The archive

The bus deposited me on the southern side of a broad dual-carriageway with a generous but unbarriered concrete median. The road was eerily silent. I paused, wondering quite where I was and feeling the familiar tingle of anxiety at not quite knowing what I'd let myself in for.

The drive into Wales was fractious and slow. The motorway was mired in congestion and overwhelmed with traffic, so we slalomed across the map heading steadily westwards on a successively narrower corridor of minor roads, a routing which made me - the navigator - distinctly unpopular for a while.

I often write about being outside my comfort zone or having transgressed the boundaries which define my normal territory. In some ways, I've made a hobby out of challenging myself in terms of range and geography, however modestly.

I'll start at the end... I'm in the same coffee shop which I headed for at the end of my last walk. An old haunt, a staging post on the way back west after conferences in Bloomsbury or casing the City, worrying about appearing on too many CCTV feeds.

A month ago I didn't expect to be here in London. Arriving at the bustle of Paddington station on one of GWR's flagship new trains for the first time, I was a little early. The skies over Berkshire had seen a reassuring red dawn fade into a marine…

I was still smarting a little from last month's abortive walk, but things had started tolerably well. Despite some engineering works which saw me arriving in London around half-an-hour later than usual, the journey had been relaxing and I'd read and dozed my way east.

Arrival in Erith did little to dispel the strange gloom I'd sensed about the place on my last, fleeting, Sunday afternoon visit. Back then I'd been content to assume it was shuttered and drab because of the malaise which descends on all British…

I'm fairly often asked 'Why London?' when I speak about my wandering. Living in the West Country, a comfortable distance from the zone of poor air quality that sheaths the city is, to most, a huge positive and the question appears to assume a deficiency.

The last few moments of my long tube journey to the furthest reaches of the Central Line were occupied by slathering sunblock onto my exposed temples, musing that when I was last here there was probably more natural coverage.