(You read of such things, on the web, natch: proceeding across Toronto by throwing a dice, journeying to unlovely parts of Florence with carefully contrived non-deliberation.) And nor was it to be like the treks undertaken by Iain Sinclair, that Celtic Englishman whose circumnavigation of the M25, or travail along the A13 to Southend, were dogged, shamanic attempts to storm these concrete bastions – with their bark-chip, shrubbery-planted revetments – laying siege with the trebuchet of his prose-poetry and catapulting great hunks of stony verbiage into them, so that the capitalists abandoned their cars and ran, screaming, tongues cleaved to the roofs of their mouths.
This was to be no randomised transit, intended to outfox prescribed folkways. This was what distinguishes my psychogeography from that of the others. Whatever my wife thought (or thought I didn't think). This is one part of the answer to my wife's question the second is to observe that I had reasons to go to New York: relatives to see, a writers' residency to launch, an interview in connection with the US publication of one of my novels. I can only speak for myself: a mammoth depression tramples me, and my mind reaches vanishing point as it negligently orbits the planet to think, at all, of taking a package tour to visit the Ituri pygmies of the Congolese rainforest, or fostering a globalised economy that will, in the fullness of its exaltation, make it possible for them to visit me. I find it uncanny to be in a world in which, as I write this very sentence, I will travel 30 or 40 miles through the upper atmosphere, while – in search of the mot juste – glancing either over the shoulder of the kidult watching The Ant Bully or at the photographic scenes of Oxford colleges that adorn the bulkheads of this Boeing 757 aircraft, on its flight from JFK to Heathrow. Even in the modern era there remain writers firmly convinced that there are still discoverable terrains – human, physical, cultural – and ways of traversing them, so as to be able to convey their "novelty" in words. Mine are not writerly journeys in the accepted sense: Rousseau philosophising à pied, Goethe rattling into Switzerland in a coach, Cobbett on his clopping gee-gee, assorted Borrows and Stevensons plodding with their donkeys, Greene rocking on a train, Thesiger with a camel up his arse. I will answer my wife's question for you – but not yet.