Nick PapadimitriouScarp

This was a book club choice I looked forward to as it is local for me and I was looking forward to someone’s else’s viewpoint on this (for me) unheard of geological area.The book started well enjoying the somewhat differing viewpoint, but it only took a few chapters before the writing became totally random!Becoming a rook changing into whatever took his fancy was very difficul5 for me to get .I enjoyed the local background knowledge of things that had gone on , but could have done without the way out stuff!The book did not float my boat, but I’m sure there a people out there who would love it.

Scarp is mapped yet unmappable, ancient and venerable in its bedrock physicality yet beyond the cartographer’s ken. It is Nick Papadimitriou, progenitor of deep topography, and Nick Papadimitriou is Scarp. They interpenetrate each other, create and sustain each other’s reality and each other’s dream. Scarp the place is a secular locus of the mysterium, ungraspable by its seer as he trudges across its plains, traces its causeways and culverts, notes with a botanist’s rigour its flora and an animal lover’s gentleness its fauna, relates tales of local characters and their fortunes, inhabiting them like a psychedelicised dybbuk, uniting his consciousness with that of the earth and elements. Scarp the book is the testament of a unique and extraordinary mind that has created itself in the image of the numinous north London/Hertfordshire/Middlesex mindscape, a book of visionary hope, a deconstruction and reintegration of its subject and its subject’s perambulating magus. Finally Scarp is a compelling and illuminating account of one man’s revelation of something beyond the senses, a unity of place and purpose. It is not quite like anything else I have ever read. Read it yourself and be transformed.

Pretentious garbage

An interesting read

If you like the book Edgelands this will be right up your street.