What better way to spend the August Bank Holiday than not at some kind of bloody festival? I lay on the floor of my girlfriend's flat in Muswell Hill, poring over the A to Z and looking for somewhere leafy and uninteresting to walk to that we hadn't previously walked to. For Muswell Hillians, another yomp through Highgate Woods offers little interest; a tortuous climb up to Alexandra Palace is even less appealing. It was time to look further afield. Maybe start at the very beginning? The first proper page of the A to Z (page 4) features green open space in abundance. So we decided to go there.

The afternoon began in the most unpromising fashion imaginable. Faced with a £2.90 return train fare from New Southgate to Hadley Wood, I inserted my debit card – you know, the one that you rely on every day to buy stuff, withdraw cash – into the WAGN ticket machine, which whirred gently, confirmed my purchase, and then asked me to remove my card. But there was no card to remove. I peered into the slot, and there it was, poking out by approximately 1 millimetre – certainly not enough to get any purchase on it with my gnawed fingernails. Jenny started poking her own card into the slot in order to retrieve mine; I wailed at her to stop, envisaging a slapstick routine whereby we poked all our worldly possessions into the slot in turn in order to retrieve the previous one, leaving us penniless and destitute in suburbia. Eventually, the machine tired of waiting for me to remove my card, and withdrew it deep into its bowels with an unsatisfying clunk. B@stard. I was furious. I belted the f*cking thing with the ferocity of a man who realised that, for the next week, he would be a second-class citizen only able to withdraw cash between 0930 and 1630 if carrying a chequebook and a passport. I stopped belting it when Jenny pointed out 4 policeman sitting in cars nearby looking for something to do. I rang up to cancel my card. We got on the train, ticketless.

We emerged triumphantly in Hadley Wood, a small village that nestles in between about 20 golf courses and contains enormous, tasteless houses belonging to rich commuters. You've never seen so many hideous fountains, spouting gallons of water out of their repulsive orifices, for no other reason than to respout the same gallons of water in strict rotation while using up valuable fossil fuels. Just as we finished marvelling at the obscenity of wealth, we encountered Ferny Hill Farm, whose tea shop was shut, but their “Maize Maze” certainly was not. A Maize Maze, for the unenlightened amongst you, is a maze whose walls are formed out of maize. The Maize Maze was doing good business, and at £5 a pop (or £16 for a family of 4) I'd be surprised if Ferny Hill Farm even bothers re-opening their tea shop. They'll probably capitalise on the fad and plant a Hyacinth Labyrinth in time for spring.

Trent Country Park was next. The further we got into it, the more human beings there were to blight it, and by the time we got to the middle we realised that we'd inadvertently stumbled upon The Enfield Steam & Country Show. Disaster. There were shire horses, bric-a-brac stalls, hog roast stalls, dozens and dozens of vintage cars, and hundreds of bored people. A Dutch street organ with 3 figurines half-heartedly hitting tiny cymbals was haemmoraging its audience rapidly, while nearby a display of 2 teepees, wooden cooking utensils and a p!ssed off husky dog attempted to give Enfield a small slice of Native American life. Most bizarre, however, was a stall run by Enfield Carnival, who were already publicising next August's carnival with a banner hastily corrected with red marker pen, while an exceedingly plain girl in a tiara stomped around heavily in the mud, wearing a sash which said – get this – “Enfield Deputy Carnival Queen 2005″. Deputy Carnival Queen. One can only imagine the lack of pride with which she totes that sash, which must have been specially made for her when the actual Carnival Queen, a radiantly beautiful daughter of Enfield, made it abundantly clear that her duties would be strictly limited to not attending the Enfield Steam & Country Show, amongst other civic events. Deputy Carnival Queen. Man alive. She had the intense, annoyed look of someone who knew that her ascent to the post of Carnival Queen could only be realised by the death of the incumbent Queen, and was making gruesome assassination plans as she whirred the tombola.

We left the Show, walked for an hour around Cockfosters and Oakwood looking for a decent pub to reward ourselves, failed to find one, and came home.