Scarp

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I enjoy eccentricity, so happily listened to Nick prattle on about Gilbert White, the Woodcraft Folk, and the mysteries of Middlesex. Even so Michael Robbins noted in 1953 that, “Cows are still to be seen grazing in the fields, and it is the nearest place to London where the motorist is requested to ‘Beware Cattle Crossing’. Papanikolaou also addresses the huge impact that the new LGBTQI and anti-racist legislation has had and how the LGBTQI movement in Greece now has the power to be even more intersectional and more inclusive. Self's droll psychogeographic adventures are more fun but they lack the sheer Joycean scope of Papadimitriou's ramblings: this is the hard stuff. Rather than pepper the book with bite-sized reminiscences of past excursions, the narrative is both dynamic and capable of rendering the most mundane of subjects as magical.

Nick’s literary gift lies in transforming the mundane and seemingly ordinary suburbs of London into a magical realm. The exception I'd say was Nick Papadimitriou's autobiographical passages about his childhood and early years but they were well narrated and did at least relate to his home environment and his interaction with the area. The artists are Day Bowman, Dan Coombs, Marguerite Horner, Barbara Howey, Lee Maelzer and Sean Williams.The image I had in my head that inspired these thoughts was of the Mill Hill Viaduct in a winter sunset. This was an excellent book for a North Londoner, curious about the highways and byways of Edgware, Finchley, Southgate and such places. It’s defiantly unfashionable, exuberant and freewheeling, linking together apparently unrelated artefacts and events and nature and the living and the dead in a dense web of meaning. Every couple of years Jason and I, and whatever accomplices we rope in, descend on the increasingly unfamiliar homeland to wrest the secrets from a corner of town not yet explored. We crossed Basing Hill Park where the water laid heavy on the path, and then walked along the Hendon Way, taking the subway beneath the road to Clitterhouse Recreation Ground.

Papadimitriou finds all sorts of ways into Scarp and, in reading the book, you are pulled along across the miles and years.But my attitude has changed over the last 18-months to seize these impulses for the joys that they deliver. I have been reading Nick Papadimitriou’s extraordinary book, Scarp, the result of a lifetime’s work of chronicling his corner of outer London, around Hendon, Edgware, Pinner.

Curling inside his looping journeys across the North Middlesex/South Hertfordshire escarpment, on which Papadimitriou de-romanticises ruins and tweaks the erogenous zones of gold courses, are other narratives that bend like tiny dimensions inside the bigger shell. The first walk to record the field recordings that constituted half the programme would have been around the same time. There are sections of personal memoir where the author describes his boyhood, his difficult relationship with his father after his mother’s death. We gaze into the fast flowing waters of the River Brent beside the Wembley Travelodge then move on along a muddy path through a spindly outcrop of trees that runs beside the river on one side and a council estate the other.On the face of it, everything sounds rather plain, an old-fashioned world of packed lunches, mint cake and OS maps flapping in the wind, and also rather domestic. But what I wasn’t prepared for was that this book would combine all that stuff with one of my other pet interests which is books that are, for want of a better description, really quite weird.