On the wall of the sitting room in my small, Edwardian villa in the inner-London suburb of Stockwell (think Brixton, then walk back towards the center of town a little), I have hung a panorama of London. Drawn, then engraved and hand-colored, this handsome hybridization of a map and a prospect was produced as a giveaway with the Illustrated London News in the revolutionary year of 1848. It measures about a yard-and-a-half by a foot-and-a-half: a long strip of my natal city, as it appeared some years after my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Adolphus Self, arrived here — quite likely on foot — and established himself at Kennington Cross (about a half-mile from where I now live), in time for the 1831 census. 

In the autumn of 2022, aged 60, I was diagnosed with secondary myelofibrosis — a progressive and fatal blood cancer — which had evolved out of a myeloproliferative neoplasm with the rather more alluring name polycythemia vera (like a cross between a Cockney pub landlady and a Greek goddess), which I was first diagnosed with over a decade ago.

Au fond, especially if you factor in the carnal sins, I’ve had a good run of it. Like some human enactment of an Eleatic paradox due to medical advances, by the time the cancer scuttled sideways in, I had already lived longer than estimated at the time of my pre-existing condition’s diagnosis: Without such advances, I’d already be — in Cockney rhyming slang — brown bread. But why not? As the old adage has it: No patient ever considers himself to be a statistic.

Put another way: I often cross Covent Garden piazza and see that shifting shingle of humanity known as “tourists,” pushed this way and that by the flows of late capitalist consumerism and forming a sort of temporary berm around this or that member of the International Order of the Didgeridoo. As if they couldn’t gawp at a juggler, a mime artist, or an eponymous hollow-log-tootler in their own benighted lands — let alone one of those street entertainers who gets a bucket full of soapy water and corn-bloody-syrup and, manipulating a plastic ring, contrives massively elongated and odd-wobbling bubbles, much to the delight of… everyone. Myself included. For, every time I see the silvery snout of one of these enchanting ephemera questing towards instant oblivion, I recall Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man: “Who sees with equal eye, as God of all / A hero perish, or a sparrow fall / Atoms or systems into ruin hurl’d / And now a bubble burst, and now a world.”

It’s difficult to distinguish stages of blood cancers accurately. My haematologist asked me if I’d like her to run the numbers anyway; and good little statistic that I am, I assented. They gave me a decade, even without any new therapies — and I exhaled noisily for about three months: After all, that would mean I’d reach my Biblically allotted span, so it would seem churlish to kvetch any more than I do normally. 

But then the monthly blood “work” began to tell another story: The cancer was hard at it, and at speed: odd-wobbling cells swelling so as to burst the world-that’s-me. And trust me, while no man may be a hero to his valet, I’m the only Odysseus wearing this pair of pants….

Or rather, djellaba and thobe. One of the most egregious symptoms of myelofibrosis is a continuous heat in — and formication under — the skin, due to the overproduction of histamine. Frankly, I don’t know how people — men, in particular — wearing Western clothes cope with it at all. I now find any fabric in contact with my skin — my legs, in particular — intensely irritating, so I have taken to wearing traditional Middle Eastern clothing. Just in time to find myself — as it were by accident — engaged in some sort of Pauline evangelism; but in this case, it’s a mission to the gentiles undertaken by a half-Jew seemingly dressed as a Muslim. Of which more later.

I’ve been treated throughout my illness at Guy’s Hospital, which is at the southern end of London Bridge, and within a couple hundred yards of the Tabard Inn, where Chaucer’s eponymous pilgrims rendezvoused for their journey to the shrine of Thomas À-Becket, at Canterbury Cathedral, some 60 miles southeast from here. For the first few years of the malady the specific — given this storied location — was suitably medieval: Every few weeks they’d bleed me, thereby diluting all those superfluous blood cells and platelets, as my ailing bone marrow produced oodles of plasma to compensate for the barbarous exsanguination that was, in point of fact, keeping me alive. 

Guy’s Hospital boasts, in its long-evolved hugger-mugger of buildings, the biggest hospital tower in Europe — a malodorous bit of late Brutalism that extends its grimy decking upside the shiny acuminate face of Renzo Piano’s Shard, the tallest building in Europe and the deranged gnomon that directs everyone to deposit their money in the City of London’s financial institutions, which still lie immediately to the north, over London Bridge, as they did in 1848, when Guy’s was already well established in Southwark — together with another hospital, St. Thomas’s, which has since upped brick sticks and now resides immediately opposite the Palace of Westminster. In my panorama — which I’ve hung oriented so that if you were to magically shoot up 600 feet into the air and 224 years back in time this is pretty much the view you’d see — the two hospitals dominate the foreground, together with the core of the finance district on the river’s north bank, around the Royal Exchange. All points to the west — including what latter-day Londoners (until Renzo et al. happened along) consider the city’s pièce de résistance, St. Paul’s Cathedral — are out of the frame. 

My late wife’s cancer was diagnosed at Guy’s as well — so was my brother-in-law’s. One of my children was born there. During the #MeToo demonstrations in London, the statue of Thomas Guy, the hospital’s founder, which stands in its original, elegant eighteenth-century courtyard, and who is reckoned to have been the largest charitable benefactor in the city’s history, was boxed in, in order to protect it from those who, understandably, find it easier to turn their ire on people who may’ve profited from the traffic in human souls in the past than on those who are still bang at it, deriving their profits from apparel/cell phones/whatever produced by sweated labor — stuff they may well have been sporting when they graffitied the pediment upon which the little stone figure resolutely stands.

All of which is by way of saying: Thomas Guy has been unboxed — while the course followed by the Thames in my strange panorama’s queered perspective makes it appear as a sinuous blue arm, cinched by tourniquet-bridges, crooked around the bend that forms the Isle of Dogs (now, the City’s second financial district, known synecdochally as Canary Wharf), and pointing south of east, towards open water, and towards the former possessions of this once-mighty imperium. The panorama’s message is plain as the proverbial pikestaff: In a few weeks — or months, depending on how long it takes the hospital to find a willing blood donor — a sterilized pikestaff will be stuck in my arm, and their blood, together with their immune system, will begin dripping into mine: a Russian-roulette moment, with only five chambers in the revolver, as median term survival rates for the procedure are around 80 percent (while fatality rates without it remain 100 percent).

In the few weeks, or months, left to me, I have been blessed with bizarre vigor: Housebound for most of last year, they shifted me to new meds in the autumn, and with this came a Lazarus moment: I donned my wooly dress and began to walk this city — the fount of my fictive art, the den of my iniquity, the omphalos of my world — as never before. I mean, I’ve always been a walker — and since my early forties, when I got rid of the family car (a plumber, having a hyper-glycemic fit while leaving a drive-through McDonald’s, providentially ran into and wrecked it, but that’s another tale), I’ve walked pretty fanatically in this right, tight little island — its landscape, from the undulating moors of Scotland to the rolling downs of Sussex, a wholly anthropic creation, burnt and slashed into its current shape even before the Romans arrived in CE53. 

Walking is the only way to experience a phenomenon — adverted to in the last essay I wrote for County Highway, about the pernicious impact of GPS navigation systems on our engagement with space — that Michel de Certeau has formulated as “the practice of place.” If you practice place according to current Neoliberal folkways, you drive to Canterbury (an hour and a half) or take the train (under an hour from King’s Cross in London), troll round the largely intact sixteenth-century walled ’ville, check out the sacred antheap of the Cathedral, exit through the holy gift shop, and scarper back to the Smoke — or on to Stonehenge. The touristic pro forma for England is often this: cruise ship docks at Southampton, coach to Salisbury or Canterbury Cathedral, go on to Stonehenge, fuck off back to the dock. No one wants to practice place by abiding in it and thus rendering it capacious — which cannot be monetized, except at a cretinous, Paltrovian level (“Paltrovian” being my own neologism: a portfolio term that amalgamates “paltry” with Gwyneth Paltrow and the founder of Behaviorism, Ivan Pavlov). Long-distance walking in urban areas, coupled with long-distance walking between them, for day after day, costs bupkes, while permitting the human phenotype to confront the obduracy of the anthropic environment that its genotype has created.

A hardened mucilage of rebars sprouting from cracked and spalled concrete, square miles of asphalt, online-commerce fulfilment warehouses that can be accurately measured in fractions of… a mile. To carom through underpasses, and to brodie over bridges beneath which unspools the ceaseless metallic travolator of the automobile assemblage, is to experience at a visceral level the way collective phenomenology supplants any apprehension of what the world might conceivably be in, and of, itself. Not least because many urban environments in these relatively highly populated zones are infernally hard to escape, as the ancient paths and tracks have been obliterated by concrete, brick, and asphalt; while the vectors of ingress and exit to the anthropic realm are heavily policed by property-owners and their motorized cavalry.

It’s hard to imagine what unobserved England might be like — let alone England in the mind of God. This is the most heavily surveilled country in Europe: As I walked through Kent, the so-called “Garden of England,” I saw more CCTV cameras on the ends of poles than I did hops. England is also, as I’ve said, an old realm. Human settlement in the Americas is disputed, but no one dates it much earlier than a few tens of thousands of years, while, within my adult lifetime, the date for the first humans to have permanently settled on this little divot of land has been pushed back to over a million years ago. Sitting on my desk as I write this is a flint hand axe, found at Swanscombe, to the southeast of London, and not far off the route of my pilgrimage — an artifact made by a Homo heidelbergensis (a suspected common ancestor of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens) that fits my own hand perfectly, is dated to around 450,000 years ago, and is around the size — with something of the heft, if not the haptics — of an iPhone. 

If we resile from being the little blue dot, nudged and turn-by-turn steered to the next retail opportunity or masturbatory cultural “event,” how do we begin to see the world? Well, it may sound trite to the point of soundbite, but when you set off without an objective, everything becomes… worthy of note.

I began on Easter Day, attending mass at St. John the Divine, one of our local churches. It’s a huge edifice, built in the late nineteenth century in the neogothic style — a gaunt, bricky thing, the spire of which can still be seen from all over south London, withal the upthrust of the various modish tall-building clusters. 

The congregation is emphatically diverse: Afro-Caribbean, African British, black and white British, Portuguese (there’s a substantial community locally, and St. John’s is an Anglo-Catholic church). For Easter Day we even had a Muslim – the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. Everyone was super-excited — I less so. I’ve met Khan, in my pre-pilgrimage existence as a jobbing journalist, and in a tight field he’s one of the most boring people in British politics. The London mayoralty comes with the power to raise only eight percent of the city’s budget through taxes, so the mayor is effectively little more than a rather grand transport manager, with some say over the “planning” of those tall-building clusters. (Khan’s predecessor, the late and very much unlamented Boris Johnson, had something of an edifice complex.) To be fair to Khan, he does the job well enough — but, my! When he opens his mouth, all I can hear are vatic platitudes — humanity, community, integrity, multiculturalism — increasingly interspersed with Zs, until it all buzzes away into a cosmic kind of inanition.

Still, there was an election in May — so there he was, trying, leadenly, to drum up enthusiasm. Leszek Kołakowski says ideologies exist to elicit sacrifices from the individual on behalf of the collective that he’d hardly be prepared to make if he apprehended its ineffectuality, taken in isolation. Christianity, quite as much as socialism, requires of its adherents this radical suspension of disbelief — along with the positive adoption of belief in eternal bliss and universal brotherhood. 

I’m not a believer in either ideology — although I regularly attend church and would describe myself as a sincere, faith-adjacent agnostic. I’ve been driven into the churches, frankly, by the pathetic response of those “humanists” around me to my illness. Not that I’m expecting a lot of practical help — serious illness is a very intimate affair — but the sense I’ve had during these last months that secular folk have no other faith than their schedule, and that if you can’t be slotted into some future appointment (say, by reason of your no longer being extant), then you aren’t really of any significant, ongoing interest. 

Leaving the Christians behind, all clustered around their Muslim Mayor, with their cell phone cameras sopping him up, I traversed the grimy forecourts of the point-and-slab blocks that constitute the social housing projects interposed between St. John’s and Greenwich — my first scheduled stop on the walk. I meditated on this: the way that walking out of the city never ceases to be a matter of lighting out for the known — the true adventure of our age, given that any new territories are rapidly being suburbanized by the likes of Musk and Bezos. No: It’s these vast and grimy residential towers, loitering around forecourts in which sit assays in public art of the 1950s and ’60s that constitute the true utopianism of London: a belief — at one time — in good, sanitary housing for those on low incomes.

Burgess Park, lain out over the old Surrey Canal, which brought goods to and from the docks at Deptford, provides another sort of panorama: In the foreground, the remnants of one of these vast postwar housing projects, the Aylesbury Estate (which features the largest slab block in the land, nigh on a half-mile long); in the background, if you keep walking, and allow the parallax to take effect, an airy sort of pavane, as the three main new tall-building clusters of London — at Vauxhall near where I live, the City of London, and Canary Wharf to the east — process along the northern horizon. 

On a blowy Easter Sunday morning there weren’t many people around — but come summer, every national and ethnic group in South London (and that means most of the world) will be ranged along its grassy strips and over its manmade hummocks — from Costa Ricans, Brazilians, and Columbians to Somalis, Nigerians, and Filipinos, all grilling their own meat in their own way on disposable barbecues. Near the Old Kent Road, in so-called “Little Nigeria” (where I’ve taken to having my beard trimmed by a guy called Dino, who, in his mirrored sunglasses and dated demi-Afro, looks like a Tonton Macoute), a nineteenth-century industrial chimney is being fully encased in a new bricky development.

All collective utopias must be subsumed to the individual ones of property owners: The English bourgeoisie will remain aging rentiers to the very last man and woman, though Great Britain is really just a strange sort of “land bank” now, in which capital fleeing more egregiously unstable societies is deposited. It wasn’t always so: At Deptford, I detoured to see St. Paul’s — a great lump of whitely gleaming Portland stone, massed into a Baroque edifice of sufficient size to host hundreds of worshippers. Although Christ was risen, its huge doors were, within an hour of morning service, resolutely locked. It was the same at the old medieval church, St. Nicholas’s — which I thought a little rum — as I headed on to Greenwich.

The diarist Samuel Pepys, who walked this way almost daily in the later seventeenth century, would have found these churches open. En route from his house in the city to his work as the comptroller of naval supply at Deptford and Greenwich, where Royal Navy ships were at that time both built and provisioned, Pepys would have traversed water-meadows beside a bankless river that looped lazily towards the German Ocean (as the North Sea was styled before the First World War). At Greenwich, he would have seen the Old Naval College, as imposing an assemblage of grand halls, chambers, and refectories as were extant in late seventeenth-century Europe. (The exception being those of Versailles, which the College was intended to rival.) 

Once more I headed for the Painted Hall, which, as its name suggests, features an enormous ceiling-borne mural of the monarchs William and Mary, enthroned in clouds and — together with a lot of corpulent nudes and over-dressed courtiers — trampling beneath their aery Protestant feet the detested Catholic French, in the form of a swarthy and bestial-looking Louis XIV, who’s cowering beneath them. If, that is, you lie on your back and look directly up at this vast and tumultuous allegory of the rise of British maritime power. Which I often do — indeed, it’s my top tip for visitors to London: Eschew all the more celebrated sites and head for the Painted Hall, where one ticket purchase allows you an entire year of entries — which is about how long it would take your eye to wander over all the aery volutes and space-walking characters that disport themselves in and among men-of-war, piles of cordage, and ordnance that will prove increasingly useful as this right, tightly caulked island sets off on a colonizing rampage that (plot spoiler) only ended once the map was as pink as a putto’s slapped backside.

A few miles on, having cut across the base of the Greenwich peninsula and picked my way between some giant superstores, I walked along the dusty defile of redundant factory buildings beside the Thames, where the Siemens company once manufactured all things electrical, but which is now, along with all the Western world’s redundant industrial space, straining to suck into its aching vacuity those one-word oxymorons: “creatives.” Without warning, I found myself outside the Anchor & Hope, a riverside pub, open on a Sunday afternoon. Not serving braying bourgeois in waxed-jackets but captious, crapulent Cockneys “working,” umpteenth pints in hand, for the adjoining Port of London Authority.

Opposite the pub, hard by the river wall, a couple of likely lads of around my own age were sitting in a little demountable trailer that had been turned into a shellfish bar. Cockneydom was built on the shellfish newly available to working class Londoners via the railways linking the capital to the fishing towns on the south and east coasts (the long viaducts carrying them into the city are both on the panorama — and still there in reality): If you scavenge — like a Dickensian mudlark — the Thames foreshore at low tide, you will find great aggregated lumps of oyster, whelk, and mussel shells. But the absolute favorite of those pearly queens and diamond geezers was the jellied eel.

And that’s what this pair had styled their operation: “Eels on Wheels.” This allusion, to the mobile service that provides free meals to Britain’s elderly poor by linking the senescent white working individual to his class in general, did indeed, aptly, warm the cockles of my heart — and I bought half a dozen oysters off of them. (Why not the jellied eels? I hear you, dear reader, eructate — the answer is: They are, in my view, utterly disgusting: a mass of oily fish in greenish jelly, usually served up with a sort of pea-juice, styled — Christ, knows why — “liquor,” and a gristly, grisly little meat pie made with unleavened pastry. True, there are a couple of surviving eel-and-pie shops in London still worth visiting, but more for their still-extant late-Victorian interiors than their revolting cuisine.)

One shucked while the other bantered: Where was I going? Canterbury. Why? Pilgrimage — which was why I was sporting the wooly dress as well… It takes all sorts, said the black guy, while the white one cursed over his knife. As for the oysters — no Tabasco or vinegar please… Why? Well, I’ve been to the very origin of the oyster: the point on the coast of Arnhem Land in Northern Australia, where, in the dreamtime, the oysters’ songline made landfall, and the primordial oyster came ashore. There, great skeins of oysters, 20… 30 feet long, adhere to the anfractuous rocks… I took a knife to open them, and a bottle of crisp white New Zealand Chardonnay to accompany them… but I couldn’t stay for long, because, together with the tide filling the sound between the oyster bed and the beach, came saltwater crocodiles–

“Thass what did fer me,” interjected the black guy, who was propped up at the back of the stall — and he pulled up the leg of his tracksuit bottoms to reveal a metal prosthesis. “Really?” I queried — and they both laughed: “He’s only shitting you,” said the white guy. 

And that was sort of that — I went on, reached Woolwich, where the buildings, once occupied by the arsenal that gives its name to the celebrated soccer team (and which, during the First War, was managed by own grandfather, among others), are now yet more apartment conversions, surrounded by modern iterations of the same: more parametrically embiggened desktop toys masquerading as… architecture.

On and on — the dusk gathering about my fugitive shoulders: past the Thames Barrier, which looks as if the several silver shells of the Walt Disney Concert Hall had — somewhat anachronistically — been disassembled and strung across the pewter ruching of the river. Looking back now, the tall-building clusters of the city’s center were beginning to distance themselves, one from the t’other, and in so doing to provide a parallax that enabled my tiring eyes to pay out the river’s several loops, so to see the full compass of my day’s peregrination. 

On and on — downriver with the ebbing tide. Here, the built environment has retreated from the river’s bank, and in the slanting evening light, I was for the first time among trees fringing the prospect: Bucolic feelings crept up on me, only perturbed by the awareness that I was heading for Thamesmead, a notorious — and notoriously failed — grand projet: A great Brutalist escarpment was built on these marshlands in the 1960s, raising streets up — in the prescribed Corbusian way — into the sky. But that utopian wave had crested, along with the money to pay for it, within a lustrum — and hidden from me by trident fences and herbage was what had been left behind: a tidal wrack of low-rise, shoebox houses, arranged in closes and cul-de-sacs, with much more herbage in between.

In the early 1980s, when I ran a playscheme for the then London-wide authority, the Greater London Council, under its notoriously hard-left leader, “Red” Ken Livingstone, I’d come out to Thamesmead on a number of occasions. By then it was what’s termed a “sink estate”: somewhere “bad” social tenants were segregated, a sort of suburban-London version of South Africa’s apartheid-era townships. I remember the kids being hard as fuck — one little skinhead turned somersaults on the giant inflatable we’d set up; he had a swastika tattooed on his forehead, and a switchblade in his pocket with which he slashed the inflatable’s rubbery skin once he’d had his fun.

But there hadn’t been that many black kids living in Thamesmead then. Obviously. Now, there are a lot of people of color, and from many parts of the world: I was renting my Airbnb from Abaynesh, who by his name alone I assumed to be Ethiopian. I never set eyes on him, although he guided weary me into my berth for the night via SMS messages. A three-bed house in one of the aforementioned cul-de-sacs, furnished with the predictably hardline utility of a short-let rental property in a low-income outer-urban zone. I’ve seen plenty in my time. Withal that, I shared my spotless duvet with the shades of a thousand, thousand, transient construction workers; awaking at dawn with them, to see the still-stark trees sliced by the vertical louvers. I enjoyed my time at Abaynesh’s: it was clean — there was plenty of tea. 

Food I ordered by phone: tarka dhal, paratha stuffed with sultanas, cucumber raita — all of which can be obtained, usually within a few minutes, just about anywhere in this country’s anthrosphere, although not usually of this quality. Food for the morning I didn’t have, though, so I ventured out along one of the ornamental canals that thread their way through the riverine development, to a late-night convenience store, implanted in the hard hide of one of the Brutalist behemoths. Some scenes of Kubrick’s adaptation of A Clockwork Orange were shot in the Thamesmead dystopia — others, non-coincidentally, at the university where I teach, Brunel, on the opposite outskirt of London.

The concourse was full of loafing oafs. They looked pretty ugly — no doubt, later, they’d make other things in their own likeness. In the meantime, there’d been Bubby: a wrecked white guy of around my own age, although moving faster on crutches than I was on my walking stick — a point he couldn’t forebear from mentioning, as he sped past me in the sodium-orange night. We got talking — I explained about the cancer, and how, like all blood ones, it was hardening cartilage and bone marrow, making walking — in the contemptible contemporary idiom — challenging; as was the peripheral neuritis, a function of heavy antihistamine doses I take in order to alleviate the aforementioned formication.

I was never that irenic to begin with — and the itching can make me irritable. Not that I was with Bubby: He offered me a hit on his whisky bottle; I declined, but stayed to hear how he was awaiting a double-amputation of the legs, an inevitable sequel — he seemed to feel — of a lifetime of drinking, smoking, and general stiffening of the arteries. Did he have family to care for him? I ventured. And he snorted with derisive joy: A wife who loathed him beyond belief (not mine), but who would be paid out by this fact alone: she’d have to minister to him after the op’.

Have to? I queried.

Yeah, because she’d had her arm amputated ten years ago — and he’d had to care for her! At least, I think that’s what Bubby said — at any rate, the notion stayed with me.

Rain was forecast for the following day — but it held off in the morning, giving me another sublime, Thameside promenade, out to London’s Ultima Thule — the now disused Crossness Pumping Station, built by Joseph Bazalgette, the engineer who delivered Victorian London from the Great Stink of the then-pestilential river. Yes, this was where, for over a hundred years, London’s sewage was evacuated into the Thames’s cloaca — and right beside it is the vast sewage farm that replaced it, together with a splendid euphemism: Riverside Resource Recovery. In actual fact, a furnace to gladden Moloch, in which most of London’s waste is burnt. I know, because the last time I was down this way, I arrived on one of the tugs that pulls the flotillas of bright-yellow containers, mounted on barges, in which all this crap is transported.

On that occasion I was making a radio documentary following the lifecycle of my own black bag — and got to see where its contents end up: hoiked by a grabber that can heft ten tons of detritus at a time, then hurled into a maw, belching flames over 60-feet high. A hellish sight — and it doesn’t matter how irreligious you may be, how — in Karl Barth’s marvelous formulation — taken by the “romance of unbelief”; trust me: When your time comes, if it’s long enough in the coming, you, too, will come over all Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin. (Meaning: “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting,” being the words inscribed by the invisible fiery finger on the wall of the hall in which Belshazzar staged his triumphant feast.) I’ve certainly been weighing myself in the balance since my diagnosis — and the pilgrimage was as much about that as it was anything else. Of which potential hellishness more anent.

There was nothing hellish in the air that evening, when I pushed open the heavy wooden door of St. Mary the Virgin in Stone and, entering its sepulchral atmosphere, heard a voice from the choir gently intoning one of the Bible passages read at the beginning of evening prayers, as mandated in the Book of Common Prayer, the liturgical chapbook for the Anglican communion which remains, substantially, as it was at its first formulation by Archbishop Cranmer in 1539: “A sorrowful spirit is a sacrifice to God, despise not, oh Lord, a contrite and humble heart…” I’d phoned ahead, and the vicar, Graham Stockhill, had very kindly agreed to open the church, and say prayers.

With me — and one other: a middle-aged woman. Together, we enacted these ancient calls and responses, beneath the Gothic arches and their responses: masonry that was already old when these words were newly hewn and shaped, for the church — like many in England, once you escape the all-you-can-eat buffet of inner-urban auto-cannibalization — displays what Nikolaus Pevsner, the great cataloguer of the British built environment, calls “the usual story”: Roman building materials — either from a temple or a villa — incorporated into an Anglo-Saxon church, which in turn has been incorporated into a Norman church, then a Gothic one… and so on. 

It’s hard to say what awed me more — the intensity of this seemingly extempore act of worship by three strangers to one another, or the afternoon’s walking that had preceded it. After the deserted riverside and the dung heaps upon which this civilization squats, I made unavoidably long traverses of busy arterial roads. Still, I hadn’t minded, because the quasi-bucolic, when it came in the form of the Crayford and then the Dartford marshes — long tracts of faraway nearby, comprising thick undergrowth, sloughs, odd hutments, and then, under a sky first rain-shaded, then brilliant cerulean, the Darent river, purling to meet the Thames — felt inspirational: the obduracy of the anthropic, the way it prevents us not only from experiencing the world beyond itself but even imagining it! How many times has someone — when I’ve told them about some long, inter-urban walk I’ve undertaken in England — asked me which arterial roads I took, as if my body were covered not in skin but an artfully bent and shaped carapace of two-millimeter-thick steel.

No car passenger or driver could’ve experienced, as I did, the awesome oncoming of the mighty Queen Elizabeth II Bridge as I approached it along the riverbank: The third-of-a-mile-long white span reaches a 500-foot zenith at this point. This is the only river crossing east of London, and all the commerce of the isle flows either over the Thames on the bridge or under it in twin tunnels. Moored alongside it was a huge freighter, for the bridge is in the purlieu of London’s deepwater container port at Tilbury on the north bank. There are mighty fulfilment warehouses for Bezos’s globalizing bargain mart on the south one: BUY NOW! ALL FRAGILE ECOSYSTEMS MUST GO! might as well be blazoned on their sides, instead of the duff abstract designs seemingly intended to confute the slowly passing pedestrian’s sense of their scale. (How big are they? It took me a half hour to walk past them — but then, I am halt… and lame.) These are the sort of humongous temperature-controlled structures of aluminum and sheetrock the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas describes, memorably, as Junkspace™ in his queer dithyramb of the same title — a sort of strange, lyrical prose-poem, in deep ambivalence about the bizarre proliferation of enclosed, and environmentally null, spaces humans now extrude — as if they were trying to terraform a hostile alien planet rather than inhabit their own.

The prayers ended, and the immemorial silence of the ancient church descended on us, followed by a little conversation. The woman didn’t introduce herself — neither asked me the reason for my pilgrimage. For once, I was grateful for that weirdness of English middle-class mores, which hold that the least personal inquiry is held, prima facie, to be a social solecism. After a while, they left me to enjoy the church alone — after which I circumambulated it, imagining what might have been seen from its grassy churchyard, which lay high up on a chalky ridge and looked out over the Thames estuary, before it’d felt the impress of industry.

After that, I walked down the bosky church path, crossed the rail line, and having emphatically been somewhere, regained the nowhere we all mostly inhabit: Here I chowed down at a Burger King, then slept at an adjoining Travelodge. All around me, no doubt, were truckers and other transients who had no more sense of being in this place than the last one they’d flitted through. Whereas I still felt rooted by every particle of my being to Stone, having personally motivated every one of them to be there. I had, yet again — and trust me, my method never fails — become a stranger in a strange land. 

This sense of the weirdness of the anthropic world persisted the following morning, as I circumambulated first the enormous chalkpit in which the Bluewater Shopping Centre resides like some strange secret invasion of commoditization. (I once made a radio documentary about this place as well — and while circumambulating it [it has a donut plan], encountered the copper whose crime-fighting beat consists in… circumambulating it.) Then I circumambulated a still larger redundant chalkpit, within which the Ebbsfleet Garden City is under construction. A bizarre Truman Show development indeed, when viewed from the bluffs a couple hundred feet above. It was on the far edge of this newly built lost world that I got my final glimpse of the tall-building clusters of central London in the distance: a city of Oz.

At Gravesend that afternoon, wearing the requisite knotted headscarf in lieu of a turban (a friendly fellow visitor helped me to tie it) and in my stockinged feet, I ascended the richly carpeted stairway leading to the prayer hall and the shrines to the ten gurus that occupy the upper storeys of this, the largest gurdwara in Europe. I’d called ahead, but, not being a missionary faith, the Sikh community’s front-facing representative told me that, while I was perfectly welcome to visit, I shouldn’t expect anyone to be available to show me around.

I had been hoping to attend more, and more heterogeneous, places of worship — but given that I was on a pilgrimage because I was ill, my ambit was necessarily circumscribed. There was this sense of lurking animosity that had pursued me from Stone, around the chalk pits, through the rundown towns of Ebbsfleet and Northfleet, and on to Gravesend, where poor old Pocahontas is buried. She never made it home — and this area is now the home for sizeable immigrant communities, including the Sikhs, who originate with a clan of engineers who came over from their villages in the Punjab to work in the paper mills that operated in this area, and which for years sent newsprint upriver, so the denizens of Grub Street, such as myself, could bedizen it with words. 

Naïvely, I’d thought the polyglot character of the quarter would protect me, but, for the first time in my life, for a full day of walking I experienced sustained abuse — i.e., I was catcalled about ten or 15 times. Some drivers just shouted “Fuck off!” out the window. Some pedestrians did the same. In Gravesend itself, three times people cried, “Who are you, Jesus-fucking-Christ!?” or variations on this bizarre theme. 

I can only conclude that the bigotry involved here was antisemitism. Of course, in the days when I was clean-shaven, shorn, and wore a normal English upper-middle-class white man uniform, I got none of this shtick. I suppose that then I passed more effectively than I do bearded, hirsute, and berobed. Paradoxically, unlike bearded black or brown men wearing North African robes, I was a sort of category error, which offended many who saw me without them quite understanding why. Hence, perhaps, their summoning of the deity, even if for the wrong reason.

Still, the scion of Protestant divines on one side and Jewish cantors and rabbis on the other, what can I say but Ecce homo? That evening, at the atmospheric village of Cliffe on the Hoo Peninsula, the church warden admitted me to the huge church of St. Helen’s. I meditated there for a while, beneath its twelfth-century wall paintings, one of which depicts the murder of Thomas À-Becket. I felt calm enough to withstand the squeal-piggy-squeal vibe as I entered the public bar of the adjoining pub, where I’d booked a room for the night: a whole boozy chamber full of inebriated white men of uncertain age and politics. Still, I know this neck of the woods well, so deployed my Cockney word power by immediately hailing the barmaid, “Orlright, luv,” and things decompressed a little. Further out on this peninsula, which transmogrifies into the still stranger — and more farinaceous — Isle of Grain, I’ve been warned off by geezers who really are up to no good.

The following morning, I found myself in the tiny medieval church of St. James’s, beside the strange dumpy edifice of Cooling Castle, which is bedded down in a bank of bramble and nettle. Think Princess Bride: You enter between these massive, fat-bellied towers and find, in the outer ward, a complete suburban house of the early twentieth century. In the churchyard there are thirteen little pale stone sarcophagi — the dead children of some worse-than-philoprogenitive old-time folk, who grazed their cattle on the marshy pastures that still spread out from below the ridge commanded by castle and church.

I wonder what Charles Dickens would’ve made, though, of the tall-building cluster that now sprouts at the very mouth of the estuary, on the north shore: the Cockneys’ onetime pleasure resort, Southend, now a large and ugly town. The novelist, who had a house, Gad’s Place, five miles away, used this evocative location to stage the terrifying encounter between Pip and Magwitch that forms the narrative pivot around which all the former’s great expectations then revolve. Of course, like many of Chucky’s yarns, this one’s plotting resorts to coincidence. It’s co-location always intrigues me more: It’s here, offshore, waiting overnight for the ebb tide, that Marlowe tells his companions on the steam-yacht Nelly his tale of the heart of darkness. And here, of course, that he gestures back west to the lowering sulfurous cloud of coal smoke hanging over London, and ringingly declares: “This, also, has been one of the dark places of the earth…”

The following evening in Rochester, after a bucolic day’s walking, I attended evening prayers at the extraordinary Cathedral — yet another sacred antheap, of compelling artistry, piled up over myriad generations. I was joined from London by my wife, the French writer Nelly Kaprièlian, so there were four of us this time: the priest — another middle-aged woman — and an older man, who sat on the far side of the aisle in the choir and thus had to do the responses all by himself. He did them well, though: One of the most difficult things in the Church of England liturgy is the one-and-a-half-beat interval (which it shares with the reggae rhythm) between the priest’s call and the congregation’s response in psalmody. As neophytes, Nelly and I have difficulties with this and come off half-assed, grace-wise. When it was over, the priest came and said hello. I told her about the pilgrimage, and she asked me if I’d like to be blessed.

I replied, sincere agnostic that I am, that I would have to decline, on the basis that were I — at some point in the future — to come unto the Lord, I’d feel pretty tacky about having tried a bit of Pascal-style side-betting in the antechamber. It was bollocks, of course — or superstition, which amounts to the same thing. But the priest confounded me at this point, by simply holding her hands out, as if to receive a bundle of laundry, and simply said, “In that case, if you don’t mind, I’ll hold you for the rest of your journey.”

I felt tears start in my eyes. I needed holding — the walk was tough enough. In my prime I could cover 30 miles of this earth at a steady lope in a day. I fancied myself a modern sort of Dickens, who was such a frenetic walker and writer himself that he once legged it overnight from his house in Doughty Street, central London, to Gad’s Hill, all the way composing, by his own account, two books in his head — alternating chapters. But my prime was definitively past, and now I was only doing ten, and by the end of the day my tendons felt like… Achilles’s. While the nights were sweaty and sleepless. 

Three days later, when I encountered the Reverend Emma Beddington, after she’d just conducted early morning holy communion for a select group of valetudinarians in the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral (an antechamber to the morgue: Why lie? We were all old — many of us looked ill), unsurprisingly, I asked her whether God was going to cure my cancer. Good Pauline theologian that she must be, she observed that no matter the work involved in walking from London, this would be a matter of faith alone. 

Then I got naughty: What about hell? I asked — I mean, I’ve committed mortal sins… The Reverend said that she felt we made a hell for ourselves, and recommended to me the writings of the fourteenth-century English anchoress and visionary Julian of Norwich. She’s responsible for a tagline you’ll have seen at one time or another on an inspirational fridge magnet: “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well…” No Augustinian, theologically, she takes the view that sin is only our blindness to God.

The last three days of the pilgrimage had been hard work, but the rewards were incredible: enormous skies sweeping over the Swale estuary, the palomino sky mirroring a landscape of mudflat, marsh, and sea. True, I’d had a bit of a freakout escaping the Rochester-Chatham-Gillingham conurbation: towns that grow successively poorer and poorer as you head east. (The latter were naval and military settlements once; now they’re without a raison d’être.) In a crappy pedestrianized shopping zone in Gillingham, which featured a takeaway with the ominous name “Curry Chemistry,” more loafing oats were baiting an obese man riding a mobility scooter. Everyone ignored this — and also ignored me, as I footed past. 

There were extraordinary churches, as well, at Upchurch, and especially Lower Halstow, where I spent the night in a seventeenth-century wooden farmhouse — awake for much of it, the windows open, feeling the breezes play on my face and the timbers creak about me, as if the entire land mass were, in fact, at sea. In the morning, I visited the St. Margaret of Antioch, which has been hunched here by the water, in one form or another, for over 1,300 years — since, in fact, that other St. Augustine pitched up from Rome to reconvert those angelic Angles.

The idyllic landscape of small fields, ancient Wealden houses (some of which are nearly as old as St. Margaret’s), and views towards the sea, was, in a sense, a complete fiction: Along the ridgeway a couple of miles to the south ran Sittingbourne: a long strip of ribbon development. And at Faversham, where I stayed the night in another ancient inn, the next day I saw the senescent crop of the so-called Garden of England in full bloom, at a Saturday-morning market in the main street and around the old moot hall. This was a community — or so it seemed to me — with a savage demography: only two classes — the rich and the poor — and one age group: vendors and shoppers alike were all pasty-faced retirees, their flesh as puffy as their puffa-jackets.

I entered Canterbury from the wooded hills to the west, footing along long, fenced paths threading their way through a suburbia of consummate mundanity: the botched reimagining of Merrie England that resides in every somnolent avenue and stifling close. My timing was perfect: I reached the Cathedral precinct at five and checked into my hotel in its gatehouse. I nearly had a fight with a loafing oaf on my way out to supper — and had to threaten him with my walking stick — but otherwise the city was relatively deserted. Not so the following day, as, after the early morning service, and with Reverend Emma’s reading recommendation, I headed for the station: In the opposite direction were coming a relentless stream of visitors: Yes, they would marvel at the Cathedral. When my wife, that morning, stepped into the crossing place, where the Gothic nave meets the Norman choir in a moment of sublime uplift, marble columns lifting off towards eternity, she burst into tears.

I’d weep myself, to see the Cathedral and its ancient environs fill up with paying customers, each one participating a little more in its transmogrification from sacred site to Baudrillardian simulacrum. Yes, yes — I know ‘twas ever thus: Poor old Rochester Cathedral had tried to attract more pilgrims, in order thereby to raise the funds for further building work, by obtaining their own saint — a local nobleman, who’d got himself knocked off while on a crusade — and building a shrine for him to rival Becket’s in Canterbury.

It didn’t work — and that was 800 years ago. You don’t have to be St. Paul in order to observe that where the law is, sin, including simony, abides — although, of course, it helps. Now, returned from the pilgrimage to my strange waiting-room life, I’m continuing to mull over its implications: Am I any closer to God, or merely more imprisoned than ever in the anthropic realm? Watch this space.