, I am surprised that I wasn’t more excited by this opportunity to creep inside the motorway we have driven countless times, that I have crossed thrice already on this walk, and that (I now know from reading Joe Moran’s excellent On Roads) is the site of an early memory of Lady Penelope buzzing beneath a flyover in a Tiger Moth.

On through the rising heat, until I reached Kings Sutton, a village of almost uncanny attractiveness. A wedding was happening in the church, and I watched the bride arriving in a horsedrawn open carriage as I settled in the pub with a pint of Brakspears. Regional tourism marketeers seem keen to claim this place as part of a ‘Flora Thompson Country’, a kind of dream enclosure.

Aside: I am writing this on June 30th, the release date for a western novel called The Tarnished Star by Jack Martin, real name Gary Dobbs; an early-release copy of the book was in my rucksack while I walked; Gary also works as an actor on the TV Larkrise, his Facebook status suggesting that he could be on the set at that moment; his novel skillfully hard-edged, lean writing summoning the shared fantasy world of the traditional western, a genre animated by economic enclosure strategies played out in the West, frontiers advancing and hard men fighting for freedoms already lost. 

I walked on, through fields and small woods, skirting a playing field with a cricket match in progress, and an airfield launching gliders. I began to feel I was in an imaginary England, or even creating one much like the Larkrise actors.

The sense of unreality remained as I walked into Hinton-in-the-Hedges. As I crossed the churchyard I could hear music and see glimpses of bright costumes. Assuming some kind of fete was going on I wandered over, but realised I was heading towards the backstage area of a play, costumed children giving me questioning looks. Not wanting to blunder on to a stage or though a dressing room, I started to slink away, but two women holding scripts brought me back and said I could watch the end (rather than, as Jennie suggested, seeing me off with a Shakespearian insult such as  ‘What hempen homespun have we swaggering here’ – which have been entirely appropriate, as it was A Midsummer Night’s Dream that they were performing.)

And there was a beer tent. With a pint of Hook Norton Bitter, I sat on a swing and watched the aftermath of the show, whose cast had ages spanning 70 years. It was a pleasant moment, soaking up the atmosphere of people celebrating something that had gone well.

Resisting the temptation to start a new life in friendly Hinton-in-the-Hedges (whose remaining hedges, seen in fly-wing-diagram-pattern on the OS map, suggest that it might have escaped some of the impact of the Act of Enclosure, still having fields spread out in a wheel with the village at it hub’) I completed the last couple of miles to Brackley. I had never thought about Brackley until this trip; I wouldn’t specifically have known that there was such a town, though it sounds plausible enough. Tired, hot and aching I climbed the main street to reach the Crown Inn, alone in this unknown place feeling a bit like John Clare returning to his empty cottage, ‘homeless at home and half gratified to feel that I can be happy any where’.

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All the photos

Photos on a map

Map

The next legs of the journey will take me through Buckinghamshire. This being the case, I have picked up a guidebook of sorts: Buckinghamshire Footpaths, by J.H.B. Peel, found in Wigtown (’Scotland’s book town’) while on holiday. Buckinghamshire Footpaths was published in 1949, when a Britain battered by war was re-creating itself, and part of Peel’s purpose is to prompt readers to see preservation of countryside as an essential part of that re-creation: ‘Unable ever again to conquer others, let us now conquer ourselves.’

Peel, a poet whose work included Mere England, a long work about Buckinghamshire, sees parts of his county as examples of the kind of countryside that needs preserving. Whereas ‘The Londonward side of Amersham…is marred beyond mending’, ‘the northern half of Buckinghamshire is curiously ill-served by railways and main roads, and has therefore retained a relatively high degree of civilization’. For Peel this meant a lack of ‘Cosy cafes, palaces-of-dance, super-cinemas and other attributes of progress’, a place to experience ‘that sense of peace, which is an Absolute of Life’.

Of course, things have changed in the three-score-and-ten since the book was written. Peel could not imagine there being a reason to change the ‘unsophisticated’ nature of the county, giving as a hypothetical example the absurdity of running a bus service between the small hamlets of Milton Keynes and Woughton-on-the-Green. These days, the number 18 runs on the hour, reaching Woughton without ever leaving the huge version of Milton Keynes that now embraces the whole area.

Personally, I can see a beauty in many of the things that Peel would deplore – motorway services, gigantic New Towns and all. And yet I see myself in this picture:

To the quiet man who in these unquiet times is braced and made whole again by contact with things strong and steadfast and English, his County…is a very haven, in which he will find, not escape nor mere distraction, but the still, small voice of reality, cool and unwavering and melodious amid the vast mirage of contemporary arrogance and haste.

Although I now live in Lancashire, and have fond memories of boyhood holidays in Bucks, my county will always be Sussex, the destination of this walk. There I might find the ’still, small voice of reality’, perhaps in the ‘cool and melodious’ spring that emerges beneath the escarpment of the Downs at Fulking… but perhaps in the foyer of a ’super-cinema’ on the seafront.

Arguably I am one of the ‘good English folk, or proud Britons’ Peel writes for, mongrel quarter-Jap that I am; I am certainly glad enough that there are woods, fields and old buildings around. However I can’t bring myself to believe in a pure, essential set of ‘things strong and steadfast and English’, unconnected from other ‘things’ and somehow unchangeable. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist: I’ll keep an eye out for them as I wander through Bucks and beyond…

But it will be a careful eye. With concepts like ‘Britishness’ being grasped at by charmless fascist-wannabes and latter-day Thule Society types – cueing late-70s memories of Anti-Nazi League rallies in Brighton and London, a bloated man mouthing abuse at the marchers from the patio of a famously Hitler-loving south coast B&B, the long heat of the Rock Against Racism carnival in Victoria Park, Bernie outside Hassocks station batting away a skinhead with his skateboard, Pils-soaked gigs in the Vault and the Hanbury Arms, the Resource Centre getting trashed – in such times I guess it is important to try and distinguish between one’s own romantic fantasies, and other people’s manipulative dreams. As for ‘reality’, I may not know much but I do know that it can’t be tamed, packaged  or colonised.

I think I can spot my own fantasies and, to some extent, the paradoxes and contradictions within them. On the one hand, I can fill with emotion at the thought of English lanes in ‘Hardy’s Wessex’, pints of ale in Tolkien’s Shire, the England depicted in the fat ‘Books of…’ and ‘Guides to…’ published by the AA and National Trust that arrived at our house through the 1970s, TV’s luminous Larkrise with Gary Dobbs looking at vegetables in a sunlit square, and countless other lovely, idealised pasts.  At the same time I can join the Hope not Hate people in celebrating a diverse ‘modern’ Britain, and yearn for the lost Utopian possibilities of the 1960s mourned in the works of H.S.Thompson and M. Moorcock, transforming, exciting futures.  Meanwhile Brighton, my lodestone, offers as a kaleidoscope of images, ideas and subcultures, unfixable and therefore endlessly desirable. Earthquake, storm, fire – then the still small voice.

Psychogeography, the practice of creating new visions of the urban environment through mindful walking, is everywhere these days. Pick up a comic book for instance – The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Century: 1910 – and there, alongside A. J. Raffles, Orlando, MacHeath and Ishmael, is Iain Sinclair, ‘the country’s leading proponent of “psychogeography”‘, in the guise of Andrew Norton, a character from his novel Slow Chocolate Autopsy – baffling Mina Harker and Alan Quartermain with chat of Kings Cross as a ‘myth sump’, the 07/07 bomb, and the films of Patrick Keiller. It will be a short hop from this to Batman teaming up with Will Self, or Captain Britain encountering John Davies on the M62.

99 years after 1910, the current issue of Product, ‘Scotland’s finest arts and politics magazine’, features Gordon McGregor’s article The Paths of Least Resistance. Trailed on the cover as ‘psychogeography for beginners’, it ‘celebrates literature’s radical challenge to alienation, boredom and consumerism’ through ‘abstract, unplanned strolls through the city’. His excellent piece references not only the usual suspects (Parisian flaneurs, Situationists, Surrealists, William Blake) but also ‘germinal pieces of psychogeography’ in the works of Daniel Defoe and Robert Louis Stevenson, and reflects on the transformation of Edinburgh. It offers a welcome north-of-the-border perspective, as a lot of writing about psychogeography stays trapped in a kind of Dunhill packet ‘London – Paris – New York’ axis. McGregor concludes that ‘If we avoid the overbearing history of the place and seek out the unfamiliar, then perhaps, in the quiet interstices, the unassuming hinterlands, we may still find the miraculous as a facet of the mundane.’

‘Find the miraculous’ sounds like a good thing to do – so how to get started? Where’s the guidebook to ‘revelatory moments’? If, like me, you find an instruction manual a useful adjunct to any human endeavor, you could do worse than A mis-GUIDE to ANYWHERE, published by artist-researchers Wrights & Sites.

This beautifully-produced, spiral-bound volume is packed with tactics, games and projects for exploring places in ways that might unlock new perceptions: ‘a utopian project for the recasting of a bitter world by disrupted walking’. These range from the simple (if difficult) ‘Find somewhere to be private in a public space’, to the beguilingly elaborate ‘In a place that is new to you, dream that you live there…’

All good stuff and I recommend it, but maybe – like Raffles the gentleman thief picking a lock with his tie-pin – you can use simple tools already at hand. For instance, The Manchester Zedders use the squares of the A-Z as sites as a starting point for exploration, finding dangerous buttercups, smiling subways, and lots more besides. Meanwhile in a part of the North West far far away, in Round the Merseyrail We Go the Merseytravel map is used as the springboard for an exploration of the ways public transport interacts with the places it serves and the personal experience of the author/traveller.

Personally, as part of plotting my autobiogeographical route, I sometimes acquire old travel books and try to use them in the present. Last week (the first of our annual Scottish holiday) I picked up About Britain No. 5: Chilterns to Black Country in the secondhand bookshop on Pitlochry station. I was struck by the coincidence of coming hundreds of miles northwards and finding a book containing my recent southerly journey, Warmington Village rendered into an endpaper idyll and a tiny Banbury inked into a motoring tour.

Produced during the Festival of Britain in 1951, the About Britain series set out to ‘celebrate a European country alert, ready for the future, and strengthened by a tradition which you can see in its remarkable monuments and products of history and even pre-history.’ It strives for an egalitarian flavour, for instance by juxtaposing Stoke and Oxford (’Oxford may belong to Britain as a whole; but so do the products of the Potteries and the Black Country’)

and making statements such as ‘If [the country] contains Durham cathedral, it contains coal mines, iron foundries, and the newest of factories’. However the celebration of the parts of the Midlands I know best is somewhat equivocal. There is a dark cloud over Birmingham and the Black Country, ‘as if it were on another planet inhabited by prisoners or madmen’. The ugliness of the Potteries is ’so demonic that it is fascinating’. However, ‘the girls contrive to look as fresh and bright as new paint’ owing to the beneficial effects of – you’ll never guess – the ‘gigantic cinemas’, which ‘have replaced the Victorian chapels and churches as the quickest way out of ugliness and dirt’. I love the almost science-fictional idea that trips to the pictures inspired people not to ‘fall back in despair into the dirt and debris of the last 200 years’ and even shaped what they looked like. It reminds me of a story in Jimmy Olsen, Superman’s Pal (142-143, 1971) in which the inhabitants of a miniature experimental world evolve to mimic characters from the horror movies continually projected on their skies – when it gets out of hand Superman saves the day by switching reels to Oklahoma!.

Coming back to the search for a psychogeography guidebook, why not simply get the daddy of them all: I-Spy in the Town? In case this cheery little volume doesn’t sound intellectual/artistic/political enough, let me point out that it dabbles in semiotics (’Whenever you go to town, one thing you will notice (no pun intended!) is that there are signs everywhere, pointing things out, telling you what to do, warning you, and so on’), makes obliquely apocalyptic posthuman prophecies (’The end of the pedestrian area. I-Spy for 10′) and hints at the sociopolitical forces that drive urban evolution (’Old industrial buildings…may take on a a new lease of life as housing.’) As my 1992 copy is from the latter days of I-Spy books when Michelin was publishing them, the Michelin Man presides over its pages like a genial imp, gesturing proprietorially at a high street, throwing up his hands in delight at ‘Service Area – reversing only’ sign (I-Spy for 15) and reminding us to get parental permission before sending for a badge.

He seems benign, grinning and goggle eyed with enthusiasm, but I detect a venomous sarcasm beneath the bland statements about bus-stops with elaborate ironworks, town criers shouting ‘Oyez!’ and disabled facilities provided by thoughtful local authorities. Sure, he sounds as if he is validating normal society, but I suspect that his obsessive listing is a prelude to some kind of dreadful take-over, erasure or blimpish mutation. First he makes a version of the world with his incessant naming, then he unmakes it in some gigantic, unimaginable act of transformation…

This is probably being unfair to an innocent black and white drawing. But I have never seen the Michelin Man in the same way since reading William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition while on holiday last year. In it, the heroine Cayce whose ‘pathological sensitivity to brands makes her the perfect divining rod for an agency that wants to test a new logo’, is literally allergic to the image of the Michelin Man, becoming ill when shown a picture of him ‘in one of his earliest, most stomach-churningly creepy manifestations, not the inflated-maggot de-shelled Ninja Turtle of the present day, but that weird, jaded, cigar-smoking elder creature suggesting a mummy with elephantiasis’.

Cue vague memories of studying this at art school – the original version had a name, Bibendum, first seen toasting avatars of the weaker tyre brands with a toast about ‘drinking up obstacles’ – driving as a kind of sick triumphal hedonism, which is why I prefer to walk when possible.

I am writing this in a self-catering cottage in Glentrool Village, a hamlet that Richard Hannay, sometime adventurer in these parts might call a ‘one-horse dorp’ – simply a quiet collection of new houses on the edge of the vast Galloway Forest. (Come to think of it, in the Wold-Newton family tree, Hannay is a blood relative of the aforementioned Allan Quartermain and Raffles – everything connects.) Despite all the stuff I’ve been reading, options for dreaming and playfully remaking the city or drifting into unexplored urban zones are limited here as there’s only one street. An A-Z of Glentrool would not need much of the alphabet; even ‘A’ and ‘Z’ would be redundant, as the one street doesn’t seem to need a name.

But perhaps I’m just not getting it… maybe a hamlet can be as rich as a city if you look hard enough; maybe a psychogeography of forests and mountains awaits discovery. ”You can find ‘anywhere’ any where’ say Wrights & Sites; ‘Keep your I-Spy eyes open’ says creepy Bibendum; ‘Follow this way and that, as the freak takes you’ says Robert Louis Stevenson. OK then. The shelves of this house contain mainly cookbooks, but among them is a volume of sermons from 1901: Neglected People of the Bible by Dinsdale T. Young. There’s a bookmark, presumably left by a previous tenant, on page 129: ‘Gehazi was familiar with sacred things, yet a stranger to their power’. Gehazi, who I have indeed ‘neglected’ to the point of never having heard of him, lets the side down by being ‘unholy amid holiness, a vile transgressor’ somewhere in 2 Kings. Rev Dinsdale presents him as a warning: ‘O young man and maiden, take heed lest you turn your genius in an evil direction’; Gehazi ends up ‘a leper white as snow’.

Living amongst the miraculous but only seeing the mundane would be a kind of falling-short, such as might invoke punitive leprosies, ‘the alienation, boredom and consumerism’ of inauthenticity, a Beggar’s Opera reconditioned as muzak, MacHeath with a tinsel knife – in the Festival future we now inhabit, the cinemas have become so gigantic that their edges cannot be seen by the naked eye, and dwelling within their unseen image-horizons threatens to make anyone into ‘prisoners or madmen’. Time to get some boots on and go out into the woods…no instruction manual needed.

A nicely timed work gig meant we were in the Birmingham Hilton Metropole Hotel at the NEC on the night before this walk. As well as the function I was attending (awards for corporate communications, including a magazine called ‘Woundlife’) the hotel was hosting a massive ‘Soul Weekender’ – which meant several floor-shaking all-night discos in the nexus of suites. Even though I had sidestepped any kind of hangover-installation, I felt somewhat jaded as a beautiful day dawned, having moved rooms and slept little.

Scanning the corporate print strategically placed around the room (a pleasant if strangely-angled space) I mused on the hotel’s name; not just the Birmingham Hilton, but the Birmingham Hilton Metropole. The Metropole in Brighton will always be the ‘metropole’ to me. It too is now owned by the Hilton chain – perhaps they have a policy of strip-mining Brighton’s symbolism, distributing any valuable parts around their network, like peasants taking the stonework of a ruined abbey to build farms. Hilton have also trademarked this sentence: ‘Travel should take you places‘.  To my sleep-deprived brain this seemed both incomprehensible and pregnant with meaning, like a Zen koan. Surely any ‘travel’ must ‘take you’ to a place? Perhaps it is in environments like the Hilton chain that travel doesn’t take you anywhere – superficially different places merging – Becks Vier and reward points pumping through their chilly arteries.

Jennie dropped me at Edgehill and I set off, leaving the road for the dappled shade of some woods. I sat on a tree stump for a few minutes, and used my iPhone’s dial-a-disc function to find some soul music – as I didn’t want to walk in a state of antagonism towards ’soul’ as a basic concept – to do so would seem somehow zombie-like. Frank Wilson’s Do I Love You (Indeed I Do) – the most exuberant song I now; the one-note guitar break never fails to send shivers down my spine – restored me to the world of the ensoulled.

Re-shriven, I walked down a hill to Ratley, a village built from an attractive yellow stone. Is this a Cotswold stone I wonder? Or the ‘ham stone’ that Simon Harvey describes as being ‘the colour of bruised root ginger’?

I entered the church, St Peter Ad Vincula. Walls leaning comfortably at odd angles enclosed a cool, quiet space – all I could hear where birds and a nearby lawnmower. On the altarcloth, three words emblazoned:

+ HOLY + HOLY + HOLY +

The pub looked nice but it wasn’t quite open. I walked up onto the hills, now on one of the Macmillan Ways. Strange to think that this path could take me to the familiar Dorset coast, and that it joins the ‘probable route of the Droitwich to Dorset salt road’. The approach to Warmington on a tiny path through trees beside the church seemed almost secret, far from a major transport route for a vital commodity.

Sheep were sitting out the hot day in the shade, as were udderless bovines of some kind. Townie that I am, I gave the latter a wide berth, despite their placid demeanour – thus losing the trail for a while.

Now I found a pub that was open – the Plough. Another cool space. I feel like I’ve been in a thousand pubs like this – false beams built on to real stone, Islands in the Stream played over speakers linked by wired painted into the now-anachronistic tobacco paint, pig roast poster adorned with clip art. Idle conversation, food, well-kept beer.

Refreshed by a nice pint of Wadworths 6X I moved on. Soon I was crossing the M40 again. On reaching the north side I decided to change my route, leaving Macmillan and following part of the Battlefields Trail that joins three Civil War sites.

Despite losing the signs again, I found my way to Mollington, another absurdly pretty village. Thirsty once more, I entered the pub and was served with a fine pint of Adnams. The landlord was really friendly and we chatted about the walk, but when a group of rambling families appeared, slowly strolling down the hill spread across the road (’like something from a zombie film!’ the landlady quipped) he doused the lights, plunging his regulars into darkness, to feign shutness. Guess I was lucky to get that Adnams.

Having lost the signs again I simply walked along the road to get to Cropredy. I have been here four or five times for Fairport Convention’s Cropredy Festival, so it is familiar as a place swarming with festivalgoers – it was odd finding it empty, no smell of outdoor festival food drifting over the fields, no Who Knows Where The Time Goes playing beneath an immemorial sunset. I initially went to a Cropredy in 1990, shortly after a marital split. It was one of the first completely new things I did, so it always feels like a sort of  ’start of a new era’ place. Picture me back then – in a field, wearing hideously-impractical elastic-sided winklepickers, slightly wobbly from 6X and sunshine, wondering what it’s all about. And picture me now – wearing much more practical footwear.

From Cropredy a few miles of Oxford Canal Walk took me to Banbury. On a sunny Bank Holiday Weekend, it was like walking through a succession of front rooms, as people sat on the tow path enjoying their boats. So far all I have seen of Banbury is a shopping centre – Jennie came to whisk me away to the Premier Inn that would be our berth for the night.

neti – neti

The gods were ‘easy to discern’ in Homer’s time, and maybe they still are.  ‘It is not enough to find the gods; they are obvious; we must find God, the real chief of the gods’ says G.K. Chesterton – not such an easy discernment, if as I dimly apprehend the HOLY/HOLY/HOLY is not a thing, person, pattern or notion. Meanwhile, some things look as if they should be signs and portents, who knows,
a black cat crossed my path,
a red fox crossed my path,
I glimpsed some words in a crack between stones, in the stone breastwork on the hill beneath St Mary’s Warmington. Curious, thinking of prayers stuffed into the cracks in the Western Wall, I reached in and pulled something out into the light. It was a cigarette packet, Benson & Hedges Gold, and the words were the health warning. Never liked B&H, too sweet. Never liked JPS either, even when they were the top smoke in their shiny black packet, so that just asking for ‘cigarettes’ would lead to these being offered, at least in the shop where I worked – too bitter. Marlboro had a savage kick but tasted like burning flakes of paint. Marlboro Lights were like the gaseous atmosphere of a disappeared planet, endlessly expanding outward with no gravity to hold it together. Silk Cut impressed me with the slashed purple fabric billboard in front of the Domestos factory that dad drove me past on the way to school and the clever ads that we later studied at college, but the smoke never arrived – they were like a symbolic gesture of smoking, as if ’smoking’ was a departed reality, acknowledged by a hollow tradition. I guess if it came to it – if some unimaginable set of circumstances meant I had to smoke – I’d have to roll my own.

All the photos – on a map, and another map showing the route.

(Remember – Mr Smoking, he no good.)

In the short time since J.G. Ballard died, there have been many tributes and appraisals of his work. I found Moorcock’s piece in the Guardian very moving, and Simon Sellars’ obituary on Ballardian.com both thought-provoking and, in a sad way, exhilarating.
Anything I can say is just another grain of sand on the terminal beach, but I want to share something about a writer whose work has always been important to me.

As a teenager I would borrow books such as The Atrocity Exhibition from Portslade Library, a place which will definitely feature in this walk.

I remember getting Concrete Island from there as soon as it came out – a novel about an injured man marooned, Crusoe like, on a large sunken traffic island. This space is described as a sort of depression in the urban landscape, with steep banks. Portslade’s Victoria Park, next to the library, also has banks of steepness and a hint of concrete underpass – just like the book! So that’s where I sat to read it. This was lovely -every boy’s dream – like reading a Tarzan book in the actual jungle, or The Once and Future King in on the ramparts of a castle.

Injured man ignores woman in the nip

One thing that I loved about Ballard’s stuff was a sense that the day-to-day landscapes and objects that surrounded me were exciting, meaningful, dangerous. All of a sudden it was OK to find car show rooms and ring roads beautiful and moving…

…back in 1999. Tony White (who I’ve known since around 1983) published a story of mine in britpulp! an anthology of ‘new fast and furious stories from the literary underground’ (’fast-twitch prose that fizzes and spits, narrative with a kick, jump cuts that hurt like a knuckle in the eye…’ said Iain Sinclair). This was great; I had a real story on real pages with people like Michael Moorcock and China Mieville. There was a launch party at some bar in London – I lived and worked in Wolverhampton and didn’t go as I was too busy…

Pulling it down 10 years later, I see that the rationale of the britpulp! book has some tenuous similarity to that of my walk – reclaiming past time, intersplicing it with the present. In the introduction Tony recalls ‘the days when you could walk into your local, perhaps provincial, W.H.Smiths and be confronted with wall-to-wall pulp fiction. Your eyes would be drawn along the shelves and encounter the latest in Richard Allen’s million-selling series of ‘youthsploitation’ ‘Skinhead’ novels, the biker novels of Peter Cave or Mick Norman, Sven Hassel’s WWII epics, and the beginnings of Michael Moorcock’s genre-defining ‘multiverse’ experiments…’

The colour of lost youth/summers lost (take your pick) is for me the exact shade of yellow of the edges of the pages of the Daw edition of Ken Bulmer’s Transit to Scorpio (as by Alan Burt Akers) and some of its 52 sequels. It may seem that I walk through countryside in search of fresh air and flowers, but in fact I’m seeking pulp fiction – or rather the burning delight that revealed itself to my younger self through the media of paperbacks and comic books. For instance, a milestone on this walk will be the W.H.Smiths in Leighton Buzzard where I bought my first Conan book, and the nearby market where I acquired a copy of The Final Programme by Michael Moorcock when I was about 14, concealing the breast-filled front cover and the back emblazoned with the unfortunate blurb ‘Moorcock’s World of Fantasex’ between two of E.C. Tubb’s Dumarest books bought from the same stall. When I get there, I intend to buy something equally marvellous, or at least seek some token that the marvellous did indeed once exist. The wall-to-wall space of pulp fiction is for me a kind of Wailing Wall in reverse.

Meanwhile, years have passed. I’m writing about The Final Programme; Ballard dies; the New Wave of British SF seems both to be receding from the shore and washing on to it afresh. And a new Tony White book arrives: Albertopolis Disparu, produced while Tony was a writer in residence at the Science Museum.

It’s a lovely book – there’s a PDF on the site, which I recommend. Tony explains the background:

‘Albertopolis’ was the affectionate and satirical Victorian-era nickname given to this part of South Kensington. The area was purchased specifically to continue the legacy of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851 by becoming home to all these great, Victorian-era, cultural and educational institutions. As I wandered around the Museum’s great halls and researched in the Science Museum collections I found myself revisiting a science-fiction genre called ’steampunk’. To generalise only slightly, ’steampunk’ is based on the assumption that mechanical 19th-century computing technologies such as Babbage’s Difference Engine created our contemporary information age a century or so early.

I enjoyed this slim tale of Zeppelins, rooftop shanty-towns of telegraphic engineers in a realm of wire, a vast information factory… As I started it I had an exhilarating sense of the game being afoot, though what game I could not say.

Wherever the readers of this volume find themselves, it may be assumed that we all agree an interest in the streets of London. But we do well to remind ourselves that by nothing more effortful than turning a corner, opening a door, or climbing a stair can one be translated from familiar street and public haunt to an altogether different realm, seemingly without any relation to the London of common conception.

For me, ‘London’ is a conceptual city like Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ – exciting as a poetic idea, but not particularly appealing as reality. I suppose this is a Brighton prejudice against London as the too-near place from whence day-trippers and weekenders come – hordes emerging from the station and walking down Queens Road, slightly too loud, credulous and excitable. We natives of Brighton would watch their antics with a certain indulgent pity, hose down the pavements after they left and bank their sticky cash on a Monday morning. Who would want to follow them back to their dens, the Squares, Palaces and Parliaments where they all reputedly ‘live’?

But maybe I’ll find a way into London, sometime after Leighton Buzzard – the ‘Terminal Session’ discovered by Tony in the Imperial College library may offer a clue as to where to start.