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

Last year I walked from where I live now, to where I was born, to where I grew up, to where I was at school, to where I was at University: Stockwell — Charing Cross — the Hampstead Garden Suburb — Finchley — Oxford. Thus linking my life together with a physical chord, the music of my swishing thighs.

I was particularly looking forward to visiting the house on Brim Hill, London N2, where I grew up. I’d been back there the previous year, and on that occasion was plunged into a Proustian reverie, on seeing that the little paving-stone semicircle at the bottom of the drive was exactly as it had been when I was two or three, and played out there, scrabbling in the privet hedge and running my cars along the moss-filled runnels. This was a kinder era, when coal trucks still delivered oily, glistening sacks, paedophiles didn’t exist, car traffic was minimal, and the US Air Force — with the assistance of petroleum jelly — encouraged naked Vietnamese girls to go jogging.

But this time the drive, after 40 years, had been resurfaced, and my happy Lilliputian land was gone for ever. Tears pricking my eyes, I looked up to the suburban heavens, and saw there the towering forms of cumulus clouds, heavy and grey at their bases, while their nodose peaks had that particularly intense shade of white only ever matched by especially cheap ice-cream cones.

Now I was crying: recalling the dreadful revelation that also dated from my early childhood, when it finally dawned on me that I would never, ever be able to take a walk in the clouds. Up until that point — and join me, if you will, in this stroll into the inchoate world of those billions of neurons coalescing to form the human mind — light beams had been solid and within my control, and the cloudscape was a fully apprehended part of the world, mutable yet solid.

The adult world is one of objects that persist through time and space: duct tape, manhole covers, wheelie bins, a crass neighbour’s stupid car — they furnish the world, replete with their own monstrous quiddity. When we stop walking in the clouds, ascending their creamy gorges and planting our flags in their sweet summits, we are for ever condemned to this.

I suspect the impulse Jack the lad mountaineers have to climb up and up their ropey beanstalks, is really only an urge to walk in the clouds. As for mass air transit, what can we say of it, save that it destroys our most cherished childhood illusions again and again. To plunge through the clouds once, lancing into bright sunshine, the aluminium belly of the aircraft snuggled in the flocculent sward, may be a magical experience. But to do this again and again, while slurping Um Bongo and eating pistachios at £3 a pack, is unbelievably mundane magic.

I took the small boys up to Clapham Common to do some cloud spotting. It was a fresh June day, and the curve of the hill was clearly apprehensible. The formations were perfect: regularly spaced chunks of total amorphousness sailed across the sky, even from below they had a planiform that suggested the curvature of the globe itself. All creation was in these clouds, as they metamorphosed from moment to moment:

“That one’s like a man with a hairstyle!”

“There’s a volcano!”

“That one looks like a crocodile!”

“Look, a rabbit!”

These were some of the things we cried as we lay on our backs.

Or, rather, these are some of the things I cried. The boys soon got bored and began a play fight. Perhaps they were too old already to take the vaporous for the solid and walk among the clouds. Or maybe they wanted more nerdish cloud taxonomy. I wish I was the kind of father who could draw their attention to cirrocumulus stratiformis undulatus (that’s a mackerel sky to you and me), without driving them to distraction — but I’m not. Cloud spotting remains a matter of ducks and volcanoes with me, with the occasional quiet appreciation of the way the swags and drapes constitute a backdrop to a charming proscenium of landscape.

I did take a look on the Cloud Appreciation Society website started by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, author of the bestselling Cloudspotter’s Guide. This month’s top cloud shot — I urge you take a look — is of a distrail, the swathe chopped out of the cloud cover when an airplane’s exhaust fumes freeze the water vapour into ice. Distrails and contrails, ticks and crosses on the ledgers of the heavens, marking the progress of humanity towards the final, very public examination. Worse still, if you join the Cloudspotters’ club, you get a membership certificate — and a badge. I began to cry all over again — and I’m crying still.

30.06.07

Monday morning, May 21. I’m on the Hebridean island of Jura, lost in reveries of farouche glen and pellucid sea, when an email from Ralph drags me back to south-east London: “News of the fire on the Cutty Sark jogged my Sixties’ memory and I dug out a drawing I did of the ship during my student days, when for two or three days a week I attended the London College of Printing and Graphic Arts on Back Hill in Clerkenwell. There were more drawings, but this is the only one that I could find. My art teacher, Leslie Richardson, had saved them all these years and returned them to me about six months ago. All grubby yet surprisingly good…”

Ah, modesty, my collaborator’s besetting shortcoming — but he’s right, of course, the drawing is elegant, while conveying a strong sense of the Cutty Sark’s capacity for speed: it seems to strain against its dry dock, yearning to break through the concrete pack-ice and coast downstream on the ebb tide, heading for the open sea.

I can’t honestly say that the news of many London landmarks being destroyed by fire would affect me so strongly. The Houses of Parliament up in smoke? No big deal — it’s happened before, and the London mob held an impromptu party, standing round and toasting the flames. Buck House? Undoubtedly, also a cause for celebration. Yet the Cutty Sark was different. Many childhood trips to Greenwich seemed consumed by the flames, both my own and those of my children.

Granted, the romance of the sea never exactly gripped me, but the romance of going to Greenwich hasn’t ever palled. It’s enough to take one of the tourist boats down from Westminster Pier, and listen, yet again, to the commentary of one of the pre-Canary Wharf deckhands, rancorously relating the extinction of the London Docks, for me to feel swept away beneath a bellying acreage of canvas.

The Cutty Sark, the National Maritime Museum, Sir Francis Chichester’s Gypsy Moth, the Greenwich Observatory, the very fact of the Greenwich meridian itself — nowhere else in the city could you find such a tight grouping of structures devoted to the notion of travel and human orientation. To be in Greenwich was — and one hopes, still is — to be on the cusp of omnipresence, the event horizon dipping tumultuously beneath one’s own, albeit metaphorical, event horizon.

I walked this way with Iain Sinclair, the mage of Hackney, last summer. We crossed on the Woolwich Ferry and made our way up through the Charlton parks — leaping from green island to island across the reddish-grey waves of London’s urban sea — until we stood by the Observatory, looking across at the lyre-shaped Isle of Dogs. Sinclair, who sort-of believes in lines of psychic energy, pointed out to me the alignment of One Canada Square with Bow Bells and the Meridian — or some such gobbledegook — then averred that all the shit that had gone down in the city since the Reichmanns built the Lego edifice, could be ascribed to this bad feng shui.

I’m not so sure — this maladroit situation certainly can’t explain the torching of the fleetest tea clipper of them all, unless, that is, you think that arson is an opportunistic crime, for which the victim is partly to blame: “She was asking for it, dressed like that in her flimsy rigging … ” Strange, though, when one comes to consider it: these ships, that have travelled so far and with such despatch, ending up marooned in sarf London.

Of course, the Cutty Sark was already a refurbished thing, the earliest example of ship restoration that our nation boasted. Now, let’s hope, it becomes the first example of doubly successful recreation: a restored restoration. Naturally, my first thoughts on hearing of the fire were of my own work. In my latest novel, The Book of Dave, my cab-driving protagonist sights the rigging of the Cutty Sark as he’s snarled up in traffic on the A206 Trafalgar Road. It was one of the few instances of London knowledge that my friend Harry — Hackney cabbing consultant (licensed for up to five writers) — queried, saying: “I’m not sure you’d actually be able to see it from there.” The passage was rightly emended.

But the most flagrant disorientation attending the Cutty Sark conflagration was that of the Emergency Services. Allegedly, when the operator was called, she was unable to despatch a fire engine until given the name of the road the ship was floating on — its own illustrious name was insufficient. Makes you fink, dunnit? I mean, the crew of the Cutty Sark sailed her round the Horn in force 11 gales using only sexton, chronometer and compass, but her position in the heart of the most populous city in Europe could only be established with a battery of computers and an orbiting satellite.

02.06.07