Read it in Books:Strange Labyrinth.

"In the middle of our life's path, I found myself in a dark forest" - The Divine Comedy, Dante.

It's been over five months now since I've been able to get together with friends, go for a nice long walk, stop for pint or two en route, and end up putting the world to right over a paneer shashlik, a naan bread, and a plate of pulao rice - and I miss it. A lot.

But hope springs eternal - and I feel confident that sooner, rather than later, TADS walks, London by Foot walks, and our Capital Ring project will return - and the feeling of that return will be made all the sweeter by the absence we have all endured. The nature will look that little bit more beautiful, the beer will taste that little bit hoppier, the shashlik will be that little be spicier, and I'll appreciate my friendships that little bit more.

The last group walk I partook of was entirely within what is classed as Epping Forest District and much of it was in the forest itself. So, when wondering what book to read next, it seemed an opportune time to delve into Will Ashon's Strange Labyrinth. A generous gift, for my last birthday, from my author friend Jack and a book that promises, on the cover, "outlaws, poets, mystics, murderers, and a coward in London's great forest".

A book which Iain Sinclair has described as "a cultural guidebook ... of doctored memory and free association". A book, I hoped, that would inspire me both in the writing of my blogs and in the curation of my walks. A book, I hoped, that would further lift the lockdown gloom that had already been easing with the early onset of spring, the kindness of dear friends, and the happy news that I'd got a new job.

Author Will Ashon is roughly the same age as me, he was born in 1969 - 1968 is my year, and, in a way, he's had the life I wish I'd had. He worked as a music journalist and founded the record label Big Dada (acts included Roots Manuva, Wiley, Young Fathers, and Kae Tempest before going on to become a novelist. But I'm not, at least I try not to be, the jealous type and I felt in Strange Labyrinth I would find a kindred spirit rather than a rival.

Ashon, like me, views locations as portals to our shared romantic past, he sees the majesty of creation in the most humble sights, and he rails against systemic control of our thoughts and actions. In the fight for freedom, his weapons, like mine, are words, wonderings, and wanderings. Like me, Ashon admits to anxiety and fear but, hopefully also like me, he attempts to channel these into creativity rather than negativity. 

The story begins with Ashon in crisis and using tasks and projects to create structure in order to stop that crisis becoming out of control. It was not an unusual or, Ashon himself says, particularly dramatic crisis. He'd reached his mid-forties and he had no idea what it was he actually wanted from life. He describes his mindset, during this crisis, as being as if Nosferatu had gone to a fancy dress party as Mr Potato Head.

He was drinking too much, he was struggling to write anything he felt worthwhile, he was becoming ever more impatient, he was losing his temper too often, and he was haunted by a deep fear that cowardice had played a hand in all the major decisions in his life. He was looking for a way out of the mental maze he'd become imprisoned in and he saw, in Epping Forest, a physical analogue for that mental maze. He would use nature, history, and even magic as tools for navigation but he would discover that, when it comes to navigation, these are unreliable tools.

The other star of the book is, of course, Epping Forest itself. A place Ashon describes as both "a simulacrum of a real forest" and "a Cockney Paradise". The trees of the forest are almost all carved with hearts, initials, and, in some instances, the names of musical acts like Elvis and The Sex Pistols. Ashon's favourite carving is a crude skull with eyes like marbles that resembles both an American muffin and a pirate lost inland but he also retains a childish glee by pointing out an etching that simply reads "BOLLOX YOU CUNTS".

The paths of the forest never seem to lead anywhere specific and, at times, the entire place seems to have been designed with the express purpose of getting lost in. Ashon eats his sandwiches in the trees, flirts with the idea of spending the night in their branches despite being a poor tree climber, and ponders the forest's popularity with doggers. Dogging is, perhaps, what Epping Forest is best known for these days. Dogging and murder.

Reading Strange Labyrinth is, in many ways, like taking a walk in the forest. There are difficult muddy sections and hills to climb but the views from the top of those hills can be exhilarating and breathtaking. Sometimes you worry what time you will reach your destination and where that destination will be but often, and this is the best approach, it's best to simply enjoy the journey. It can't be purely because I'm trying to walk at least 11,000 steps a day at the moment that I regularly found myself pacing around my flat with the book in my hand.

There are many lengthy digressions, some more interesting than others, and it often seems that these lengthy digressions are the main part of the book. Again, journey before destination. There's the tale of Wally Hope, a strange combination of hippy, businessman (with no interest in making money), and military fantasist who spent a good chunk of the sixties incarcerated after his own mother dobbed him in for drug use, organised the first Stonehenge free festival, and has been cited by Penny Rimbaud as the inspiration for Crass.

Hope believed the Chubb family of locksmiths had bestowed Stonehenge to the nation, drove around London in a rainbow coloured car with a teepee strapped to the top, and died not long after another spell in prison in his late twenties after being arrested for being in possession of three tabs of acid. His death has been variously put down to suicide, choking on his own vomit, and state sponsored murder of an undesirable troublemaker.

There's also Penny Rimbaud himself, and Gee Vaucher, of Crass who still live in Dial House on the edge of North Weald Bassett (I know, I arranged a TADS walk there last year). When the tube line still ran that far out in the early eighties, some drivers would stop the trains between stops so that young punks could scramble down and meet their heroes.

Heroes who brought to punk ideas of vegetarianism, radical feminism, pacifism and anti-Christianity to go with the anti-authoritarianism that was already there. Many hated Crass, Gary Bushell (for Sounds) and Tony Parsons (NME) slated their records and they were suspected, not incorrectly, of being old hippies.

Nevertheless, they were a life changing force for many. Including me and, it seems, Will Ashon. When Will meets with Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher, conversation leaps from Taoist interpretations of Crass records at Blackpool punk festivals to quantum mechanics and on to Fluxus and shamanism. Taking in the 1958 film The Inn of the Sixth Happiness and the Aberfan disaster of 1966 which killed 144 people, 116 of them children.

Rimbaud and Vaucher's hospitality and idealism sends Ashon into a reverie of his own youthful hopes and dreams. His left wing parents, his hippy school where kids were allowed to smoke, and his belief that they might win, the good people might win the argument about how the future of the world would look. But in remembering that, he remembered, too, that they did not win. Thatcher stayed in power for many more years, the Conservatives even longer, and even Labour had to move to the right to eventually regain power.

He considers how, in some ways, it was surprisingly painless to give up hope, to accept defeat. How it made life easier, more bearable. Ashon asked Rimbaud how he had survived the crushing defeat of everything he believed in and been able to retain his serenity in the face of this. But, thinking about it later, he came to the conclusion that Rimbaud had not regained his serenity at this juncture but discovered it. 

Rimbaud had, several years earlier, been in his own metaphorical dark forest. A nasty relationship break up and a cancer diagnosis had left him anticipating his own untimely death. Fortunately, a major operation cured him of the cancer but when it came to the withdrawal of love enacted upon him from another, he realised that the real pain came in no longer being able to love himself because of this. That looking for external love to reinforce internal love is a dangerous game to play.

It was a powerful section of Strange Labyrinth but Rimbaud was hardly the only familiar (or even unfamiliar) name that cropped up reading it. Ashon references people and collectives like David Bowie, Stewart Lee, Alfred Hitchock, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Nietzsche, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Picasso, Turner, Francis Bacon, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Jacob Epstein (all of which I am, more or less, fond of) but he also introduced new names to me. Like the 17c Renaissance poet Mary Wroth, the experimental American essayist Curtis White, the feminist theologian and writer of fantasty novels Sara Maitland, and the 12c French poet Chretien de Troyes.

Others I was aware of but in no great detail. I was unaware that John Clare's poetic celebrations of the English countryside were tinged with sorrow regarding its disruption and I knew that Dick Turpin was buried in York (but not why - or how he actually died). I know of but I've never actually read Dante or Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons. Perhaps they read the latter to me at school. I didn't use to pay much attention. 

Ashon uses these reference points to delve back into his own childhood as he remembers the taste of an ice cream from a Mr Whippy ice cream van and his intense antipathy to his local Leicestershire bobby on the beat PC Connor. But he also uses them to think about deeper, and more abstract concepts like 'retributitive magic' while at the same time referencing artworks like Olafur Eliasson's The Forked Forest Path and Richard Long's A Line Made By Walking and the 1941 Jose Luis Borges short story The Garden of Forking Paths.

New words were introduced to me as well  thanatophilic, discomposition, scholler, hydroponically, nubbin, everted, viridescent, bivalent, pronking, caduceus). This all underlines that Ashon is a clever man but he wears his learning surprisingly lightly and never misses a chance to put himself down. The book is, in a narrative sense, all over the place. It's like a conversation with a close friend - perhaps one conducted walking through a forest and then continued in a country pub. 

At one point, you're hearing about the notorious cop killer Harry Roberts and the rumours that he electrocuted a cat and strangled a peacock, not long after you're reading about Danbert Nobacon from Chumbawamba exposing his penis at a school to prove that it neither looked like a microphone nor a missile. But Ashon drills far deeper down that merely recounting horrific, macabre or amusing anecdotes. He ponders the damage Enclosure did, and still does to the UK as a nation, how privatisation erodes our liberties both physically and mentally, not just on the surface but also in the 'deep grammar of assumptions that limit our ability to even see a problem', and he speaks not of Marx's false consciousness but our own 'fenced consciousness'.

He cites the American social critic Curtis White's idea that we are an 'administered population' who conspire in the murder of our own imagination to make life easier for ourselves in the short term. Thus frustrating our desires, in the longer term, as we agree to a one sided contract with the state in which they erode our access not just to more and more physical spaces, but spaces of intellect and emotion as well.

In Ashon's attempts to find direction in his life, to be saved even, he comes to the conclusion that he did not suddenly find himself in a labyrinthine forest of the soul and mind in his middle age. He'd always been there. His advancing years allowed him to not only see this, but to appreciate it. To be lost, when life is ultimately meaningless, was not such a bad thing. It is up to us to infer meaning on our own existence lest we have our worth and value judged by others, others who may hold very different ideals to our own. 

I found this book fascinating. I was, at times, appropriately enough, lost in the labyrinth of Ashon's words and concepts myself. To the degree that it was, as undoubtedly intended, not dissimilar to a long walk in what I once imagined a forest to be. There are moments when you feel utterly lost, defeated even, but a chance encounter, a flicker of light through the canopy, a vista that reveals possibilities that our own caged, and privatised, imaginations choose to deny us - these things were the genuine joys I got from this book. 

It was a book that looked at darkness, accepted it, and knew that we all must navigate it to arrive, eventually, in a lighter place. In that respect, and I humbly accept I do not operate on the same level, it was like two of the things that bring me the greatest pleasure in my life. These blogs, in which I try to make sense of my existence, and the walks I arrange, in which I try even harder to share the joy I find in existence with the people I love the most. What, on the surface, may appear the selfish journey of one person and their battle with their own demons can, and should, hold a light up to each and every one of us as we pore over the moral compass of our own being. Thanks Jack, I loved it.