Having used a fairly recent (1992) I-Spy book as the springboard for a flight of fancy, I thought it would be fun to get one of the older ones and see what differences there might be. I-Spy on the Pavement came out in 1961, the year I was born, so that’s the one I decided to get.

The idea of children being encouraged to wander around towns on their own, looking at things, seems quaint these days (and it is poignant that this should be so.) To my modern eyes, accustomed to seeing children as vulnerable beings needing round-the-clock supervision and enclosure, the I-Spy ‘redskins’ in the illustrations seem to move through a world of adult menace; it is as if the various tradespeople and mendicants they encounter are just playing roles of normality, like characters in a Hitchcock film.

But the kids are in a world of adventure, junior psychogeographers seeing wonders in the detail of the city.

Of course, some of that detail has changed in the past 47 years. Banks have changed names, police boxes disappeared except for the one mythical one that is better known than ever. (I recently found a picture of Brighton Clock Tower, and remembered that there was one there, opposite the original Virgin Records.)

The 1992 I-Spy in the Town does not include CCTV cameras, now a feature of most urban environments. (This seems like an odd omission, as ‘I-Spy’ sounds like the raison d’etre of the CCTV industry, an ideal motto for their guild. One can imagine a special I-Spy book being produced as a training manual for CCTV operators, like the famous Ladybird Computers book that was used to train MoD officials in IT; ‘Vagrant in Sector 10: I-Spy for 20, dispatch community police officers’).

Amazingly, the 1961 book does mention CCTV, albeit in a different context. It seems that construction was a spectator sport in those days, understandable with new ’sixties’ architecture appearing from the rubble of WWII. Special viewing facilities were available at building sites, and were apparently common enough to include in an I-Spy book. These included a ‘televiewing platform’ (Score 20), in which ‘Closed circuit television is installed and on a large monitor screen…you can see the work in progress in areas that would otherwise be hidden’.

I’m all for exploring ‘areas that would otherwise be hidden’ and I love the way this little book makes everything seem pregnant with meaning…

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.

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’.

—

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.

I recently discovered some video art pieces I made at art school back in the 80s, in a catalogue on the web. Lux were kind enough to digitise these for me and I’ve loaded a couple on to YouTube.

On re-viewing one of these, ‘Redtown’, I realised that its mythologising of place and self was a kind of psychogeography – and that I’m aiming to walk the filmed street again, toward the end of this journey – so I’m sticking it on here for your viewing pleasure and to fill in time until I do some actual walking again.

It has decayed over decades of storage on a tape that was already a copy, followed by conversion into various formats. What remains, like Burroughs’ ‘dream slipping away from me, receding into the past, dim, jerky, far away’ – barely qualifies as a memory. But it’s also a container of memories, including some I had forgotten (eg being scared at the idea of snakes and ladders as I thought the box contained the real items.) I do remember that the idea of a ‘real’ town-within-a-town known only to locals came to me in a dream, and that the name ‘redtown’ probably came from having recently red Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest.

The clip is a fragment of a longer piece. I was too young to realise that less is more, so basically put in everything I could think of. There’s another six minutes, during which you get to meet the Devil and learn about entropy and the Heat Death of the Universe. As you may have gathered, I find it hard to watch (though think what you were doing 25-30 years ago and imagine putting it on display via a planetary computer – it may not be pretty.) However I do like some bits, such as the super-parochialism of making it about ‘Portslade and West Hove’, as if even the rest of Hove was some kind of here-be-dragons, terra incognita blankness. And I rather admire my youthful counterpart’s total scorning of technique, just poking the giant camera (a model called a KY2000, which seemed hilarious at the time) from the window of a car.

A live version of Redtown was probably my first piece of performance art, in a pre-Arches incarnation of the Zap Club in the Royal Escape basement. My droning, tangential tale was hideously inappropriate for a bar-room audience, leading compere Ian Smith to ‘hate this man [ie me] more than anyone else on earth’ and think ‘he [me] was the worst man in the world’ – though his stance later softened to the point where we lived under the same roof for a while and I once appeared, naked, in one of his performances, stabbing his minotaur character with a plastic sword.

A less overthought piece, Fireman Jack, is also on YouTube:

Back in the present day, I’m hoping to resume the walk from Stafford in early August.

‘Thursday’s child has far to go’, and (perhaps because I was indeed born on that day) so I have, with my nightly dreams of lostness, frequent work-related wanderings and this journey. One thing that puts me into pedestrian mode quite often is the fact that I don’t drive. Like the Passenger in the Iggy Pop song, I ride and I ride and ’see the city’s ripped backsides’, always driven by others. But often I walk, and see… all kinds of things. This blog recounts some of them, and is the most fulfilling writing I’ve done for a long time. A month between big walks and posts feels like too long, so maybe I’ll post concerning other walks, sidetrips, interludes; after all, I’m always travelling towards 50 even if I’m not headed homewards.

Thursday’s child is fascinated by distance. The blue hills in paintings, a special blue that Rebecca Solnit (in A Field Guide to Getting Lost) calls ‘the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not.’ Even obviously false distances, like the tummocky hills in the MGM Wizard of Oz set, create a pang, a wish to be there, not here. To enter the ‘loveliest garden you ever saw’ seen by Alice through a tiny door – heartbreaking when unreachable and disappointing once reached. Perhaps why Captain Beefheart sings ‘The black paper between a mirror | Breaks my heart that I can’t go’

Thursday’s child walks in marginal places. 14, inspired by readings of J.G.Ballard from Portslade library (to be part of this route, stay tuned), walking alongside the A27 towards Shoreham flyover… noting the discarded cans, bottles, wrappers, smokers’ requisites as the slipstream of an endless high-speed party. Sitting between the concrete pillars of the flyover doing my drawing homework

Thursday’s child looks around and notices things. The photocopied license beside a fruit machine on Preston station, in the name of ‘Sceptre Leisure Solutions’. But whose ’sceptre’ - some Leisure King, looking like a polyestered, debased Ghost of Christmas Present? ‘Solutions’ as in problems solved (‘Let’s make sure commuters can gamble between connections’)? Or solutions as in things dissolved (particles of solid leisure diluted until all that’s left is this feebly flickering bandit) or the dissolving medium, ‘leisure’ as the Universal Solvent, unable not to destroy its own containers

Thursday’s child is lost in time, baffled. In Victoria Station… 6 years old, walking through it with my dad, on the way to see dinosaurs and lightning in museums… later, hot chestnuts burning through the paper bag bought outside Foyles, peeking at Conan the Conqueror… walking to Heaven to see Throbbing Gristle, Dec 23, 1980… now some years later drinking traditional ale in a bar fabricated in a mezzanine, up amongst the roof girders, festooned with stalactites of dust and grease: like drinking in the lighting rig of a theatre, somehow too high up, not quite a real place as it wasn’t here before: haunting my own life

Thursday’s child retraces his steps. The footpath followed hundreds of times to school (keeping bus money to spend on comics, walking 40 minutes to meet Stav and Des beneath the fire escape, crossing the golf course with no concession to distant golfers teeing off) was a ‘drove road’ moving livestock over the centuries, now skirts the back of a Sainsburys superstore, graffiti gestures covering wildlife interpretation signs. New spaces overwrite the old, create new margins, but still a genius loci might emerge, still fossil thunderbolts (‘lightning stones’ kept as amulets by shepherds) appear from the still chalk soil

Thursday – finishing a course near Chorley – ‘College Governance’, perhaps as far removed as it is possible to be from the word of ‘Anarcho-Absurdists, Revolutionary Sybarites, Alchemical Hazardistas and Urban Arcadians’ alluded to in The Flâneur and similar text/places I am haunting – walking to town through a cell of preserved countryside, shoes and pinstripe trousers getting muddy, navigating roundabouts and ringroads until playtime is finished and I head for the steeples and stations of the centre.

As well as some symmetries of place (travelling between piers, seas, and seaside towns) I’ve realised that there can be a symmetry of time to this journey. I left Brighton shortly before my 25th birthday, so if I arrive back for my 50th I will have symbolically concluded another 25 years – the second half of my life during which I’ve lived in places other than Brighton.

Still thinking about routes. I could hug the motoways which have some meaning (in the tradition of Iain Sinclair (M25) or John Davies (M62). I’d be doing the M58+6+42+40+25+23. (Perhaps these numbers have some numerological significance? They can be distilled down to 5…) Or I could parallel the rail network… or go with my original idea of using the long distance path network. It’s a bit like choosing an operating system for a PC. The territory I have to cover is a vast mass of information, chaotic and huge, tidal waves of detail, masses of unrelated objects – the system I choose will, hopefully, make enough sense for me to get from A to B. My hardware will be boots, socks (psychogeography), waterproofs, a compass; my software maps, guides, signs. Whereas a PC uses cascades of logic to create patterns that we channel into some kind of meaning, my kit will spawn the millions of choices  needed to put one foot in front of the other…