'Oh, help my in my weakness'/I heard the drifter say', sang Bob Dylan on an oblique tale of divine intervention on his 1967 John Wesley Harding album, adding 'My trip hasn't been a pleasant one/And my time it isn't long'. Giving pause, perhaps, to contemplate the figure and transit of the transient: the half glimpsed, yet recorded.

Perhaps a passer-by witnessed by the likes of Guy Debord or Raoul Vaneigem of the French Situationist International, picking up the reins of their surrealist predecessors, on one of their dérives: drifting aimlessly through Paris, their intent the discovery of the occult city, the transformation of everyday life. Or a statistical sighting recorded by the Mass Observation project, staffed by professional, volunteer drifters, recording often absurd minutiae of British life in a surprisingly poetic state initiative.

Or the figure in 'The Walking Man Diary (1975-76)', a large-scale work, part photographic, part commentary, by the recently deceased local artist Ian Breakwell, documenting the irregular, but frequently daily haunting of Smithfield by a shabby itinerant. Or a character chance encountered on a venture by Hackney author Iain Sinclair, foot-noted into books such as London Orbital (the M25 traversed on foot) or his most recent, The Edge of the Orison (replicating an 80-mile, 3-day walk by poet John Clare).

Born a month apart in 1943, Breakwell and Sinclair comprise a psychic doubling, similar both in name and pursuit - notebooks, diaries, film and, above all, walking and its observation inform both of their working practices. While Breakwell's work folds out across media from the diaries he kept for some 40 years, Sinclair's writing folds in memoir, travelogue, literary and local history asides.

I first became aware of Breakwell as an art student in the mid-1970s, when, having been practising for some 10 years, he had already acquired a reputation as 'that diary guy'. I tracked his work over the years: extracts of diaries (1964-85), published in 1986 by Pluto Press, formed the basis of a BBC Radio 3 serial and Channel 4 films. 'As an artist', he said, 'humour, in all shades through to the very darkest, is an integral part of this work.' Possessed of a mordant wit, acute to synchronicity and the absurd. One entry: 'The 18.30 train from London to Plymouth. In the dining car the fat businessman farts loudly and unexpectedly, and simultaneously, by the side of the railway track, a racehorse falls down.'

Out of London in the 1990s, he was commissioned by Sunderland and was Artist in Residence at Durham Cathedral, his farewell an alternative multi-media guided tour as part of the nationwide Hidden Cities project. Locating to Stoke Newington, as a good citizen, he joined the Library, where we met, and he could often be found researching or grappling with the photocopier. On one occasion, he jokingly suggested the Library buy a recently published art-house monograph of his work - 'a snip at £45.00'. Or I'd chance upon him at last orders in the Rochester Castle, elaborately constructing a roll-up and happy to talk (we'd discovered mutual acquaintances). He died of cancer, October 14th.
Some years ago, writer and musician Howard Devoto (himself later beached on the shores of the neighbourhood) was asked to identify the audience his songs addressed: 'People going quietly out of their minds in cafes'. Or, perhaps, on the road. Sinclair's book traces Clare's escape route from an asylum in Epping Forest up the spinal ley line of Ermine Street, the Great North Road, out of Hackney to his Fenland home, 'undone by London'. The poet, absorbed in orbiting a 7-mile radius around his countryside village, produced luminously detailed poems of place. He knew it; it knew him - 'The birds talked to him', observes Sinclair, continuing, 'but he had to learn the difficult thing: in different places, we are different people'.

Feted by society patrons, this year's model, representative of the fashionable cult of the peasant poet, he was brought to London - and lost: 'I am unwilling to play the part of a newly discovered monkey.' Adrift, discarded ('So last season, darling' - one can imagine the talk), bewitched, bothered and bewildered, incarcerated, he makes his bid for freedom, for roots, a sense of self. But both place and poet have changed: he remains lost. Again institutionalised, for his last 22 years, allowed to ramble only in a small circuit of his old patch; reduced to begging in the church, writing snippets of doggerel for the price of a pint.

Launched at an impressively over-subscribed reading in Stoke Newington Bookshop, Sinclair presented his book by starting at its end and moving in reverse: the book begins at the end of the reproduced walk. Unlike some of his fiction, where narrative thread can be washed away by cascades of hallucinatory allusion, his walking words are precisely illuminated, still with characteristic imagery ('Libraries are oracles', for instance). Yet there is more than poor Clare here: a drift into the nature of the road, of poetry and fiction, detours and psychogeography, the genealogy of his wife of 40 years, Anna, her family links to Clare's Northampton time and place; a fascinating romance.

Dylan's drifter escaped. Breakwell's journey is ended. For Sinclair, still, 'the horizon calls'.

Edge of the Orison, Iain Sinclair (Hamish Hamilton, 2005): www.hamishhamilton.co.uk; John Clare Society: www.johnclare.org.uk; Ian Breakwell's Auditorium, a film from the stage of audience reactions to an unspecified variety show, is on show at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, as part Variety, an exhibition he co-curated: www.dlwp.com ; Mass Observation, still looking for participant drifters: www.massobs.org.uk 

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