to digress for a moment...

"Again they walked on in silence. They were nearing Clerkenwell Close, and had to pass a corner of the prison in a dark lane, where the wind moaned drearily. The line of the high blank wall was relieved in colourless gloom against a sky of sheer night. Opposite, the shapes of poverty-eaten houses and grimy workshops stood huddling in the obscurity. From near at hand came shrill voices of children chasing each other about--children playing at midnight between slum and gaol."

The Nether World by George Gissing, an almost unrelentingly miserable novel, yet beautiful, written by a man who married twice and very ill-advisedly, and was dead before the age of 50 from emphysema.

This Saturday I am undertaking a walk through Clerkenwell, the setting of the Nether World, an area of London that resonates with sadness and misery, and it's a place I really have a huge fondness for. Having just read The Nether World, I am even more caught up in the shoddy romance of the place. Hopefully, some of this partiality will come across this weekend, and I can feel that I have satisfied the rigours of my craft and entertained my audience. The most difficult thing is to fulfill one's own expectations. I want to cram into two hours some of the fascination with which I regard this corner of the city, the awe in which I hold its winding alleys and misshapen walls, and if not those then at least the joy in its strange stories and the lives of its endlessly fascinating inhabitants. And yet I fear that all I can convey is something vaguely entertaining about a history too remote to grasp. Perhaps I should have a watchword, so that I can muster, from the damp bricks of Corporation Row, from the curving path of Ray Street and the sunlight streaming down on Mount Pleasant some sense of the long and torrid path human experience has taken in these streets and fields, of the closeness of their lives to our own. Perhaps it should be "Gissing", as a tribute to the great man's grasp on the Hogarthian, effortlessly Londonish grime of Clerkenwell. Thanks George.

My walk is at Farringdon Station, 2pm this Saturday.