Dreamland Doubling: Circumnavigating Pinewood

Solitaire: [turning tarot cards between sentences] A man comes. He travels quickly. He has purpose.

A year ago I was in Florida, where I visited a theme park pretending to be a film studio. Now, after walking through some rainswept woods, I was outside Pinewood, a real studio that does not allow visitors. I had walked to the southern end of the studio territory, which was bounded by fences bedecked with security signs.

The sensible thing would have been to walk on to the south to complete the day’s journey. But I felt drawn to do something else – after all, this was Pinewood, source of a thousand dreams. I decided that, as I couldn’t go inside, I would make a complete circuit of the outer perimeter.

Starting off to the north, with Black Park on my left, I walked past more of the same fencing. Strange, indeterminate structures could be seen through the trees, gantries and the backs of giant walls. It was odd seeing the mundane technology used in the manufacture of fantasy. I must have been to the cinema hundreds of times, letting a glimmering screen fill my field of vision… Perhaps this space is what is behind that screen – parking bays, silos and miles of wet woods.

I knew without even looking that Pinewood is where Batman, Superman and James Bond films have been made. I therefore characterised these large sheds as factories for stories about potent orphans, who fight the fallen angels and gross powers (me being fanciful, me being clever – qualities bestowed on me by the worlds of fiction – the large redbrick walls reminding me of Boundary Road Woolworths as seen from my pushchair circa 1965.)

I reached the northernmost point and turned a corner, now walking south towards Iver Heath on a B-road. Scraps of plastic caught in the hedge gleamed in the low sun, like escaping ghosts. The entrance had a 1960s coolness about it, resembling something from the world of Peter Stuyvesant cigarette adverts I saw in magazines when I was a kid, stylised jet planes flying over a globe like a diagram of swish grown-up adventure.

A road opposite the studios is called Bond Close, suggesting a fannish enthusiasm for the studio’s most famous son on the part of the local authority. Ironically for a road named after a bachelor who lives in a flat, the houses of Bond Close are enormous, as if to accommodate huge extended families. But then the Close has been built in the aura of film- rather than Fleming-Bond; the wardrobes are more likely to be full of tuxedos and safari suits than Sea Island cotton shirts and the head of the family would need to be played by six different blokes each needing their own room.

Not everyone has unconditional love for Pinewood and all its doings. Along the road I saw many protest posters with green ribbons, saying STOP PROJECT PINEWOOD.

Looking into this later, it seems that Pinewood plan to build an extension, on the other side of the B-road I had walked along, additional facilities almost as large as the original. This ‘creative hub’ would house, among other things, ‘living streetscapes including Venice, Amsterdam, Prague and New York’ to ‘reduce the cost of location filming’ by not going to the locations, or even to their Eastearn-European stand-ins. Local protest will delay this, but I expect this hard-copy virtual world will come into being at some point. In a few years my walk would have been between two lobes of a gigantic dream-brain.

I headed back to where I had started, along the Iver Heath Link Path, permissively provided by Pinewood. Through the fences I saw the only objects I spotted that looked as if they belonged in films – fibre-glass boulders, perhaps a relic of the set of something I had actually seen, some Earth’s Core or Land That Time Forgot half-forgotten…

I’m not sure what I hope to achieve by this circumnavigation. Perhaps I thought that like some shaman I could capture the essence of this private world of images, by creating a circle around it. In there somewhere, a sunny afternoon when my dad came and found me playing out in the street, and unexpectedly took me to see Live and Let Die at the Astoria; in there also, every other afternoon like it.

Solitaire: The High Priestess is wife to the Prince no longer of this world. The spiritual bridge to the secret church.

If that way be your walk: Chalfont St Giles to Langley

I woke up in one of the White Hart’s comfortable rooms, early brightness offering some hope that this would be a good walking day. Chalfont St Giles being the home of John Milton, I read some Paradise Lost while I waited for breakfast time. I hadn’t looked at this poem for years – not since ‘Rusty’ Reynolds taught it at A-level, at least when we weren’t able to distract him into talking about cricket, jazz or Bob Dylan. (A happy memory – VIth form huts at the back of Hove Grammar School as lost paradise…) I became steadily more wide-eyed as I read through Books 1 and 2 – soaking in the language of a potent supermyth; I often read comics, pulp and fantasy, to the point where I’m jaded from a surfeit of marvels, but this stuff… has me babbling with inarticulate enthusiasm.

The pub breakfast was suitably hearty, though for some reason the three overnight guests were squashed into one corner of the restaurant. My fellow breakfasters were on some kind of public- or third-sector job-related trip, their language similar to my own work-speak but with different words – so much so that I couldn’t understand what they were saying. We all spoke ‘corporate’, but in different dialects.

I paid up and left. At the end of the bar, pink balloons, slightly deflated, were a residue of last night’s breast cancer fundraising dinner (£25 with a complimentary half-bottle of wine, £5 to the charity) – worthy resistance to the bodily effects of ‘Chaos…And Tumult and Confusion all imbroild’. Flashback to encountering the language of cancer – suddenly learning unwanted words like ‘metastasized’, treading uncertain territory of ‘percentages’ and ‘remission’.

A few hundred yards down the hill I passed Milton’s Cottage. I believe he wrote Paradise Lost here. I wondered if Edge Hill, a key battle of the English Civil War (the site of which I visited a few months ago) featured in his mental landscape. Opposite the cottage is ‘Milton’s Indian Restaurant’, where I checked out the menu – disappointed not to find dishes with Miltonian themes, a vindaloo maybe described as ‘a fiery Deluge, fed With ever-burning Sulphur unconsum’d (very spicy)’.

In Chalfont itself I overshot the path and wandered into the churchyard, walking out through the lich gate (better than being carried in) and picking up the South Bucks Way.

On a gloomy day in the rain I was braced for walking through a ‘dismal Situation waste and wilde’. It was somewhat grim with the strangled sounds of cattle and barking dogs blowing across the wet heath, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Another tract of country, no beauty spot and no reason to come here except for the journey itself…

It was raining harder as I walked through Chalfont St Peter, and over a hill via long streets lined with big houses to Gerrards Cross. A Costa Coffee gave a brief respite, the warm tones of its corporate decor familiar from just about everywhere I’ve been. From there, really wet now, I walked across some parkland and out past the last houses, too busy plunging through the rain to wonder why the woods here are called ‘The Rancho’, a soggy echo of Spain or California.

Rancho: notorious?

In Fulmer I stopped for a pint in the Black Horse – Greene King ‘Fireside’ Bitter, a cheerful picture of a blazing hearth on the pump clip contrasting with the unlit fires in the pub itself. It was nice enough though for some reason I felt glad I hadn’t stayed there, as I had considered doing. From the pub I doubled back past the church, sounds of hymn singing emerging, today being the Festival of Christ the King, for many the last Sunday of the liturgical year – the expectant penitent waiting of Advent soon to start. I yearn for such spiritual structure but here I am out walking, again.

I joined the Beeches Way and soon crossed the M40, almost at its southernmost tip. I suppose I could have called this year ‘Walking the M40′ as I have more or less completed its length and recrossed it several times. I now feel that I ‘own’ it in a different way from the drivers and passengers.

Shortly afterwards I entered Black Park Country Park. This seems a clumsy title as its name is ‘Black Park’, and it’s a ‘Country Park’. Google simply conflate this into ‘Black Country Park’, implying that this stretch of wood and heath could really belong back in an earlier part of the walk, near Dudley, Stourbridge and Wolverhampton. A low sun appeared, gleaming through the dripping trees.

On the other side of Black Park, I found myself at the southern tip of Pinewood Studios. Rather than walk on, I decided to take a detour, making a complete circuit which will comprise a post of its own.

Another mile of wood and wintry sunshine, some muddy paths to the station, and the day’s walk was finished. Elsewhere, the rain I had enjoyed was washing bridges away, flooding homes. There were autumn leaves still unfallen on the branches, and also some spring green come unnaturally early; in a couple of weeks I would be 48, a year-and-a-day left to reach the 50th year where the endpoint of this journey should lie; a bit more time ‘treading the crude consistence’ of ill-defined territory, ‘bog or steep…strait, rough, dense, or rare’; pointing lenses into the sun, metastasizing words and pixels and unfolding fresh maps.

Dreams in a career: heading to resume point

Saturday at home, awake early, I read a bit of London Orbital, the account of Iain Sinclair’s pre-millennial trek around the M25. As I drift towards London, I want to avoid literally walking in Sinclair’s footsteps. This doesn’t seem likely on the next stretch, as I will be walking outside the M25 while Sinclair and companions were on the inside. I did, however, learn that author Arthur Machen lived out his last years in Amersham, a place I would be passing through later that day.

A desire path on Tesco supermarket territory in Amersham, taken last visit

I walked through Amersham on the last leg, and tonight I would be getting the train there as it is the nearest station to Chalfont St Giles, at least the nearest that looked like it would have a taxi rank. The Machen connection helped me decide what reading matter to take: I pulled down the Ballantine Adult Fantasy edition of The Three Impostors that I had been meaning to read for some time, and in a casual act of modern thaumaturgy downloaded his Great God Pan to my iPhone. The latter I have read, a classic weird tale. ‘There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision, beyond these ‘chases in Arras, dreams in a career,’ beyond them all as beyond a veil. I do not know whether any human being has ever lifted that veil…’ (Flashback to lyrics from Leave the Capitol by the Fall, ‘The tables covered in beer…It’s a hand on the shoulder in Leicester Square/It’s vaudeville pub back room dusty pictures…I laughed at the great god Pan…All the paintings you recall/All the side stepped cars…’)

Such things would have to wait for today – my career is not just a torrent of dreams and I was working at a university open day until early afternoon, so it was a few hours before I was striding down St Helens Road, disengaging my workmind, thinking and walking my way back into the route. The train journeys were remarkably speedy – in a sense the starting points have moved closer to home compared with places like Milton Keynes that involved slower trains, changes and waits. Amersham has always fascinated me, being both a country town visited on holiday and the farthest outpost of the London Underground, right in the top left of the famous map. It seemed to join unrelated worlds together. As a teenager when I finally made the trip out from London I was disappointed that the Tube train wasn’t underground the whole time – I wanted to hurtle straight from the city of palaces, museums and bright shops to Amersham’s half-timbered High Street without seeing daylight, passing through a series of ever-quieter underground stops.

Despite this disappointment I’ve been back a few times. One time we stayed at a hotel that had appeared in Four Weddings and a Funeral, while being guests at a real wedding. And then there was another time, back when eating food cooked in pleasing ways seemed intrinsically interesting, I arranged a birthday trek for Jennie involving every meal of the day being a nice one in a different town, ending up at an Amersham restaurant called Gilbeys. (Actually this makes us sounds like rampaging gourmands – the meals in question were with relatives and lovely friends like Phil & Di.)

The White Hart garden next morning

On this night however I spent about two rainy minutes in Amersham and immediately got a taxi to Chalfont St Giles. I was staying at the White Hart, a pleasant food-oriented pub with comfortable accommodation in a separate chalet-like block. There I had an enjoyable dinner, delicious things served on beds of other things on oversized white plates. The decor was a kind of mashup of ‘fresh-clean-modern-bright’ with an underlying pub-ness, silvery abstract prints over the log fire.

Subsiding into a pleasant tired haze, I started The Three Impostors, a strange episodic non-novel. It will make a great non-guidebook to London once I have crossed the M25 to walk there next year, helping to conjure it as a city of strange encounters where ‘the most ordinary encounters teem with significance’ and chance discoveries lead to Gothic adventures. In Machen it’s never very far from the prosaic world of tobacco-shops and cafes to darkening hills and uncanny ruins, ‘light shining on a little space in the world, and beyond, mist and shadow and awful forms’. For a brief while armed with books like this and an Oyster card maybe I can be ‘one of those whom idleness had led to explore these forgotten outskirts of London’, courting enchantment.

Misty en route: Great Missenden to Chalfont St Giles

For a long time now I’ve been pondering the best route to take for the last part of the walk. I could veer off into the southwest, strike the south coast and approach Brighton from the west. Or I could skirt London anticlockwise and end up arriving from the north close to the route of the M23. Or head straight through London and come in via Kent. Each has its attractions, pros and cons and today was the day I would decide.

I left Great Missenden with some gladness. Despite its superficial normality, I had found this place to be sad and uncanny, rather like something from a story by Robert Aickman, or the phantom town of Argleton that has been all over the media recently. Hiking out through autumn paths, leaves cascading down through wild air, felt like escaping a strange impasse.

I spent an hour or so walking past large detached houses, my lower-middle-class bungalow-dweller envy-antennae twitching. Some of its citizens were out, performing their Saturday rituals in a mist that seemed to freeze them in place; jogging, football with kids, driving to get the bloated weekend papers. I stalked past, locked in my own hard-to-explain rite, moving from Great to Little Missenden via a dank A-road underpass, thoughts turning towards the vast sunken cities in the works of H. P. Lovecraft and away from the giant houses of these dormitory villages with their hard-to-maintain gutters and weed-threatened gravel paths.

Soon I was in more open fields, feeling space and silence and the simplicity of just walking for the first time in weeks. A ragged patch of sunlight moved across the red trees. It was All Hallows Eve, a day when some believe that divine beings and spirits can walk around unsummoned. I don’t know what I believe about such things, or indeed anything: a vagueness that contributes to my urge to wander to places that no-one has summoned me to visit. Myths cascade, ideas melt, movement is all that remains… This could be some postmodern condition I’ve inherited, or it could just be a function of geography. J. B. Priestley talks of the ‘mistiness’ of Britain being important, creating landscapes where ‘instead of everything standing out sharply, one thing melts into another, almost like the strange places we see in dreams.’

My unlimbered walking mind free-associated from this to reggae band Misty in Roots, stalwarts of late-70s RAR gigs and festivals, and their memorable declaration that “if you’re not conscious of your present, you’re like a cabbage in this society”. I used to grow cabbages, but these days it’s a rare thing for me to even cook one that hasn’t been pre-shredded and bagged by distant devices. I need to rediscover some slow, real things; I ‘need something to slow me down’ as Joey Ramone once sang. (All proof that, when walking, ‘as the body advances the mind flutters around it like a bird’.)

It may well have been that countless spirits, angels and demiurges manifested themselves around me in the Halloween fields but I didn’t have eyes to see them – except of course for a Home Counties green man, a corporate international mermaid, and Lucifer the light-bringer depicted in the porch of a church (on a poster for a recital of Milton.)

I could have headed southwards towards the hotel we were to stay in, but on a whim headed on eastwards towards Amersham. Here, in the Saturday market bookstall, I made my route decision, using the crude bibliomancy of book purchase. As guides to London and Kent were on offer, that is the way I would go – crossing the metropolis and reaching the east coast before bouncing back to Brighton.

Buoyed by this decision, I started marching westwards, though horse fields and woods to Chalfont St Giles where I finished. Time now in the last of Autumn to re-read Paradise Lost and start towards winter with a more definite aim.

Walking Home to 0Z

In 1900 a book called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published. Author L. Frank Baum stated that he intended to write ‘a series of of newer “wonder tales” in which the stereotyped genie, dwarf and fairy are eliminated, together with…horrible and bloodcurdling incidents’.

Despite this intention I found the film version terrifying in parts when I saw it at the pictures as a five-year-old. Shortly afterwards my parents took me to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I guess they had some kind of plan to warp my mind through cinema.

It was on UK TV one Christmas, about 1975. This second viewing impressed me in a different way – it seemed like the kind of fantasy quest tale I enjoyed in books, in a childlike but timeless world. When Marvel and DC comics publishers teamed up to publish a comic-book version, illustrated by John Buscema who also drew The Savage Sword of Conan, I was beside myself with excitement. Despite not knowing what ‘intertextuality’ meant, I was keen on it when it came my way in a four-colour ‘Special Collector’s Issue!!’.

I suppose there’s a deep-seated urge to travel from ‘the great grey prairie’ of the day-to-day to a world of strange wonders. Perhaps this was at the back of my mind when I wagered with one of the University departments that, were they to achieve their targets, I would ‘dress as their choice of Oz character’. Naturally said targets were met, so here I am.

In some ways the Oz stories are works of realism: life is full of surprises and transformations, and sometimes you find that you’ve moved to a new world where everything is different, where people use strange words and things work according to unfathomable rules. But it’s not all good stuff. Cancer, for instance, is an unwanted transformation. It is a world with its own language and rules, but no-one wants to have to learn them. And, sadly, some people don’t make it home again. But many do, thanks to the care they receive and the research that underpins it. With this in mind, this dressing up gig is raising funds for North West Charity Research: click here to see what’s been raised, or to make a donation.

As well as being a bit of random horseplay and fundraising, this is also a serious psychogeographical experiment. I’m looking for evidence of the Emerald City in the Edge Hill campus. In the book, the Emerald City isn’t very emerald. The Guardian of the Gate gives everyone green-tinted spectacles before they enter, as ‘if you did not wear spectacles, the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you’.

But as it turns out, there is plenty of emerald marvel to be seen with the naked eye…

All done now. The journey raised a lot of smiles, helping make the campus a ‘merry old town’ for a while. Got over £500 so felt I had kicked cancer in the ass with my dainty ruby slippered foot.