Self's droll psychogeographic adventures are more fun but they lack the sheer Joycean scope of Papadimitriou's ramblings: this is the hard stuff.

On the face of it, everything sounds rather plain, an old-fashioned world of packed lunches, mint cake and OS maps flapping in the wind, and also rather domestic. There’s the nostalgic aesthetic of Standard Definition video tape as opposed to Ultra High Definition (4K) video clips recorded on a SD card, the camera running as it roves across the landscape looking for a subject to settle on. Pete seems happy just to go along for the ride too taking snaps with his Lomo Actionsampler camera, although the only action to sample is our plodding along the tarmac. There are a host of others too – a proper ministry of silly walks – but Papadimitriou is his own man. So "Scarp" is Papadimitriou's name for a mass of high-seated land which joins Chiltern Ridge to Lea Valley in a broad sweep across his beloved Middlesex.I roared, a fiery demiurge, below the pantiled bungalows, the pubs decked out in brewer's Tudor, throwing all this multiplicity into the world in my fury before subsiding back into the humming darkness of the undifferentiated planetary mass. Along the way, the poems he reads as national troubadour are from other times, while in his prose every now and then you can feel a new poem budding: Jess the friendly lurcher with a blood thirst for venison, a borrowed bathroom in a stranger's house, a cloud that could be licked. Above you can watch the complete documentary on Nick and his work – The London Perambulator by John Rogers. This is a strange book in so many ways, it a a physical journey around the escarpment of land around the north of London. He accepts its stories, often it's casualties without judgement and most importantly without recourse to human sciences or politics to justify the links he makes.

Papadimitriou talks about laying aside knowledge and concentrating on ‘sensory properties of locations encountered while visiting or passed through’, and maybe this was why I (sub)consciously decided against equipment which would aid me in recording my walk (or distracting me from it). We talked about everything as he would lend a helping hand in the garden, editing my first collection of poetry, playing with the assorted cats and dogs, and amusing the long-term boyfriends that might be around. And now two more journeys hike over hills into this sodden summer, a good year to prefer armchair travel to the real thing perhaps, walking books to boots.

The irony of reading "Scarp" in the middle of Glasgow, while the city moved quickly to take advantage of unexpected sunshine wasn't lost on me. I would go down to the brook with my sister and two brothers and we would walk what seemed like miles along the watercourse in either direction. I have been reading Nick Papadimitriou’s extraordinary book, Scarp, the result of a lifetime’s work of chronicling his corner of outer London, around Hendon, Edgware, Pinner. Over those weeks, I got to know Nick and admired his roll-your-sleeves-up dedication to writing, and was intrigued by his wayward and somewhat wild side. He is an expert on his space, underpins my belief that the places near to you have as much interest as anywhere else.