Categories: uncategorized, circumnavigation
Tags: london, urbanwalks
Date: 21 March 2006 18:31:55
So what's this all about then?
Well, so far & tentatively, the Third Circumnavigation of London.
This is all going to sound very nerdish and very unlike what most people think is fun, but I walk (or cycle) round cities for fun. I've been doing it for decades. I fill in my copy of the AtoZ so I know where I've been. I now have eleven A to Zs of London. And a couple each of Newcastle and Glasgow and Manchester, three or four street atlases of Brighton, and one-off maps of at least a dozen other towns, all with yellow lines of felt-tip pen filling in the streets I've walked on (*). I must be the only person in the world who thought that the day the A to Z company moved to coloured maps was a disaster. These days, with cheap(ish) digital cameras I even take quite a lot of photos. And (I'm really sorry about this) I take notes. In a little notebook.
Now my First Circumnavigation was at the outer edge of Zone 2. I realised that if you have a Zone 1 & 2 travelcard you can go to the last station in Zone 2 on any underground or mainline railway sometime in the early evening, walk round to the next one, have a pint in any decent-looking pub you found, and be back home in time for dinner (or, in my case, more likely last orders at the local). So I set off to the station intending to get the first train going anywhere, then to change to the first train going anywhere else. "Anywhere Else" turned out to be Willesden Green. Walk from there to Kensal Green, take the train back - and return some other time to start off again at the same place.
That was cheap and cheerful and took about a year. Not particularly hard work either, around one walk a month.
The next London project was to cycle to or from college across every river crossing on the tidal Thames. Not very difficult (though going from Lewisham to Bloomsbury by way of Dartford was a little extreme) so I combined it with the attempt to walk or cycle either along or across every street in Lewisham.
The Second Circumnavigation is a larger scale thing. I'm going out to (usually) Zone Five and instead of each walk starting where the last one left off, I've been doing them in overlapping sections, big zig-zags that cross each other on the map. So far its been good. Sort of fun, I've seen a great many places I'd not have gone to deliberatly,
And gave me lots of photos for my forthcoming amazing websites Thirty-six views of Battersea Power Station and Every Building on the Old Kent Road. Not just amazing but so far completely virtual, they live in Imaginary Storage, which is the best kind.
But events - some alluded to on blogs on this very site, others to do with me finishing off an MSc, but most to do with rather tedious health problems (**) - intervened, as events do, and my journey petered out somewhere in the region of Mitcham Common. But its time to start again. My project for the year is to see if I can get back out of doors at least once a week or so. First to finish the Second Circumnavigation - watch out Croydon! And then some other project. What. I'm not sure yet. A Third Circumnavigation? More of the photos? Cycling London's rivers?
Whatever it will be, there will be notes. Loads of notes. I'm as voluble (or as much of a bullshitter) in private as I am in public. Its hard to see things without having ideas about them, or forming opinions. When walking around London those ideas Mostly about, well, not so much architecture as how the places people live fit together. Which I have a couple of notebooks full of already. So, I intend to write it up then post it here.
And that's it really.
(*) Actually they aren't all yellow - the colour schemes are complex and intricate, depending on the details of my mood, the phase of the moon, the Greenness of the local transport system, but mostly whichever colour of pen I happened to have in my bag at the time I first used the map.
(**) My wrists and ankles knees started to give way. RSI and some kind of beginning of osteoarthritis. And gout sneaked up (you really don't want to know about gout). And I mostly was forced to stop walking any great distance and started taking the bus everywhere. And I has to stop cycling almost entirely. The last time I tried to cycle any distance over about a mile was the September before last, and I had to give up and walk for the last two miles home because my wrists hurt too much to operate the brakes. Because of that the Second Circumnavigation is in abeyance, almost finished, but suspended for a year. I started somewhere near Eltham and I've worked my way round to the south-western approaches to Croydon. Only a few miles to go.
And now the nice doctor tells me I have dangerously high blood pressure and need to do something about it pretty drastically. He made me have an ECG and seemed slightly surprised that my heartbeat appears normal (though very fast). Apparently it means I'm much more likely than average to have a heart attack (and three or four other Bad Things) and much more likely to suffer badly from it if I do. And the way out of it is to change my lifestyle and have less stress. This puts me in a double bind. The middle-aged fatso's Catch 22. The kind of behaviour I need to adopt to circumvent the long-term problem - basically more exercise and less fags, food, and booze - is the kind of behaviour that exacerbates the short-term one. Walking & cycling put pressure on the joints, swimming would be better but more than a few minutes gets very boring and therefore stressful. In fact exercise as such is stressful, not only because it is boring but because it reminds me of school sport, a subject that can have me shouting and ranting at the drop of a hat. And I'm not intending to do rants here so I won't.
I don't know about anyone else but for me being out and about and in the presence of other people is relaxing. I don't much like being on my own (well, not after lunch anyway... mornings are different) There have been times when I've gone and got on a train or a bus just because I feel more comfortable with others around, even total strangers, than I do on my own. I often hate getting back home at night and shutting the door behind me and sitting on my own. It is as if I have killed the day, nothing more can happen, opportunities and chances are dribbling away. And when I'm at home I can't avoid the terrible state of the place and I have to cast around for another displacement activity from getting the floor repaired, which is what I really ought to be doing but can hardly face.
But the knees and wrists have calmed down a little, and I really need to get out some more, so armed with some of the twentieth century's best drugs - allopurinol to prevent gout (and cause itchy red blotches - but what do you expect from backing up one of the central biochemical pathways), diclofenac supposedly to ease the knees, moxonidine to cut the blood pressure (and do all sorts of odd things to every body system from sleep cycles to temperature control) indomethacin actually to ease them (and cause bleeding from orifices if I'm unlucky ,and no, I think maybe I'm not going to take it with the diclofenac, even though the doctor said it was alright, the pharmacist looked sensibly slighly surprised that both were on the same prescription & I know who I am more likely to believe) - I'll be throwing myself back into that road that goes ever ever on (though mostly just round the corner to the pub)