Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

After the taboo-defying vision, the Green Way ties all the loose ends together: Colne, pylons, Staines Bypass. On the rough wall of the dual-carriageway underpass is an arrow and a strange graffito: INIT ILAND. Cockney paraphrase of Inuit? Green weed in swift-flowing water. Our track winds its way through the dormitory estates of Staines. We’ve made it, the town, the railway station. The car.

Ad Pontes, the Romans called it: a place of bridges, over the two rivers, Thames and Colne. There was once a stone, in a meadow beside the bridge, known as the London Stone, said to mark the western limit of the jurisdiction of the City of London over the Thames. The back story has been quietly buried, tidied away into a museum around the side of the (discontinued) town hall. A few main street pubs peddle their pedigree. Staines is best known these days as the fictional base for the comedic celebrity, Ali G. A branded look: dark aviator glasses, sock-hat, male jewellery, white as black. A voice, innit?

The market element of the Roman town is still present in a scatter of sweet stalls and a lorry dispensing fruit and veg. The museum boasts of Staines as the world capital for the manufacture of linoleum. That’s about it.

A statue of Queen Victoria, a war memorial angel that everyone (including me) photographs, access to the Thames path. For the first time, since we lost sight of the Millennium Dome, we’re back with the river: in all its sovereign dignity. The sun is going down behind the bridge, the familiar sludge-coloured waters, running smooth and swift, are fired. Like a petrol spill. We stand at the point where the weary Colne rushes under a footbridge and into the main stream, the Thames.

On another day, we might have plunged into the water. The Swan Hotel, with its sloping lawns, looks inviting. Reality inhibits instinct: we trudge, through evening traffic, back to the station.

The shamanic archer has vanished. In the course of our day’s walk, the Silk Cut poster has been papered over. Scarecrow, smoke warning, fields: deleted.

Picking my way early through Shepherd’s Bush: 26 May 1999. Associated as it is with stop/start journeys out of town — the grot-shock of the Green — this is not an area with which I’m comfortable. I’ve never walked it, other than rapid hikes through Popular Book Centres on my way down to the original Any Amount of Books in Hammersmith. I came here recently to interview J.G. Ballard for a book I was doing on Cronenberg’s film of Crash . Ballard weekends in the borough. It’s as close as he wants to come to London.

I took the wrong road, involved myself in an unnecessary detour, a swing past Fortress BBC in White City. I was looking for a side street, a right-hander off Wood Lane. The conjunction of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, Westway and the White City estates struck me as a convenient accident of civic planning. Empty-headed fools, heading for the TV studios, drive through here with their windows down, flashing conspicuous expenditure in the form of a Rolex. Masochists blabber on cell-phones. East Acton to White City (desolate rat runs between Westway and the Uxbridge Road) is bandit country. I was fortunate, it was first light. The bandits were sleeping it off. And, in any case, as was obvious to the most shortsighted teenage toller: I was unreconstructed Swatch Man in a twelve-year-old motor. An ex-drug dealer BMW with one active headlamp and moss emphasising the rectangle of the sunroof.

Now that our orbital walk had crossed the river and — if you included the Lea Valley opener — reached its halfway point, I made the mistake of talking about it. A journalist (autodidact, radio producer, scriptwriter, assembler of micro-books that come in alphabetically arranged units) thought he might be able to punt a piece, written while accompanying us on the next leg of the journey. Kevin Jackson, in his day, had wallpapered most of the broadsheets: Blake, Ruskin, Humphrey Jennings, Anthony Burgess, Surrealism. You hum it, he’ll play it: Alan Moore, Bill Griffiths, a photographer called Richard Heeps who chased the Greenwich Meridian Line across Cambridge-shire. Jackson tags Heeps as working ‘the old Modernist Project of Making It Strange’. If there is anything stranger than camping (without coercion) in the triangulation between the West-way, Scrubs Lane and Harrow Road, I don’t want to know about it.

Kevin uses his West London property as a bibliophile’s crash-pad. He lives elsewhere. With his interests, the need to hit libraries on a daily basis, do jokes in Greek and Latin, eat competitive dinners, it was inevitable that he’d return to Cambridge. He acts as generous patron to the sort of troop Sandy Macken-drick assembled for The Ladykillers . Undiscovered geniuses of the city, free (for a time) to pursue arcane researches or compose intricately layered epics set in suburban hinterlands. The bathroom was an unrequired extra. The fridge contained a pot or two of outdated yogurt.

The bell doesn’t ring. Kevin’s house is posthumous, dead in the definitive way East Acton houses die: theoretical tenants come and go, you never see them. The front door is a coffin lid. This byway is a Prozac dormitory, a self-referential nexus feeding on a busy through-road. In East London it would be squatted. And the hallway decorated with hanging bicycle parts. Alongside Wood Lane you have invisible Crusoes, let go by Radio 3; decent souls enduring an exile at the limits of the possible (where the Central Line loses contact with the centre).

6.15 a.m. The figure at the upstairs window is Kevin Jackson. Dressed and ready. He’s been waiting there all night. Tall, quite sturdy, with a full head of hair. Bounding downstairs and out of the door, he employs a manly handshake. I’m not convinced that Wardrobe have come up with the optimum outfit for a hike through the Surrey countryside on a warm day. If you spotted Kevin, hanging about the bus stop near TV Centre, you might guess: alpha male from Blake’s Seven — a British lead with Californian aspirations. Wardrobe has gone with Sam Shepherd leather (improperly distressed). Combat veteran. This can perform, coupled with circular ( Dr Strange-love ) spectacles, quite effectively on a filigree-featured miniature like Tom Cruise. Kevin is no miniature; he’s the proper size for an English gentleman, head and shoulders above the mob.

This overload of culture references, film titles, anecdotes, fits the man. He’s lived in America, labouring on (unmade) scripts with Paul Schrader. He’s worked with an Oscar-winning documentary director. He’s edited and written episodes of The Archers . He’s visited Ballard in Shepperton ( New Worlds fan from the age of eleven). He’s just back from Scotland. On his way to…

Kevin is the freelance’s freelance. Whatever hours you burn — essays in New York, reviews in London, radio, TV, presentation, production, small press squib, large press remainder — you sink a little deeper each year. It never comes in as fast as it goes out. Success kills you. Copy is edited on the phone as you wait for the next appointment. You review your own reviews. A day on the hoof is just what Kevin needs — but he’s lumbered himself with having to write as he walks. He’s doing a photography course and a Latin course and he’s dropping out of social anthropology. By the time we reach the M4, he’ll have compiled (by alphabet) a list of British road movies, a dictionary of motorway fiction, a critique (illustrated) of Manser Associates Hilton Hotel at Heathrow (glass-fronted fridge for body parts).

Some monkey-drumming battery, or Puritan residue, keeps Kevin on the move, an exuberant neurosis of achievement. Been everywhere, read everything, but he hasn’t come up with the right kit for Staines. The leather rucksack hangs too low on his back, it’ll bruise the spine. He’s midway through the photography course; studied the masters, penned the thesis, bought the camera. One small detail overlooked: no film stock. The gleaming jacket, authentically frontier (envelope-pushing, ass-kicking), is too heavy. It will cook him if he wears it; cripple him if he carries it. The greying hair is probably long enough to keep the sun off his scalp, but he’s not hefting any water, or packing plasters. Yellow trailbreaker boots may look great at the timber line (tested in Notting Hill), they’re an overreaction to the Thames path, the lazy villages of Surrey. The preppie striped shirt with button-down collar and pen in pocket is fine, if a little tight fitting for a day of swinging arms and excited conversational semaphore.