Scarp

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If you have not discovered Scarp you are in for a treat and a fabulous journey through Middlesex/south Hertfordshire in a form both different and entertaining. This is the landscape challenged and personified, but described in the loving detail of a botanist's catalogue.

Although fanciful, it all adds up to very fresh way of looking and history and landscape of the high ground Scarp of the defunct county of Middlesex - a take on psychogeography which Nick Papadimitrou has termed Deep Topography. Maxwell, while the second series took a more general if still somewhat esoteric approach to walking in the urban fringes of the capital.Weird, leftfield, and slightly eerie, almost like a poetic version of the wasp factory - slipping into other minds and mini-stories that all blend into one larger and semi-somnolent awareness. He's also got an incredible language at his disposal, remarkable ideas and a deep sense of lucid confusion. But "Scarp" is a life's work, a labour of intense love for the landscape and a tribute to the land which sustains us, which we walk in difficult times, which links up homes, prisons, hospitals and bus stops. In 2009 John Rogers/Vanity Projects made a film about Nick titled The London Perambulator: Afoot in London Edgelands. Home from the school run, put the coffee pot on and press play on the CD player without looking to see what’s loaded.

Difficult to say, but leaving me with so many questions after writing about somewhere so ostensibly humdrum is a success of sorts. Nick’s is an unique and wonderful voice; and his is the one that has given us this more useful term for our obsessions.The final section of the book, supposedly a journal handed to him for annotation by a friendly rook (! Papadimitriou talks about laying aside knowledge and concentrating on ‘sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through’, and maybe this was why I (sub)consciously decided against equipment which would aid me in recording my walk (or distracting me from it). Shielding our faces with our hands, we - two Montserratians, Heidi Shea Osborne, Rootsman, and I - walked quickly to the edge of the forest and dropped down into Soldier's Ghaut, a steep . Through decades of walks from his council flat just inside the hellish ring of the north circular, he has fallen deeply for the low bumps of the 17-mile north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment.

He rescues a hedgehog that has got its head stuck in a strawberry yoghurt pot, but is otherwise mostly unkind to the present, shunning the "campfire of the TV set" and dodging "slug-like" killer cars whose drivers fart into their seats as they pass him. The Lockdown has caused me to excavate the rushes I shot in 2008 for my documentary about Nick Papadimitriou, The London Perambulator. I also ended up listening to some 1970s prog rock ( Kevin Ayers, Egg ) which was mentioned in the strange story of the Gloria Queen of the Psychedelic Ancients of Lower Saxony cult. Part autobiography, part fiction, part travelogue, and written after decades of hiking and discoveries in and around London, the book focused on the ridge of land to the north of the city's suburbs which Papadimitriou refers to as the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire Tertiary Escarpment. It’s been a few years since I last walked with Nick, following a period of time when we made The London Perambulator, then our radio show on Resonance fm, Ventures and Adventures in Topography.It does get very surreal at times, and I lost interest later on, although I did finish it (I always do). Like Iain Sinclair the walking tour is a peg to which he attaches his own musings and recollections, mostly about a troubled adolescence in the 70s that ended in a spell in prison. Through the metal grated fence we can see that the Abbey doors have been left wide open – awnings on the balconies flap in the breeze blowing straight through the broken windows. What does it for me is the difference, the descriptive language, the unusual connections geographical and personal insight. Papadimitriou finds all sorts of ways into Scarp and, in reading the book, you are pulled along across the miles and years.