Antony is going to Flevoland, where he’s erecting an enormous anthropoid statue, derived, as usual, from a cast of his own body. This one is going to be 25-metres high and welded together from the same steel girders used to build electricity pylons. We’re walking along the South Downs Way as he describes this to me: it’s a flat, grey day, and the grey-green humpbacked hills are like so many awesome cetaceans, migrating along the Sussex Weald.

There are pylons marching over the Downs, and as Antony discourses knowledgeably upon them, waving his long arms about, it’s difficult not to see them as wreathed in high-tension cable while the pylons stride along, slamming down one concrete boot after another, and occasionally snapping: “Very good!”

If Antony sees a polder, it only makes him bolder, and Flevoland has to be the biggest polder of them all – thousands of square kilometres of reclaimed Zuider Zee. To begin with, the pancake of drying silt, wrested from the sea, was settled by Dutch fundamentalists, the kind who believe buttons to be the work of Satan. Lowlands, low church – you get the photo. But Flevoland proved too much of a pays bas even for them, and they retreated.

By the late 1980s the ersatz towns of Flevoland were experiencing real social problems, as Surinamese immigrants were dumped in them, and in the absence of any light on the horizon – only dykes – turned to drug-dealing and violence. But now Flevoland is on the up: doughty Dutch burghers have encouraged the Surinamese to build a scale reconstruction of a Batavian fort – with a scale model of a Dutch East India ship moored alongside. It’s a nice – and very cloggy – conceit, this: a creation of land, and on it a recreation of colonialism there’s no terra more nullis than the bottom of the sea. Meanwhile wind farms have blossomed – hence Antony’s Homo pylonis.

I passionately desire to go to Flevoland – all the more so when John, the architect, reveals that he’s also off there on an unheard of site visit. John – as has been remarked in PsychoGeographies passim – usually takes such a lackadaisical approach to his metier, that’s he sometimes turns a corner to be confronted, unexpectedly, by a 10-storey building that he himself has designed, with no comprehension of how it got there. Flevoland is ideal for his conception of the built environment: a slate blanker than a sheet of paper or a VDU screen.

Once he’s there we exchange texts: “It’s appalling, every junk-food outlet and crappy postmodern building you’ve ever conceived of all in one place.”

“But can you walk across it?” I demand.

“Yes,” comes the reply. “But you’d go insane!”

Perhaps I already am insane, because while this is going on I’m far nearer to the Highlands than the Netherlands, driving north on the A73 from Airdrie, together with a squad of two small boys in camouflage kit, heading for yet another frenzied assault on Stirling Castle. But first, we stop off in Cumbernauld. This, the first of the Scottish new towns, was built in the 1950s to accommodate overspill from Glasgow’s bombed tenements.

Poor, poor Cumbernauld: poured and hammered into being in the white heat of Britain’s brief affair with Modernism – ever since, rejected and derided as the ugliest town in the land. Channel 4 viewers have even voted to have it blown up – without specifying evacuation first. Yet why such savagery? We can’t all live in Poundbury, or otherwise crawl up the Prince of Wales’s arse. Admittedly, it is a brilliant October day, but Cumbernauld doesn’t seem such a dreadful place to me in fact, it doesn’t even look like a town at all: but the biggest motorway service centre ever conceived of, straddling the A8011 like a steel and concrete cabre tossed by the McGods.

Cumbernauld has the distinction of having been Britain’s first shopping mall – and its first multi-level covered town. It may be derided now, because its penthouse apartments never found tenants and have cracked and spalled with time, but the mall remains, almost a kilometre of retail outlets! I take the boys to Greggs to liberate some doughnuts, and then we give the flightless smokers outside the Kestrel a swerve and head on to the Royal Burgh, where – to be blunt – we find the same thing.

With its princely apartments, vast kitchens, arching chapel and soaring great hall its garden, its battlements, and its Argyll and Sutherlanders’ regimental museum – not forgetting its plentiful retail opportunities (if, that is, you get off on shortbread and pipe bands), Stirling Castle clearly beats Cumbernauld as the first multi-level covered town in this neck of the woods.

En fin, I may not have made it to Flevoland, but I have proved – to my own satisfaction at least – that wherever you go in this world the Flevoland dialectic still obtains: a go-round of bricks and mortar as relentless as the waves in the North Sea. Very good!

03.11.07

“I went to a barber’s shop in Greek Street, Soho, about a month ago and realised that it was only the third time I have been to one in my entire life. In the mean old brilliantined days, small boys were forced to sit on a plank placed across the arms of the barber’s chair, and this, I contend, made them scowl, because they were the objects of ridicule. Consequently, I refused to go to a barber and preferred to cut off my own hair when necessary.

“Then I shaved off all my hair as part of some daft bet when I attended life classes at East Ham Tech College. This was nearly fifty years ago, long before the style became fashionable, and it never really grew back properly again. When I first encountered a skinhead, in Carshalton, Surrey, in 1969, he said, ‘All right, geezer,’ then did a double-take.

“I believed that I had made my hair feel unwanted, but in fact the exact opposite was my heart’s desire. Hence the nature of the trio’s detached hairstyle and the oddness of their bearing. The hand in the ear is a cry for help, the conch my listening for wisdom and my whole life’s autobiographical stance. I was brought up in a 3rd-floor council flat on the North Wales coast, an evacuee from Wallasey — not even Liverpool! From my attic bedroom skylight window all I could hear was the sea and a seagull. No real birdsong.”

I worry when Ralph talks like this: with a tone of haunted and valedictory reminiscence. Worry, because he isn’t here. Not only isn’t he here — there’s no one else here either, unless you count the businessman in the blue-and-white check shirt sitting opposite me preparing a Power-Point presentation on his laptop. But I don’t count him, because I see him bloody everywhere, and if I started counting him and his doppelgangers I wouldn’t know when to stop.

No, not only isn’t Ralph talking, but I’m also listening to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, played by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, so if Ralph were to be speaking of his childhood as an evacuee on the North Wales coast (incidentally, the “not even Liverpool”, struck a particularly affecting note, yes?) then it might well represent the breakthrough into either operatic acceptance for him, or full-blown psychosis for me.

I’m on a train from Manchester, putting this column together out of curls and cuttings of personal hair-story. I too have gone slap-head (as they say in the city Ralph doesn’t hail from). Someone told me the visual content of your dreams massively increases if you either shave your head, or wear a woolly hat to bed. I tried them both. I thought I’d look like a Buddhist monk, all lean and ascetic but I more closely resembled the wrestler Big Daddy, and elderly women ran screaming from me as I strolled through the streets of Oxford, a town that ever afterwards has been associated with alopecia for me. “Beliefs are ideas going bald,” a remark credited variously to Andre Breton, Lautreamont, Leonard Cohen and Big Daddy, but which I claim as my own.

Baldness is a touchy subject in our family. Both my brothers lost their hair at an early age — one of them never really gained any. And being a nasty little tyke, I guyed them mercilessly about this. A couple of years ago, still being the proud possessor of a crowning glory that some have dubbed “the Koh-i-Noor Diamond of coifs”, I resolved to make amends. For eight whole seasons I gave Keith — my redoubtable hair man, who shears at World’s End in Chelsea — the swerve. If I saw him in the King’s Road I looked straight through him and said, “I do not know you.” Whereupon he stared at me and replied, “I don’t know you either, mate, but you could do with a barnet.”

Eventually, I had enough locks for any old lusty prince to bust into my tower. Keith gave me the chop, and I had the clippings made into two absolutely beautiful wigs, which I presented to my aggrieved siblings. Were they grateful? Were they fuck. The threw the toupees back in my face, crying out that this was the cruellest taunt of them all. I don’t know, there’s just no pleasing some people.

In conclusion then: Ralph may have thought he was drawing three of his own personae, but, in the grand tradition of the Surrealists, he unwittingly ended up depicting my brothers and myself, reunited in the afterlife, all with great hair. The symbolism of the clockwork mechanism, the conch shell and hand poking out of one of our ears is also easy to explain. But what any of this has to do with geography is utterly beyond me. I may have to ask the man sitting opposite.

06.10.07

Glencoe. It’s late August but already there’s a hint of autumn in the air, along with the droplets of smirr and the midges dancing between them. Further south the heather is still in full flower, but up here in the central Highlands, the stark triangles of the mountains are at first tawny, then swathed in grey mist, then tawny again. I unload the car and pitch the tent, while the small boys head off to explore the riverbank. I want them to fetch firewood, but they return empty-handed: over the summer the campsite has been picked clean, bucolic louts have even hacked at the living alders and birches.

I head off downstream to where some large timber has been disgorged on to the stony bluffs. It’s too large: entire trees, their root systems embedded with rocks lie like stranded krakens. I wrench a couple of limbs off and drag them back, then gather a few handfuls of twigs and wager our last firelighters on stimulating a conflagration. Dusk and clouds are flowing down into the U-shaped glacial valley, the midges are getting fierce: We need smoke.

Then comes Colin. I’ve encountered him already, a portly, middle-aged man, in grey tracksuit bottoms and a check wool shirt. He has a regulation bald patch, and as I passed him on the path he wished me a cheery “Good evening” in a New World accent that I couldn’t place. Now he comes up to our fireplace and says, “I heard the kids’ voices and had to come over, I’m missing my own ones and dying for a little company,” then he giggles, a disagreeable cartoon chuckle. “I was sitting at home in Glasgow at six this morning, when I decided that I couldn’t stand the city anymore, so I got in the car and drove up here,” again the naughty giggle and a conspiratorial look. I came here to get away from all Colins, but this one has latched on effortlessly.

“I don’t think that’s gonna catch,” he says, gesturing at the fire. It’s true. The early promise of the firelighters has given way to a forlorn charring. “I’ve got some kindling and logs in the car, if your lad’ll give me a hand,” he gestures at my nine-year-old, selecting his volunteer, “I’ll go and get them.”

“Go on then, Ivan,” I say, but as he obediently trots off through the woodland behind Colin I am gripped by a dreadful anxiety: this Colin isn’t just some saddo loner with grating mannerisms, he’s a highly organised paedophile, who’s going to whip my son into the back of his car and drive him away … Glencoe will become the ominous backdrop for another bloody massacre … Then I check myself: Christ! I’m falling victim to just the free-ranging, stranger-danger paranoia I so despise in the commonality. I’m damning a man for being a pervert simply because he’s being friendly. I hunker down to the fire, trying to coax it back into life — but it’s no good, the anxious worm is boring through me, and I find myself scampering through the woodland in studiedly casual pursuit, only to encounter Colin and Ivan on their way back with the logs.

So, having falsely accused him, I’m condemned to Colin for the evening. Still suspicious, I draw him out. It’s a rule of meetings with unremarkable men that if you question them they’ll remain transfixed by their own incuriosity. So it is with Colin. While we get the fire going (and even with his logs, his coal and his kindling, it fails to properly ignite until he applies his electric air pump), and the boys toast their marshmallows and slurp their hot chocolate, I learn a lot about him, while he remains in total ignorance of us.

Colin’s parents emigrated to Canada when he was a kid. He grew up there, joined the Canadian Navy, trained as a radar plotter, then left and came back to his native Scotland in the early 1990s. He hasn’t worked properly since. He has a girlfriend and a couple of kids. He’s also got diabetes and has had five heart attacks. I’m shocked when he tells me he’s four years younger than me — he looks much older. He sits at home in Glasgow, growing hydroponic weed in his cupboard, which explains the giggling and the claustrophobia. Every so often he drives his Mondeo up north and squats in this campsite, staring out at the mountains he’s incapable of climbing.

As I pump Colin for his life story a sadness emerges that blankets Glencoe as thickly as the darkness. Even when he gets out the 12 million candle-power torch he bought at Argos for £29.99 it fails to dispel my gloom: this is just a cock-up of a man, no conspirator. Eventually, the small boys are asleep on their rug by the fire, and Colin takes his leave: “I’ve got my laptop in the tent,” he tells me proudly. “I’m gonna watch The Da Vinci Code.”

15.09.07

It’s the time of year when we forego the pleasures of the beach in order to visit Dr Thurm Angstrom, in his claustrophobic office at Reading University’s Department of Comparative Environmental Science. Regular readers of this column will be familiar with Dr Angstrom, whose laughable excursus, Sweaty Hearth: Transliterating Domestic Space in the Age of Climate Change, was one of the great publishing failures of last year. An initial print run of 100,000 copies, printed on non-biodegradable polyurethane sheeting, were instantly remaindered then dumped off the coast of Cornwall by the psychotically depressed publisher.

The reef of Sweaty Hearths subsequently distorted the ocean currents so catastrophically that a freak tsunami engulfed Rick Stein’s famous fish restaurant in Padstow, and swept it out into the Atlantic, where it was harpooned by an illegal Japanese whaler. The first I heard about it was when a distraught Ms Billings wrote to me to say that her elderly parents — together with several other middle-class English couples — had recently appeared as an entry on the menu of an exclusive Osaka restaurant, right underneath sushi made from the notoriously poisonous fugu blowfish.

But the crazed Dr Angstrom didn’t want to talk about this: he’d summoned me to discuss the Russian territorial claim to the Arctic seabed. “I’m 100 per cent behind the Russians,” were his opening words. “This is a bold new day for humankind!” I ignored the lack of any politesse — Angstrom is not a Jane Austen character — and focused instead on the changes in the man: gone was the penis sheath and lean nudity of the previous year instead, he was sporting a full set of furs suitable for subzero temperatures.

“I’m only wearing these,” the deranged climate scientist told me, “because soon they won’t be a sartorial option at all the polar icecap is shrinking, and calving ice floes the size of Reading every 24 hours! Under such circumstances the Russians are doing the only sensible thing.”

“But surely,” I objected, taking a seat upon a pile of bound proofs of Angstrom’s latest tome, Cold Hearth: Igloo Cities in the Age of Global Warming, “there’s a distinctly savage irony implied here: the Russians have their eye on the gas and oil reserves beneath the Arctic seabed, and if they then exploit them it will only increase carbon emissions, speeding the entire go-round of civilisation’s destruction!”

He fixed me with a roving eye that recalled that of Nanook of the North: “Some,” he chose his words judiciously, “might regard it as a virtuous circle; after all, more warming, less ice. Less ice — more access to the mineral deposits!”

“My God, man!” I expostulated. “You’re behaving as if global warming is a good thing!”

“Isn’t it?” Angstrom rose, picked up a narwhal tusk and climbed on to his paper-cluttered desk. Here he began to dance a fierce jig, conducting himself with the tusk, while singing: “Burn, baby, burn, global inferno! Burn, baby, burn… ” He halted abruptly. “No,” he resumed, tapping a wall map of the Arctic with the end of the tusk, “you cannot combat the inevitable, you can only go with the floe!

“Consider Roald Amundsen, he deliberately sought out the pack ice with his ship the Fram – which, incidentally, means ‘forward’ in Norwegian – then remained there, trapped for a year, in order to discover the secrets of survival in those climes.”

“Um,” I interjected, “Dr Angstrom, I don’t know if I’m just being obtuse, but where’s all this leading?”

“It’s absurdly simple,” he said, tapping the edge of the icecap with his tusk. “Here, in the south-east of England we have a critical shortage in the availability of greenfield building land, while up here in the Arctic, an iron-hard level surface the size of Reading becomes available every day! By my calculations, each of these floe-cities — if they are built — can be reinforced and provided with integrated freezer units that will keep them viable for at least 99 years. During this time, the New Readings will slowly float down through the North Atlantic, then the Irish Sea, eventually coming ashore here,” the tusk tapped lower, “at Aberystwyth on the coast of Wales. As Amundsen would say: Forward!”

“B-but,” it was a feeble objection to these delusions of icy grandeur — but the best I could manage — “what if the Russians, despite dropping their flag on to the seabed, don’t succeed with their claim?”

“Well,” Angstrom looked stricken, “then, I have to concede, we’re sunk. A Canadian Arctic seabed would be problematic — an American one catastrophic.”

“How so?”

“Well,” he sighed deeply. “The whole plan is tightly calibrated with the continued rise in British house prices — hence the 99-year time period. In the USA there are these bloody sub-prime mortgages, not at all the sort of borrowing we want. Buying one of our properties with that kind of financing… well, it would be like sinking the foundations in… in…”

“Water?”

“Quite so.”

01.09.07

“Today I made the ascent of the highest mountain in this region, which is not improperly called Ventosum. My only motive was the wish to see what so great an elevation had to offer. I have had the expedition in mind for many years …” So begins Petrarch’s justly celebrated account of his ascent of Mont Ventoux, a peak at the west end of the Luberon massif in Provence.

Luberon. Mmm … The very region sounds lubricious, to me. It makes me think of dallying with libidinous Cathars in valleys rather than climbing up 2,000 metres of bare limestone-capped mountain. But then Petrarch was made of sterner stuff. “Remorseless toil,” he observed, “conquers all.” He claimed that his 1336 hike was the first taken since antiquity purely in order to admire the view. Others have disputed this — as well they might. Founding father of Humanism Petrarch may have been — Norris McWhirter he wasn’t.

Besides, his account is studded with spiritual exhortations you can’t imagine Janet Street-Porter coming out with: “The life we call blessed is sought for in a high eminence, and straight is the way that leads to it.” Nor, I imagine, do most of us always have a copy of Augustine’s Confessions on hand when we go hill walking, to liberally quote from should we feel the impulse.

Still, there I was, in the Luberon, and while climbing Mont Ventoux seemed a little de trop, I still had an urge to get out in that maquis and deprive Jean of his source (or is it Manon?). Why shouldn’t I scale the Petit Luberon, a lesser limestone escarpment to the south of Mont Ventoux? And why not provide myself with a motivation to match Petrarch’s own lack of one?

The village of Lacoste suggested itself as a starting point (suggested … it always strikes me as such a suggestible word), because the Marquis de Sade lived here, and his castle still stands on the hilltop, a suitably medieval-looking ruin, in this landscape fractured by religious schism: Protestant against Catholic, Catholic against Protestant, and everyone against the libidinous Cathars.

True, daytime temperatures were hitting 37C, and August isn’t really the month for strenuous exertion in this part of the world. Not that the locals see it that way: the day before I set out, a cycle race climbed the zigzag road to Lacoste, its Lycra-clad, tight-shirted contestants looking — from behind — more than ready to embark on 120 days of Sodom. Poor Tommy Simpson, the English cyclist, was done for by the heat when he pumped his way towards the top of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France. Granted, there were amphetamines and alcohol found in his bloodstream, but who among us can honestly claim that we’ve never cycled up a mountain pissed and speeding? Besides, when it comes to the Tour, I say, plus ça change.

I elected — like Petrarch — to leave before dawn, and by the time the sunlight was streaming down through the trees I was already high up on the Petit Luberon, with De Sade’s castle well below and behind me. At the top of the escarpment the rocky path levelled out and I entered the mysterious Foret des Cadres. Actually, there was nothing mysterious about this at all — it was a forest of cedars: big, shaggy trees, their foliage trailing on the ground. It seemed I’d narrowly missed out on a herd of Eeyores, because all over the forest were rude shelters constructed from fallen boughs.

Then, as I reached the far side of the plateau, and the massif fell away from me in successive lower peaks carpeted with thorny scrub, it hit me: I would devise a latter-day perversion to match any ever dreamed of by Donatien Alphonse-François de Sade. It was this that would provide my motivation as my feet stumbled on the sharp limestone outcrops, this noble pursuit that would be my trailblazer as I joined the Grande Randonee down into the valley.

It worked: meditating hard on what I might get up to, given two cyclists, a copy of Augustine’s Confessions and a large saucisson sec, I motored past the lonely “Peak of the Eagles” and down towards the turning point of my trek, Le Tapis. I checked to see if there were any children down the well, then turned back, marvelling at the way the escarpment high overhead had been eroded by run-off into fantastical arches, spires, and an exact likeness of Gerard Depardieu.

By the time I was heading once more down the rocky track towards Lacoste (as Petrarch would have it: “a heavy body weighed down by members”), my own salacious feverishness was greater than the air temperature. Someone had told me that De Sade’s castle was now the property of the octogenarian designer Pierre Cardin, and he was in the process of transforming it into a comfy bourgeois home. Perhaps cardinism was the perversion I sought? And what is cardinism, I hear you ask. Simple: sexual relief obtained by castle conversions. True, this may be an expensive way of getting your jollies, but with the housing market the way it is …

25.08.07

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.

Don’t be fooled by the comparatively short distances and level terrain into thinking that this will be an easy hike. Consisting of four separate stages — Domestic Transfers Check-in Desk, TAM ticketing desk, TAM Check-in, and Security — the walk, or “queue” as it is colloquially known, can become especially arduous if you undertake it, as we did, in the immediate aftermath of a strike by Brazilian air-traffic controllers. We flew in at 6.30am in a daze, but after “walking” for three hours, we knew where we were. Purgatory. Still, we didn’t have it as bad as those who flew in to Sao Paulo’s domestic airport a fortnight later — their destination was altogether final.

Walk 2. From the head of the funicular to the base of the statue of Christ the Redeemer. Distance: 200m.
Time: 1 hour (including refreshment stop).

Everyone, just everyone, has to visit this huge statue when they come to Rio. It’s just so huge, and the views from the top of the mountain are superb. At least, they are on clear days. On the one we attempted our trek, it was so cloudy we could see neither up nor down. The youngest of our party did exclaim “Oh my God!” when he saw the vast Redeemer looming out of the mist, but while this may have been apt, he is also — being five — utterly credulous.

Walk 3. Copacabana to Ipanema. Distance: 1.5km.
Time: 2 hours.

Put all thoughts of Astrud Gilberto and the eponymous girl out of your mind. Beachfront Rio may no longer have been quite as minatory as when I was last here, in the early 1990s (see Psychogeography passim), but being winter it was still a misty, chilly, slightly scuzzy prospect, as the author’s wife never ceased to remind him.

The boys liked to walk up the beach — which, to be fair, is pristine — then back down the Avenida Atlantica, time after time after time. Eventually, I persuaded them to divert up the Rua Francesco Otaviano to Ipanema, past a scary Catholic iconostasis (life-size plaster figures of leprous-looking saints). It was dark by the time we turned into the Avenida Francesco Behring, and there was absolutely no one on the beach at all. The breakers rolled in from the Atlantic, and the lights of the hilly suburbs to the south mounted up as if Christ the Redeemer were developing the empyrean itself.

Towards the end of the point was the Parcque Garota. The author’s wife felt that its dark shrubbery, and sinister-sounding appellation disqualified it as a location for family rambling, but I pointed out that “garota” is in fact “girl” in Portuguese, and the park was named after the eponymous one. “In that case,” Mrs Self snapped, “why is it full of single men lurking in the bushes?”

Walk 4. Paraty, Brazil. Round trip from the Marquesa Hotel. Distance: 2kms. Time: 1.5 hours.

If you visit the charming seaside resort of Paraty — 3.5 hours drive north of Rio — be sure to tour its famously uneven, large-cobbled streets on foot. The grid-pattern of boxy, whitewashed houses will be familiar to anyone who has ever seen a spaghetti western.

Abandoning the boys at the hotel, I acquired sturdy walking companions, to whit: the entire staff of the British Council office in Rio de Janeiro, together with a journalist from Il Globo, his photographer, and the Jeep they’d all hired.

I asked them why they were on my case; they explained that they’d paid my plane fare to the literary festival that was being held in Paraty, and they wanted their face time. This was all news to me. I don’t like having anything to do with the Council, which is an adjunct of the Foreign Office, charged with converting the heathen to reruns of The Vicar of Dibley. They wanted to go for a drive — I insisted on walking. I prevailed, and we set out for the kilometre or so to the jetty where the pleasure boats are hired, the whole media cavalcade stringing along behind.

The journalist asked me questions, his snapper snapped away. The Head of the British Council and I chatted amiably enough. (It’s impossible to do anything else with them, as Holly Martins discovered in The Third Man, when he encountered the BC rep, Crabbin, memorably played by the late Wilfrid Hyde-White.) We made it to the jetty, and then, after further excruciating politeness, I managed to shake them off. Bliss.

11.08.07

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.”

I thought on it flying home to London, besmirching the sky with more than my fair share of cosmic lamp blacking. Back in town, the rains came down like stair rods — except that no one under 40 was in a position to employ this simile, because they’ve never seen a stair rod in their lives.

A puddle formed in the back garden five feet across — this was unprecedented. The small boys’ school was closed due to flooding I went to pick them up on the bicycle, then, three-up, we toured the local wet spots. The low points of Silverthorne and Queenstown Roads were flooded: scuzzy meres with kerbstone banks and littorals defined by police incident tape.

The small boys were excited by this inversion of the normal state of things. You don’t spend two years of your young lives with your dad upstairs typing a futuristic, dystopic novel about flooded Britain for nothing. We discussed the possibilities of London being seriously inundated, and foolishly I gave it to them straight: Yes, I thought it was definitely rather than maybe, to adapt an album title from the aptly named beat combo, Oasis. Predictably, the small boys grew anxious, and began discussing among themselves what toys could be saved.

Returning home, I thought of my friends in the Vale of Pershore — we were due to go up for the weekend usually, we all indulge in a little wild water swimming in the Avon, but this water was going to be way too wild for that. It wasn’t long before the sewers of rolling TV began to back-up with the breaking flood news. My friends’ news was stark: “We’re cut off,” Charles said. “But the most bizarre thing is that Gabriel has been watching the Test at Lords all afternoon, where there’s bright sunshine.”

Yes, after all, the paradigm for the deluge remains Genesis, chapters 6-10. It’s a short tale — with a powerful resonance. The main facts are well known: God, an irascible super-being, prone to creating marvellous things, but afflicted with severe Attention-Deficit Disorder, gives life to humanity, but then gets quickly bored with it: “And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.”

The solution was obvious: lay on 40 days and 40 nights of stair rods (although the simile is questionable, since although “there were giants in the earth in those days” [Gen 6:4], they had yet to invent the stair carpet, or even the runner), then instruct a morally recondite sexcentenarian to build a fuck-off big boat in order to preserve breeding pairs of all genotypes (except insects, which were invented by Beelzebub in 1923).

The important thing here is that the standard account of the antediluvian — which every morally recondite son of the manse, such as our own Prime Minister well knows — is that the ignorant, the venal and the lazy get it in the neck (the water, that is), while the Good are saved, so that when the dove pitches up they’re in pole position to build enormous towers on the floodplains, and invest in the booming language-school business that soon comes into being. It’s obvious that the Prime Minister subscribes to this view. Touring Gloucester shortly after it went “glub-glub”, he referred time and again to the exceptional nature of the rainfall. If he didn’t have an overwhelmingly secular electorate, the words “Act of God” would’ve shot through his lips.

But from where I’m sitting it’s Britain’s Sodoms and Gomorrahs that remained high and dry, while the likes of my friend Charles had his livelihood all but trashed. His crops were washed away, his barns soaked, and the Poles who come every summer to do the picking (most of whom are professors of theology), ended up paddling. Still, what the tide brings in the tide takes out again. I expect there were seasonal workers in Doggerland (in the Mesolithic they favoured transhumance), and when it became impossible, due to rising sea levels, to walk home to Poland, they, too, took it personally.

04.08.07

In Moulin Rouge, John Huston’s 1952 biopic of the French painter and absinthe-bucket Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, José Ferrer played the lead — entirely on his knees. The action begins in a Parisian bar, Toulouse-Lautrec sits supping his deathly green mouthwash — the barman polishes the glasses. Then the painter clambers down off his stool. Suddenly we’re in his point of view, looking up at the great zinc-topped escarpment of the counter the barman leans over, peers down at us, and speaks the first line of the movie: “So long, Toulouse!”

I resolved to walk to Toulouse in the spirit of Ferrer’s Oscar-winning performance by which I mean that for large portions of the journey I would be semi-recumbent on trains. First I would walk from my home in Stockwell, south London, to the Eurostar Terminal at Waterloo Station, then I’d entrain for the Gare du Nord. In Paris, I would stump across town to the Gare Montmartre and entrain once more for the far south.

In Toulouse, I would walk to my hotel, walk to the theatre where I was giving a reading with the chanteuse Marianne Faithful, walk to dinner, limp to bed, and in the morning I’d do the whole thing in reverse: a nice weekend’s stroll, covering some 1,300 miles. My wife, ever-sceptical of these peregrinations, always says the same thing: “Will you walk up and down the train?” She refuses to accept the musicality of my giant steps, their alternation of rhythmic striding and the fermata of the rail compartment.

The night before I left, I ran into Bobby. He got the walk to Toulouse. He grew up in Florida and used to water-ski across the Everglades, from lake to lake, his transit linking the Atlantic seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico (“We’d stop at amazing restaurants to eat fried chicken and gumbo”).

It was a dullish morning in London and rain threatened. Down by the Vauxhall railway arches the late-night revellers at Fire were punching the air, trying to KO the new day. Along the Albert Embankment, it was debatable that earth had not anything to show more fair. On the 6.37am train to Paris, the stewardess was chatty: they’re moving the terminal to King’s Cross and it’ll make her trip to the trip that’s work a grinding urban commute. It will render my walking tours of Paris equally unappealing, with all that London to march through before I reach the Boulevard de Magenta. The 50km through the Channel Tunnel has been walked, of course — by a Russian 36-year-old in 1998. But he was on his way to join the Foreign Legion and not officially sanctioned, a fugitive, on his knees — metaphorically — and what fun is that?

Aeolus was tossing buckets against the train windows in England — and then in France. But the drizzle was light as I strode away from the Gare du Nord, making for the Seine. I’d eschewed the map to give myself the delusion I knew my way around — or, perhaps to make the walk seem more like a Situationist’s aimless Dérive. I cut off Magenta before the Boulevard de Strasbourg and headed south down Rue du Faubourg-St Denis. As ever with these intermittent walks, the two cities had been kicked into one by my boots: London was exoticised — while making Paris seems ineffably mundane. I liked that. I liked the way the Porte Saint-Denis had all the historical resonance of a five-bar gate.Naturally I got lost around Les Halles, but then recovered myself to saunter across the Pont Neuf, through Saint Germain and up the Rue de Rennes. A swift espresso, priced at euro6, and it was into the uglification of the Gare Montmartre.

In Toulouse I left the station and headed along the Boulevard Pierre Sémard, which bordered a canal, then turned down the Allée Jean Jaurés, a wide, dull boulevard that debouched into the charming little Place Wilson, where I found a grandiose monument to the Occitan poet Pierre Goudouli. Ah, French urban place names! Where else in the world can you go from martyred Communist trade-union leader to socialist premier to US president, all within 40 minutes. From there I trod on the revolutionary Frenchman who was the US’s greatest friend — Rue Lafayette — until I reached the prosaic Place Capitole and checked into the Crown-Plaza.

That evening, at dinner in a brasserie on the Place Wilson, my friend François Ravard told me of the amazing sight he had witnessed that afternoon: a float of Gay Pride marchers being drawn through Toulouse by a melancholy French peasant sporting an Asterix moustache and driving a tractor. Meanwhile, another of our fellow diners informed us that the Charlemagne Regiment (a French division of the Waffen SS) were holding their annual reunion in a town an hour’s drive west of Toulouse. Such strange ambulatory antics! They made my own homage to José Ferrer seem positively banal.

21.07.07

I write this to the jaunty strains of the West Jesmond Rhythm Kings’ platter Jubilee Stomp, courtesy of their trumpeter and vocalist, Mike Durham, who also happens to have been the highest bidder for my services in this year’s Independent Charity Auction. Or rather, his wife Patti snaffled me up as a present for Mike, who, as well as being a jazz musician and a sesquipedalian, manages to be a deep topographer of considerable intensity.

So it was that I detrained at Newcastle, unfolded the Brompton and set off to pedal the three miles up to the Durhams’ house in the leafy ‘burb of Jesmond. This was not most people’s vision of Tyneside: no smuts, flat caps, or whippets in sight, no fog on the river, no fishes on little dishes, only the long strip of Osborne Road, flanked by stony villas, into which had been sunk boreholes called things like The Billabong. Presumably the students who rent here often throw over their studies to go walkabout in the outback of intoxication.

Mike and Patti Durham have done their fair share of walking about too. Both of them haled originally from the south — Surrey and Sussex respectively — but they’ve been Oop North for more than 30 years now. Mike took a job with Procter & Gamble straight out of university, wooed Patti and swept her away to Northumbria. I suppose Tom Stoppard would say something arch about bringing Durhams to Newcastle — but then I’m not him.

Then they went walkabout. In the process of raising two children, the Durhams spent time in Cincinnati, Stockholm and Osaka, as Mike was posted hither and thither by soapocracy. The Durhams were remarkably insouciant about their globetrotting. Patti spoke of the squeaky cleanliness of the 1970s Swedish socialist paradise and how in Japan she and her blonde children were followed about by hair freaks. For Mike, Swedish was a doddle to pick up — “I walk, you walk, he walk — no declensions, see?” While in Osaka he and a fellow jazzman acquired a rhythm section by sauntering through the red-light district with their lugholes open.

Now retired, Mike has taken to sauntering the environs of Jesmond, arguably becoming rooted there in a way that only a transplanted growth can. He took me on a tour of his sacred sites, once he’d talked me through the highlights of his collection of 250-odd brass instruments. These glare-blared in immaculate glass cabinets: a synaesthetic cacophony.

We headed for the valley of the Ouseburn and the pleasure gardens of Jesmond Dene created by the pioneering engineer William — later Lord — Armstrong. After the Crimean War this was where the Armstrong breech-loading guns were tested, but later meadows, walkways and picturesque water features were conjured out of the newly post-industrial landscape. In the 1880s, Armstrong gave the gardens to the city.

On a summer’s weekday, Mike and I more or less had the place to ourselves, and we wandered down through the lush trees, stopping to examine the remains of the mills that used to grind here and the ruins of a 12th-century chapel connected by tunnel to the opulent banqueting house where Armstrong entertained his foreign clients. Now, this too is in ruins, another fine example of municipal desuetude. But that didn’t bother us. At least Armstrong’s Bridge is still here to admire: a wrought-iron tone poem of a thing, spanning the gorge 65ft up, its piers supported by their own weight on enormous iron rockers.

I haven’t the space to include all the sights Mike showed me but what I can say is that the valley of the Ouseburn was a more or less perfect rift through time and space: sundering prosperous Jesmond from the outer limits of Heaton and Byker, its wooded lips sewn together by Armstrong’s bridge and the A1058, which, in 1995, was sunk in an underpass, despite the efforts of migratory eco-warriors.

Patti joined us for lunch at Caffe Ti Amo in Jesmond Vale. Here we ate delicious clams and marvelled at the safety helmet that, having fallen off the back of a lorry three days earlier, was still outside on the pavement. The helmet was a nice symbol of the Lower Ouseburn Valley, which we strolled along after we’d eaten. In contrast to the Dene, this was a landscape that had fallen off the back of history’s lorry: a palimpsest of industrialisation, where coal wagons once rumbled, ore was crushed to extract white lead, and flax milled.

The Ouseburn was fed into a culvert in 1906, which emerges under the arches of three contrasting bridges: road, rail and metro. From here it was a hop and a skip down to the banks of the Tyne. Our walk ended beside beached, clinker-built boats. Former fishing boats, once hardworking craft, one of them was now dubbed Idler. How apt.

07.07.07