Did a classic walk in from Wycombe to Wooburn last week, along the River Wye. We'd gone down to do a talk to the Fine Art students at BCUC and I'd had this urge to walk home, chart the changes taking place to the area where I grew up as they manifest themselves along the river which gave the area it's purpose and its identity.But before I got onto the river I couldn't resist a diversion to Gordon Road where BS Johnson satyed as an evacuee. Somebdoy contacted me via this blog to point out the long descriptions of Wycombe in his novel 'Trawl'.
I started reading him because he lived in Claremont Square, Islington, just down the road from me, the top of Penton Mound. He writes about night-time schleps around Islington in 'Albert Angelo'.
It's another reference in my 'autopobiography'.
You can read about the walk here: http://remappinghighwycombe.blogspot.com
1 comment:
Very interesting,John.
I thought we'd covered Gurney on our visit last August but it seems you were holding out on us, keeping the best for yourself. Is there a through-route/drovers track from High Wycombe to Gloucester? Did Gurney walk these ways while composing songs or mentally revising Somme and Severn?
The dog stone? Is it that old? Do you know of any old drawings. They're right, man. You are sick. It seems to me this HW thing is getting deeper and deeper and I so know what that is like. Recent excursions up over Stanmore (via the site of Roman Sulloniacae) to new zones abutting onto the old: Merry Hill with its sudden view across the south Herts plateau to outliers of the chilterns, to Markyate Street with its memories of Roger the Drover and Sigar of Northaw who told the Nightingales to shut it! Rivers running down to Colne and Thames via Staines. Later its the Great Midland Plain where Louise originates, up the road and over the hills to unknown lands...
Bushey takes me through to the Jewish cemetary with its eruv poles, a little river running alongside the A41(T) and reading beds visible on Sandy Lane. George Harrison's gift of the manor at Letchmore to the Krsna people and the farm at Batters Green which I think may be the old Middlesex County Council experimental farm...
Its a sickness, drawing us out beyond Big Brother and Russell Brand. God help us.
Nick Papadimitriou
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