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Scarp

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Nick's words take on greater significance the more familiar you become with a zone or a place of your own, bringing rich meaning to walking, truly one of life’s great pleasures. Over those weeks, I got to know Nick and admired his roll-your-sleeves-up dedication to writing, and was intrigued by his wayward and somewhat wild side. Papadimitriou knows his flowers and arranges them well, adder's meat and "nippled sow thistle" among them, and his literal botanising is often the starting point or way in to what becomes another aria from his book-length bizarre taxonomic opera.

There are a host of others too – a proper ministry of silly walks – but Papadimitriou is his own man. Papadimitriou has been pitched somewhat as a misfit oddball and instinctual topographer but I sense a degree of sophistication behind this work. I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw. Every day the walk makes its shape: Armitage oils his feet and heads off after his "difficult hours" in someone's spare room; he often gets a little lost, finds the path, looks about himself, "more moor". Difficult to say, but leaving me with so many questions after writing about somewhere so ostensibly humdrum is a success of sorts.The artists are Day Bowman, Dan Coombs, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Lee Maelzer and Sean Williams.

The fragments of his personal history shed much needed light on the author’s current psychogeographic monomania.These don't convince in the slightest as anything more than fictions contrived at a writing desk miles away (as with all "psychogeography" in my opinion - city life would be unbearable if human beings could genuinely tune in for even a moment to the psychic agonies buried everywhere around them), but they are compellingly entertaining, though some of them owe more to TV drama conventions than any spiritual aura of special places. He finally advocates for the support of departments of Greek language and Literature as hubs that can further foster what is already happening: a real resurgence of wider Modern Greek Studies and “a radical reappraisal of what it means to be Greek in a globalized, glocalized, overmediated, contingent, inconsistent, precarious and simmering world”. Self's droll psychogeographic adventures are more fun but they lack the sheer Joycean scope of Papadimitriou's ramblings: this is the hard stuff. Papadimitriou rambles through the landscape and through history – in one long sequence an immortal rook visits incidents and people over several centuries, reporting their stories in the first person.

Yes, there's some lovely bits here about the beauty of the disregarded, overgrown lands on London's margins, and the dubious charms of outer suburbia. This is the landscape challenged and personified, but described in the loving detail of a botanist's catalogue. 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.London is impossibly beautiful in the snow, perhaps because snow seems to cleanse and purify; it softens blemishes (cloaking some of the more horrendous examples of misguided architecture) and renders what is already imposing, such as St Paul’s and the Houses of Parliament and Southwark Cathedral, with an even greater majesty. Iain Sinclair is best known for his book London Orbital, an account of his walking and exploring the terrain close by the M25. Over the road was the point where the Dollis Brook becomes the River Brent after its confluence with the Mutton Brook. Sometimes he becomes part of the landscape, some aspect of ancient geology or plant life informed by his rich knowledge of wild flowers and traditional herbology. It’s also nice to be out of the rain – the steady drizzle that has fallen throughout the day has hardened into proper raindrops with added attitude.

Nick explores the region in which as a nihilistic teen he committed arson and was taken to prison, weaving his experiences into a poetic thicket of descriptive prose that includes strange drifts into fanciful historical fiction, accounts from curious figures in his past (including the hippie girl we’d all love to meet), and a trainspotter’s account of the area’s (deep) topographical make-up. Scarp the place is a secular locus of the mysterium, ungraspable by its seer as he trudges across its plains, traces its causeways and culverts, notes with a botanist’s rigour its flora and an animal lover’s gentleness its fauna, relates tales of local characters and their fortunes, inhabiting them like a psychedelicised dybbuk, uniting his consciousness with that of the earth and elements. He's the arsonist who twice set fire to his school, and did time for burning down his neighbour's house.Nick’s literary gift lies in transforming the mundane and seemingly ordinary suburbs of London into a magical realm.

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