To reach today’s square, I needed to make a short crossing on a small ferry, which I knew would be fun but also added the tiniest frac- tion of hassle to proceedings, which is all I ever need to be tempt- ed to procrastinate. That quibble aside, I always enjoy ferry crossings. The only thing that beats them are cable ferries across rivers, with a bonus point for those you have to hail by shouting, hoping that the ferryman hasn’t gone home for lunch or closed for the season. Though these journeys are brief, they have the excitement of crossing a border, a boundary, to somewhere new.

Although today’s river was only a few hundred metres wide, I wasn’t brave enough to swim or canoe across it. The brown water swirled and boiled with eddies and undertows, and ships ploughed up and down. Even the ferry struggled, crossing the current in a wide, swerving arc.

As the ferry slowed down to dock, I looked back across the river at the landscapes I had been linking this year. I enjoyed seeing those con- nections from this fresh perspective, noting how this place joined onto that place. I wheeled my bike down a causeway of riveted girders, over tidal mud and shopping trolleys, then pedalled away from the ferry.

I removed my bike helmet and wiped my sweaty face. It was hot. I was at a memorial to a pilot shot down by German Messerschmitts in the skies overhead during the Second World War. Appropriately, the fields around were filled with poppies. Scattered at the base of the memorial was the rubbish from a KFC takeaway. The ten-piece Wicked Variety bucket contained 4,790 calories, the large fries had 1,440 and there were 750 more in the large Pepsi. I hoped it had been shared around, for that is a spectacular 6,980 calories, enough to fuel one eater through an impressive 69.8-mile run. Although given that they had been too lazy to put their rubbish in a bin, I doubted these calories were being used for long-distance running.

A cockerel crowed from behind a nearby hedge, jubilant not to have been fried. I rarely heard cockerels around here, but the sound reminded me of travels in other countries, of pre-dawn wake ups in the Philippines and the potholed roads of rural Nicaragua.

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I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square as usual, but to see the squares between the squares. I’d found myself with the rare but joyous occurrence of a weekend afternoon all to myself, so decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the big football match in the evening. I wasn’t playing and was merely preparing to take my seat in front of the TV with beer in hand and loud opinions galore. But the game was still all I could concentrate on.

I headed out after lunch to see how many of the grid squares that I’d visited I could link together in an afternoon. I would ride through as many as possible before I ran out of time, and then zoom home for kick-off. It would be interesting to take stock of all I’d seen so far.

This kingdom of mine might cover only twenty kilometres squared, but it seemed at times to span a thousand worlds. From winter to sum- mer, welcoming smiles to grumpy shouts, and from last week’s jaded streets to this long grass, busy with butterflies, where I lay on my back, alone and undisturbed, and enjoyed the warm sun on my face.

Down in the distance I could see the city’s gleaming towers, shim- mering in the midsummer haze. I lay still for a while, listening, hov- ering above myself in my mind’s eye, allowing myself to settle into the grid square and its vibe. I heard birdsong and the hum of a motorway. ‘The language of birds is very ancient,’ wrote Gilbert White in a letter. ‘Little is said, but much is meant and understood.’

Each week I arrived in my grid square with little idea what might capture my interest, but an increased certainty that something would. As with all good exploration, there were hints and hopes about what I’d find, but each square also surprised me.

This meant that if I found a square underwhelming, with little to interest me, the responsibility was likely to be mine. Was how much I saw dependent on how much I looked? Some squares buoyed my mood, while others merely matched it. A boring square wasn’t its fault; it was my fault. I knew that as I struggled lethargically round today’s streets, but I also excused myself on the grounds of illness.

I had sweated and shivered through the night, unable to sleep. In the morning, I went to make myself some toast, but we’d run out of bread. I dragged myself to the shed to do some work, but after an inef- fectual hour of pretending to write this book, I tried to salvage some- thing useful from the day by fetching my camera and cycling out to investigate a grid square.

I sheltered beneath a large field maple tree, reframing my atti- tude to rain. Parking the grumbles and persuading myself instead how gleaming clean all the trees looked. Appreciating the gun-barrel-gran- ite skies. Remembering that a day in the rain is better than a day in the office. That kind of thing.

One of my favourite smells is the air after a storm, the earthy scent of petrichor, from the Greek words petros (stone) and ichor (the blood of the gods). We tend to think that our sense of smell is something to be sniffed at compared with the animal world’s, but we are astonishing- ly adept at detecting geosmin, the chemical released by dead microbes that is responsible for the heady smells of petrichor and pools of water. We can smell geosmin at a level of five parts per trillion – that’s thou- sands of times more sensitive than sharks are to the scent of blood. We may be so sensitive to it because detecting water on the savannah where we evolved was a vital evolutionary advantage.

I had a free morning and my latest grid square lay before me, begin- ning with the rare pleasure of a segregated cycle lane, safe from the busy road that sliced the square in half. I rode fast and free, blasting away the day’s earlier frustrations of waiting on the phone for an hour to speak to my electricity provider. Free at last! (Me, not the electric- ity.) North of the road, wheat fields ripened in the heat. South of the road lay a 1940s housing estate. The noisy road was once an important Roman route, though it was already an ancient thoroughfare by the time they arrived. I can’t begin to imagine what the traffic here will look like in another 2,000 years.

A row of houses had been built recently between the road and those wheat fields that had been forest back when the Romans carved through this land in the name of progress. The new-builds were extrav- agant expanses of glass and steel, with large gravel areas for parking multiple cars. Sparrows jostled noisily in pink rose bushes and pet- als fell among the squabbling. A placard in one garden campaigned

Meadows

against a ‘green belt grab’ that proposed to build 4,000 more homes around here. It summed up the difficulties of deciding where to build. This family was enjoying their new home but understandably didn’t want all the neighbouring fields to be built on as well. I don’t like the countryside being turned into towns, but I also want everyone to have a home. Answers on a postcard to your MP, please.

The map promised waterfalls. I was not expecting the 979 metres of Venezuela’s Angel Falls (named after the American explorer and pilot Jimmy Angel, whose plane crashed on Auyán-Tepuí in 1937), the volume of Inga Falls in the DRC (more than 46 million litres per second), or even the Denmark Strait cataract (an undersea waterfall plummeting unseen for 3,500 metres beneath the Atlantic Ocean). But the word ‘waterfall’ was not something I had expected to see annotated on my suburban lowland map, so I was excited to investigate.

My heart sank when I saw that the stream ran straight across a golf course. Golf courses are like a certain type of model. At first glance, your eyes light up at the swathes of undulating lushness. But your passion quickly plummets at the emptiness you find, the lack of nature beneath an artificial, preened veneer. The golf course did not bode well for my waterfalls.