It all happened by accident. I fully intended to stay at home today and plan my business. But I had a travelcard burning a hole in my pocket.

Here in London, you can get a Travelcard, which entitles you to travel on all public transport - train, tube and bus - in whatever zones of London you pay for. I often get a weekend travelcard, which costs about one and a half times the daily rate, and is valid for Saturday and Sunday.

In my hurry yesterday, I got one for zones 1 - 6 instead of zones 1-4. It was only an extra 70 pence, but it covered the outer zones of London, where frankly there's not a lot to see.

The sensible thing would be to forget about the extra 70 pence. But that is not what I did.

Firstly, I'm an adventurer, and welcome the opportunity to do something different. I haven't been that far out of the centre of London for ages, so I decided to go on a random quest to see what it was like.

Also, after spending so much money yesterday, I really needed to get in touch with my Inner Skinflint, and get my 70 pence worth.

So I headed into town, to Victoria Station, and looked at the tube map. There were lots of places I haven't been to yet that I could have gone to, but most of them were in zones 1 - 4 and I could go there another time. Most of the places in Zone 6 I'd never heard of.

Eventually I settled on Ruislip, which is in the far suburbs of North-West London, on the outer reaches of the Metropolitan line.

If you're trying to pronounce 'Ruislip' and getting something like 'Roo-ee-slip', that's understandable. That's what I first thought, before I lived in London. It's actually pronounced 'Rye [rhymes with 'eye']-slip'. So there. Yet another English invention to make outsiders feel strange.

I'd heard of Ruislip, but only as a place where stockbrokers lived. It has a reputation as a dull suburb. Leslie Thomas, who wrote The Virgin Soldiers, had another book called Tropic of Ruislip, which I take to be about hot sex in the suburbs. It sounded like a place to consider.

So, with the light already fading, and with a light rain falling, I took the Metropolitan line out of London, from Baker Street through Finchley Road, Wembley Park (near the famous stadium), Harrow-on-the-Hill (near the famous school), Rayners Lane, Ruislip Manor, Ruislip.

It was getting dark as I got out of the little station ('Sorry about the messy state of the station but we are fighting a loosing [sic] battle against the pigeons') and wandered up to what appeared to be the high street.

I had hoped for something vaguely picturesque. I was disappointed. Built, I suppose, in the 1930s, the main street of Ruislip is a long parade of dull shops, most of which were closed by this time - half past four on a wet Sunday afternoon.

There was the usual mixture of well-known high street names - Woolworths, Lloyds Bank, NatWest Bank, Barclays Bank, MacDonalds, Wimpy, Pizza Hut, and a local 'Poppins' restaurant. There was the Persad Tandoori, Vodafone (selling mobile phones), and a variety of charity shops - NCH Action for Children, Scope, and rival cancer charities - Cancer Research on one side, and Imperial Cancer Research, looking distinctly more dowdy, on the other.

There were proud local shops - Ruislip Computers, Ruislip Village Fruiterers, Swift 24 Hour Dry Cleaners ('We Clean Supreme'), and Altons ('The Shop for Men and Boys'), with a shopfront that must have been modern in the 1950s, and the sort of grey, dull clothes - cheap, practical, and completely devoid of style - that are worn by old men of all ages. ('Lined cardigan: original price £59, sale price £30')

There was a pet shop that had, in the window, "The Cat's Cradle - every cat's favourite sleeping place". This was a fleecy hammock-type device that attaches to the radiator, and on which a cat can stretch out and lie like a Roman Emperor in warmth and comfort.

There were shops selling bedding and furniture, paint, beauty products, and beauty. There was a ladies' hairdressers, with a window full of Paul Mitchell hair products, and a small display devoted to St Valentine's day - a few pieces of lurid red velvet, and a set of candle-holders with unlit red candles standing vaguely upright at odd angles, in the window.

There was a bookshop. After ages of careful planning and agonising - perhaps consulting a focus group or two - they had settled on the brilliant and devastatingly audacious name of The Book Shop.

There were a couple of possibly decent restaurants, a delicatessen or two, and one minimalist café - the Brazilian Café - that had bare wooden floors and some nice sparse wooden tables and some quite attractive modern wooden chairs - the only thing resembling style I saw in the entire place.

And some shops devoted to home furnishings and general knick knacks.

Oh, readers, if you have tears, prepare to shed them now.

This was not the land that taste forgot. This was the land that taste has never visited.

Furnishing Interiors (I wonder do they hire a consultant to think of these imaginative names) had a large statue of Laurel and Hardy sitting on a bench (£139), plus a series of marble statuettes of Beethoven, topless and armless Roman girls, and the bust of a Roman officer with heavy armour and an evil expression. ('Roman Pedestal - was £100, now £90')

Bland and tacky perhaps, but there was worse.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Stewart's Fine Furnishings.

Where is the owner? Surely he or she must step forward to take a bow.

For the most part, the window was full of the usual innocuous tat. True, there was a lifesize wooden Elvis, which was close enough to Kitsch to enter the room of beauty by the back door. There were a couple of near life sized clowns with violins, whose function or origins I would not guess at, but which were not competely repulsive, though I would be wary of entering the house of anyone who had actually bought one.

Ah, but the pièce de resistance was yet to come. The CD holder.

This was a small figure carved in wood, a figure leaning over and resting his big head on the block which had been carved with ridges into which CDs could be slid. This figure was bizarre. It was clearly intended to be African, though the facial features were more like the twisted, distorted mask of a Japanese play.

He was naked, except for a loincloth made of rough twine, and his hair was made of the same material. It affected to be an African figure, though I am sure it was knocked up locally, with neither the fine workmanship or bold features of real tribal art.

There was something pathetic about the way the figure was leaning forward unnaturally, so that his big head would hold the CD block in place for his owner's convenience. You will guess I suppose that I also found the object extremely offensive. Not least because of the title: for £30, you could buy this fine specimen of 'primitive man'.

But this was not the worst. There were a number of similar figures, all entitled 'Primitive Man', on display. In the next window, there was the biggest of all. And this was the one that makes me fear for the sanity of English suburb dwellers.

Again, this had been carved from wood and decorated with a stringy cloth. It was lifesize, and did bear a fair approximation to tribal art from the developing world. The eyes were represented by cowrie shells. It had two prominent wooden breasts that jutted out in front.

And down there, at the crotch, something nearly twelve inches long was sticking upwards and outwards. I could not see what exactly - it was wrapped in corrugated cardboard - but it was obviously phallic, and erect.

I don't think it was a mobile phone holder.

I seriously worry about what this says about the hidden primitive soul of the English suburbanite. It's not the weird sexuality - the gender-bending crudity of it. It's the strange, racially insensitive, culturally confused, repression it hints at.

What dark imaginings lurk in the shadows and between the crevices of these polite English bungalows? I don't doubt that the inhabitants of Ruislip love their children, and their cats, and give generously to charities which ask for money for starving African babies. I just worry at their dumb cultural isolation.

The streets, wet with rain, were deserted. I left, and caught a train, and felt a breath of fresh air as I hurtled back in the dark, away from suburban primitives, and back to civilisation.

If you want to know what it feels like to write an online journal, you should check out Al Schroeder's amusing entry, here.

It's true, it's sooooo true ....

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