Scarp

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Ultimately this isn't a book about the Scarp but about fringes - of society, cities, nature, perhaps even sanity. There are large holes in the upper floors giving a clear view upwards through the building to the leaden sky.

The zone or place, in this case, is Scarp, where the language of the land is wonderfully flexible, intuitive, and 'sings' with a precise, hi-fidelity exchange of signals between the walker and the region.These accelerating transmogrifications, which indeed have something of a Terry Gilliam animation feel about them, are funny but also effective at evoking the layered life of the scarp.

He is able to make his walk talk as he does and I have never read a more fully inhabited book of walking.The wicking properties of his coat are as important as the comforts offered by comparing his trails and trials to Odysseus or Sir Gawain .

He's the scruffy-looking drifter staring over your garden fence, or sleeping rough on a golf course. 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). 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. He believes we have some sort of zonal radar system that also operates trans-temporally, enabling us to introject directly into our cortex whole chunks of regional memory at the level of danger - from humans, animals, floods, earthquakes, microbes (particularly) and fire. Like magic, in the last decade or so, the maker movement and psychogeography emerge, and it’s like, “oh, yeah, that”.Photograph: Rob Greig/Time Out/Camera Press Nick Papadimitriou on the north Middlesex/south Hertfordshire escarpment. 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". We follow him to the Abbey grounds where what appears as a long high wall thickly coated in ivy turns out to be a sequence of derelict buildings, what Maxwell describes as the ‘Home Farm’, that provided the Abbey with food. But this is a far bigger and more exemplary fable than that - here a wanderer, repeatedly interrupted by ordinariness, journeys to contain in words and sweat a "vast and yet seemingly invisible presence" that "hovers over the northern suburbs of London".