I remarked as much to him, thinking that this was the kind of observation that might get him waxing psychogeographical – a winding path through tunnelling technologies and the cost of land in the nineteenth century, perhaps, with stops for the great Victorian cemeteries and the machinations of the rail companies. Instead he grunted, as if it had never occurred to him before, and looked out of the window. Unsatisfactory, deeply unsatisfactory. I was ditching work, and ditching the pub, in order to go on an expedition with Oliver Pierce. Oliver Pierce. Throw in a few encounters with eccentric characters, surreal and/or threatening, and it could be considered a caper. If it involved drinking or drug use, criminal or semi-criminal activity of some kind, and perhaps a lucky escape from arrest or a beating, I could justifiably call it a gonzo escapade. This was a wish fulfilled, but only if Pierce was Pierce. He had to play along, to conform to the personality that appeared on the pages of his essays. He had to be unpredictable and dangerous and full of bad ideas. I was just along for the ride. As the writer, you are a passenger, the avatar of the reader. You can’t instigate the crazy, you just happen to be there when it gets started. That’s how it should work.

Or that’s how it should appear, anyway. How did Pierce set up those Pierce-ish situations? Had he invented even more than he admitted to? If so, how? This trip hadn’t even been his idea, it had been mine. He was a writer too. What if neither of us was the instigator, the protagonist? What if we were both Boswells? If we were just blokes on a train?

I looked out of the window. Material for the escapade piece I would write. A slash through unexplored outer London. The sinews of the modern city. Gas-holders and scrub. Broken, daubed walls. Industrial buildings sinking into triffidous greenery. Triffidous, that was good. Neologisms were always good for this sort of thing. Think Will Self, Iain Sinclair. London’s fringe, where it breaks apart and loses its shape, before yielding to fields. But I was mistaken. This was only a temporary lapse. The city regrouped and re-exerted itself, growing denser again. With a lurch akin to vertigo, I became aware of the sheer size of the metropolis, the huge area it covered, the multitudes it contained. Builders’ yards and taxi roosts were replaced by terraced lines of back gardens. Punch bags and trampolines. Blocks of flats. A train depot, its Christmas lights still up. More gas-holders. The train grew weary, getting into a melancholy cycle of slow deceleration and fitful, uneven acceleration. It terminated at Barking, and wanted us to know that well in advance, its efforts palpably waning.