Here's the unedited interview I did with Jay Terrestrial from the folk band Firepit Collective (www.firepitcollective.co.uk), that features in  a recent piece for Unofficial Britain.

Reconaissance photos taken by one of the lonely living circling the city of the dead. Scouting the territory before delving into the Scrubs and beyond.

Some pictures from a walk I did with Gareth E.Rees on the Romney Marsh, tracking the Royal Military Canal from Ham Street to Appledore, and exploring the Isle of Oxney. Napoleonic defences, World War Two pillboxes, an altar to Mithras (possibility) stuck at the back of a church with a load of crap, chemical run-off, gorse, fungi and sheep.

Brancaster coast, north norfolk

From Rye to the Pett Level

With a Sunday to spare and inspired by two separate London books that I’d recently read, This Other London  by John Rogers and the anthology Mount London  (published by Penned in the Margins), I decided to take it upon myself to walk from my flat in Willesden Green to this place Horsenden Hill that I’d heard so much about recently. Stories of a fragment of wooded, heathy countryside not far from Wembley, peopled by cheetah people and Sylvester McCoy, were enough to tempt to me.

Spring arriving, back on the creek and walking through the town past stilted women in black who run and shriek at children by the hot-dog stand. 

These last days before the rains come

Along the hollow shore

For my grandfathers

David and Andrew stride across London Bridge, dark rapidly engulfing the city. They zip their jackets high, buffeted by squalls off the river. An ugly monument to excess dominates the skyline, a dagger in London’s ageing heart. The Spike is near-complete, a cyberpunk’s nightmare punching its aggressive erection into the sky.

In the months after Stodmarsh, long after John Harvey’s body was dragged from muddy water and the harriers had left, I sat brooding at my desk, posting envelopes, preparing English lessons on pronouns and adverbs, editing two books ready for publication.

‘The future is going to be boring. The suburbanisation of the planet will continue, and the suburbanisation of the soul will follow soon after.’

I cycle every morning down through Hackney Central, cut over Morning Lane and through Victoria Park into Bow. En route I stop by the Regent’s Canal for a few minutes to smoke a cigarette and watch the coots and moorhens, the joggers and dog-walkers, the narrowboats with empty cans of Polish lager bobbing against their hull.

'Aren't you scared?'

I don’t like to say I hate any part of the city, all the components blend together to form the whole I love so much, but Elephant & Castle roundabout doesn’t make it easy.

The term ‘twitcher’ gets misused, the ornithologically-challenged applying it to any old Sunday stroller out on regulated marshland, indulging in a brief respite as he or she binoculars gadwall, teal and tufted duck. There is a lot of talk about the therapeutic qualities of the avian world. Enjoy it while flocks last. 

It also helped witnessing them at five in the morning on a makeshift stage on the converted Soviet trawler, the Stubnitz, sitting on the Thames in the middle of nowhere.

Like the lives of so many air and water creatures, it seems a better one than ours. We have no element. Nothing sustains us when we fall.

‘What the hell happened to you face, man? asked The Canadian.

‘Magnesium burns. Back in the eighties.’ He coughed again.