What a strange little community Harlington is. The village, just off the Heathrow peripheral road, is a bog-standard interwar development, with pebble-dashed semis ranged down drowsy culs-de-sac. Only when the flight approach into the airport switches to the north do you realise you aren’t in some still sleepier part of the ‘burbs.

The only reason I even know what Harlington looks like is because a few years ago I walked to Heathrow from my house, along the Grand Union Canal then across Hounslow Heath. Otherwise I would’ve remained in the same blissful ignorance of the airport’s surroundings as the rest of its 20 million annual users.

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Let me offer you my latest peregrinations, which consisted of a 15,000-mile sweep through the Americas, north and south, that produced a series of giant carbon footprints, while giving me hardly any opportunity to stretch my legs. I blame the kids: two small boys are a sufficient drogue to brake any possibility of sustained walking, unless it’s on a treadmill facing a marathon screening of all the Harry Potter movies.

Walk 1. Sao Paulo Airport. Distance: 260m. Time: 2.5 hours.

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I like a maverick and I like Brian Paddick, the ex-Met Assistant Commissioner, who has now thrown his hat into the ring to become the Lib-Dems’ candidate for London Mayor. They don’t come much more maverick than Paddick: the youngest area commander in the Force’s history, whose softly-softly cannabis policy on his Brixton manor caused a furore, the openly gay copper who rapidly rose up the greasy pole of this once most arch-homophobic of institutions.

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Will is going to be talking about his forthcoming book Psychogeography (illustrated by Ralph Steadman) and much more besides at the Durham literature festival on October 3 at the Gala Theatre, 7.30pm, £13/£11 concessions. Call 0191 332 4041 for tickets.

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Consider Doggerland, the landmass that before the end of the last Ice Age connected the British Isles with The Netherlands, Denmark and Germany. My brother wised me up on Doggerland, sitting in the humid garden of his house in upstate New York: “When we think of Britain and the continent being connected, we obviously imagine an isthmus or land bridge,” he averred, “whereas the reality was an enormous plain. Archaeologists have discovered human artefacts and evidence of habitations from the Mesolithic in this area. Think of it! A tundra where the North Sea is now, teeming with game — lion, mammoth, hippo — criss-crossed by the hunting trails of sophisticated huntsmen.”

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