I'm reading a book about John Clare, a poet and farm labourer who travelled by foot out of the capital for eighty miles, 'To the Edge of the Orison'. He made this journey after the 18th and 19th century enclosures of the countryside. The story of Clare, in this book and others, is that in the profound refiguring of the poet's physical landscape, he went mad; its appendix is his death twenty years later in a lunatic asylum.

The megabus is emerging out of central London, into the suburbs towards the motorway. Streetlights race past my window, back towards the nucleus of the capital, a black hole. In my book, the author Iain Sinclair says that all journeys out of London are flights. I'm running away, like Clare.




Am I?

Eighteen months ago, in the summer between my second and third year at art school, I set myself the task of reaching the five furthest corners of Great Britain, of travelling to 'The Ends of the Earth'. I thought of it as a conceptual art project as I drew a star-shape across the island by my own journey-making, and collected a piece of whatever land (sand, rock, chalk) I found at each end point, bringing the pieces back, and displaying them along with a timetable, 'To the Ends of the Earth' in the gallery of a library in London.

At the end of one of my journeys, at the tip on the south coast underneath London, I arrived at Beachy Head. By the fence which keeps walkers away from the crumbling cliff's edge, someone had left a bouquet of flowers; Beachy Head is a place other people go, to throw themselves into the sea and find their own end. As I crawled underneath the fence, and further, as far as I dared, reaching out with my arm towards the edge, to snap off a piece of chalk, I felt tired of my mission, of art and of my self. I wanted to give up. I came back from the edge and sat looking at the sea, comforted by its placelessness and timelessness. I knew why people come to throw themselves into oblivion here; feeling this, I felt that there was something profoundly out of kilter inside me.

My third and final year at the Ruskin was difficult. I often thought about giving up, blaming art for the turmoil inside.

I started visiting my uncle's farm in Wales.



Each return to Oxford and the Ruskin was pained and uncertain, but I completed the course, and was awarded a first class degree at the end of the year. Throughout, the farm remained at the forefront of my mind; it was both a day-dream fantasy and a window into reality. On leaving, I returned home to Leicestershire and hatched the plan of this journey: to travail across the land, involving myself physically in the work of farming. Travelling this time would be a journey to, not from.

No, Iain Sinclair, it's not a flight. If the end at Beachy Head had brought me towards death and oblivion, then the soil and the land, mediated by farming, mean life and reality.

Editing this in 2009, I realise that it was in a sense a flight, a flight from 'Art' as I associate it with London; also from academic success and the competition of Oxford. But I can also see how in running away, I found ways back into the things which I loved: about art in making, writing and engaging with people; of success, securing an Arts Council grant and recognition from others; and in a subversive, competitive relationship to my gap year, travelling contemporaries (a gap year journey which was not a gap year, and farming throughout the UK, rather than explorations or benevolent projects abroad). It seems you never can escape who you are.