The hiking urban vicar, a compact man, close-cropped, thin-spectacled, smiling, met me on the steps of the Anglican Cathedral. He wore a worker-priest's uniform of black shirt and dark anorak, but he had a writer's hands.
That's how Iain Sinclair describes me in his newly published Ghost Milk, in the few pages he devotes to describing our 2009 (ad)ventures together: a conversation onstage at Greenbelt ('My problem, when confronted by an expectant audience, sitting on the grass, was being carried away by the tent-show-revivalist aspect. My pitch was too spiritual. I kept banging on about the pilgrimage, the quest, the journey of the soul. The believers were much more down to earth.') and the October walk around the Toxteth which Bill Griffiths had depicted in his epic poem Mr Tapscott; a walk which ended in a cafe on Lodge Lane, MT BELLYS, where 'the man in the cafe, launching a business, fresh paint, overloaded sandwiches, topped up mugs, hovered over our discussion' of my two months on foot beside the M62, blogging as I went. From his transcript of that conversation Iain records me as having said (among other things), 'I realised that what was important to me, reflecting back, was the writing. The writing was as important as the walk. You construct the world as you go'. (See previous blogs here and here).
Ghost Milk sees Iain Sinclair circling the outlands of East London on a mission of archaeology in reverse, documenting the period when the Lea Valley industrial-chemical wastes were being transformed by the processes of capital into the sterile, ring-fenced London Olympic site. As is his wont, Sinclair then spirals out from there on other peripheral trajectories, including to and fro along the M62... Which is where I came in. I've only read pages 309 to 313 so far (from vanity). The rest looks like it will be very good too.
Comments