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Hastings, Welsh riding & almost the end of my stay in London

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I’m up in Ipswich this weekend visiting Louis & Emma (Te Puke & Palmy friends) before I leave (ash cloud permitting) for Canada next weekend. The weather seems to have regressed back to winter, so it’s been a nice relaxing weekend hanging out with old friends, eating good food, watching sport (a horrible game, but a good last ball win by the Black Caps), churning through a recent Tess Gerritsen novel, winning at Buzz & so on. All the major things have been crossed off my list of things to do before leaving London, so it’s been nice to get away for the weekend & ignore all the smaller things left. Louis & Emma live in a flat in a converted malthouse, & I really like the massive exposed beams & wondering at all the industrial & processing goings on that this place would have once seen – plus being so close to town is pretty good too.

Trish & I did make it to Battle & Hastings last week. I was quite impressed that Trish made it around the large battlefield with her previously broken ankle & leg still on the mend. The small display & video before walking around the field complemented an excellent audio-guide. The battlefield runs up the side of long gentle slope to the abbey at the top.

It was quite difficult at times on the rather pleasant spring day on which we were there to imagine fifteen to twenty thousand men slashing, bashing, shooting & charging at each other over the length of 14th October 1066. One part of the commentary that sticks in my mind is when it said that the first phase of the battle was over – that was six hours after the start & the battle then continued for the rest of the day. I can hardly last six waking hours without food, or at the least a drink – I can hardly imagine having to fight all day with such heavy equipment just in the chance that I might stay alive & help my side to a victory. William the Conqueror was persuaded by the Pope to build an abbey on the top of the hill as an act of penance for all the blood spilt – parts of this still stand & the second half of the tour is around the remains, which were quite interesting.

Leaving Battle, we headed off to Hastings – which is quite a dreary little seaside town really. The most interesting thing around the seaside were the two short funicular railways that go from sea level to the top of cliffs – one of them is now the steepest in Britain at 78% incline; the tracked submersible tractor unit to launch the Lifeguard’s launch was also of note.

The day following, I eventually got around to packing up the bike & associated gear for the bank holiday weekend & set off to Farnborough to meet Andy – with a fair bit of sitting on the M25 in traffic on the way. After a feed at Andy’s & loading up Andy’s A3 with two bikes & associated gear, food & clothes we were off to Wales for a weekend of riding. The weather forecasted did not look too promising, but the prospect of three days’ worth of riding had us both pretty excited. We stayed in Southgate, on the Gower Peninsula (the UK’s first area of outstanding natural beauty, apparently) just west of Swansea in south Wales – where Andy’s sister, her partner & their daughter live. Andy’s parents have a holiday house just around the corner from Katie, Simon & Amber, so this is where we stayed for the weekend. After reasonable traffic (considering the long weekend) we arrived, unpacked & promptly hit the hay.

Saturday dawned overcast, but dry & shortly Simon had turned up on his bike & Katie pushing Amber in the stroller. At thirteen months Amber is just learning to walk & was quite intrigued by a stranger – so she kept staring at me with her large & gorgeous deep brown eyes. Shortly after, we were out riding & Simon was showing us his local trails around the peninsula. We started off with a nice rocky descent before crossing a road & riding through a group of Scouts setting up camp for the weekend. Most of the riding was out in the open with a mixture of ascents & descents & a bit of ridge riding. Nothing too taxing, but my lack of time on the bike started to show on some of the climbs – there was one good steep one, but at least I wasn’t off pushing this weekend, even if I was in the granny ring. On a good day you can see Devon from the Gower, but it was a bit overcast, so we could only just see back to the Welsh mainland.

Apparently we were in King Arthur territory, so we had to stop for a pint of Double Dragon here:

From here it was only another half an hour or so home. While not a particularly demanding ride on the face of it, it must have been pretty trying for me as I was exhausted for the rest of the day & even had a bit of nap before we headed around to Katie & Simon’s for dinner – where I was feeling so out of sorts I shockingly lost part of my appetite & couldn’t quite finish my meal, weird.

The trail centre at Brechfa is one that Andy had been wanting to ride at for quite some time & Sunday was the day. We started off on the Raven trail that was graded “black/severe” & the signboard feature such glowing descriptions as: “mountain biking to the next level” & “fast, undulating trail that sweeps betweens and flows sinuously in berms and over jumps”. I wasn’t particularly convinced as the trail had a really steep & hard climb at the start on nicely paved singletrack & then the following descent was a slippery rooty affair which didn’t really flow at all. In fact, on this trail it seemed that the price you paid for a lot of climbing was never really repaid by decent descents. A few times I would notice a great singletrack climb to be followed by descending on fireroad – what a waste. Still, at least I wasn’t the guy near the end of the trail with his arm in a sling & a broken collar bone. With all that climbing I was pretty tired (in addition to the previous day’s ride) & spent a lot of time in the granny ring & with Andy waiting for me. Back to the car for lunch & to load up the car again for a few miles’ driving up the valley to the red/difficult graded trail.

The Gorlech trail was about the same length as the Raven trail, but with even more climbing (over 1000m c.f. 725m). Fortunately, this climbing was a lot more manageable & some of the singletrack going up was beautiful winding its way through mossy trees.

We got much more value for our climbing efforts out of this trail & parts of it flowed very nicely & all the berms, step-ups, tabletops & other jumps were great fun. Not to mention every so often popping out of the trees with good views over the valleys (& even some sun, which was much better than the sleet forecast).

The only work in Welsh I learnt all weekend was ‘araf’, which means ‘slow’. Due to the British Health & Safety cotton wool culture, these two words were plastered all over the narrow roads & at any opportunity along the trails – for no good reason. Here is Andy waiting for me again after another great piece of trail.

So my legs managed to survive near on 40 km of riding & about 1800 m of climbing & we didn’t even get all that wet – only a little bit from all the puddles at any dip in the trails. Still it was enough water to mean that I had to pay a little more attention to cleaning my bike that night. A night blobbing in front of the telly – we avoided Welsh TV & some how ended up watching an episode of The Pretender (there really was nothing better on) which took me back about a decade or so (the days when you would record on VCR TV programs to watch later – haven’t done that for ages).

Bank Holiday Monday dawned brilliantly sunny. After sleeping in a bit & tidying up the house at a leisurely pace, Andy took me for a short stroll across the golf course that neighbours the village to the see the ruins of Pennard Castle. A castle has been here since about 1100 & it’s in a great position above some sheer drops, one small problem is that sand blown up on the wind easily builds up against the castle – it was for this reason that the castle was abandoned at the end of the 14th century. The golf course is a real links course – wind-swept, open full of hummocks, hillocks & mounds; however it is a good couple of hundred feet up from the ocean & has commanding views of Three Cliffs Bay below.

Back on the road we headed east towards Port Talbot & its blast furnaces, steelmaking, rolling & finishing plants before we turned up the valley to Afan – one of Wales’ most popular trail centres. As it was a public holiday, there were a lot of people out walking & on all sorts of types & quality of bikes. We did the Y Wal trail, & this proved to be the most enjoyable ride of the weekend. Crossing the river at the bottom of the valley we climbed quite easily for a while – old rail paths always have nice gradients. The steepness stepped up a notch, but even in my state I could manage it in the middle ring – maybe a little bit of strength & fitness was returning to my legs after all – & we managed to pass quite a few groups of riders. Some of climb was on singletrack & it was really quite nice. But what was even better, was that these trail builders had remember to save their best work for the downhill – woohoo! These lived up to the signboard’s claims this time: “some of the best singletrack descents in the UK… fast, open & flowing”. Great fun & in no time at all we were back at the car – three days of good to great riding were over. With the car loaded up again & lunch downed we were back on the M4 fighting the holiday traffic. Countering what is apparently usual, when we crossed the Severn from Wales to England the weather went from good to poor; with a little crawling on the M5 we were soon at Taunton & catching up with John & Anna – Andy had not met the twins, Ester & Lydia, yet. The A303 back to Andy’s was pretty chocka, but my run home up the M3 & around the M25 were unbelievably quick.

The rest of the past week has included Tuesday in Portsmouth (taxi-driver for Trish, who was attending a workshop), a bit of painting of the cattery at Ray & Jill’s, buying travel insurance, walking a good few miles down the Thames from Kew to Putney & the penultimate visit to Andrew & Shelley’s. I’m back round there next week to say goodbye, the only consolation there is the pavalova Shelley has promised to cook – with the Patricks planning on being back in NZ by the time I return to the UK & their wonderful hospitality & friendship, it’s a harder goodbye than most.

Forgot to mention that I got to vote in the general & local elections last week. Not really much of note there – strolled across the road in my slippers to the local primary school, resisted the urge to vote for Napoleon Dynamite of the Loony Party & that was about it really.

around home, family, friends, history, London, UK

Planes, bikes & houses

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The sky is strangely quiet over London at the moment – as I expect it over much of the rest of the British Isles & parts of Western Europe. I can’t say that I mind too much; but I’m glad I have no plans to go anywhere near an airport in immediate future – for those that were planning on traveling by air, the disruption due to the volcanic ash floating on down from Iceland must be horrific. Two days of closure – unprecedented & surely a right nightmare for travelers & the airlines. On a brighter note with regards to air travel (pending the clearing of the ash in the next four weeks) – the paper work for my application for a one-year working holiday visa to Canada came through a few days ago & I have since booked my flight to Calgary (May 15). It would be fair to say I’m more excited than a “Frenchman who has just invented a pair of self-removing trousers”.

The weather has continued to improve & that has made the days out in the last ten days nicer & in some cases possible. Trish & I have also managed to watch quite a bit of Hornblower, I’ve got hooked on Alexander McCall Smith’s second series of books (the 44 Scotland St series) – set in Edinburgh & full of very interesting interconnected (as I suppose most are in novels) characters in which one often sees parts of one’s self reflected, been sorting a few things out for Canada & we have played quite a few visits to Trish’s mother, Nora, in hospital. Such hospital visits are still consisting of countless games of gin-rummy, which is good for Nora as she remembers how to play & is known to beat us on occasion; sadly, it looks as though she will not be going home after being discharged, rather she will only be discharged when she has a place to go to in a residential care home.

Eltham Palace is but a few miles from home & I had been meaning to visit for some time. Trish & I took the opportunity last Tuesday as the sunny day was good for viewing the extensive gardens. It’s a slightly strange palace, as while it was originally built for Edward IV in the late fifteenth century & Henry VIII spent a lot of his childhood there, it fell in to disrepair in the 1800s (the Great Hall being used as a barn) before Stephen & Virginia Courtauld extensively renovated it in the 1930s. The Great Hall was restored in medieval, the buildings were extended & the exterior kept in the right period, but the inside is a bold mixture of Art Deco, ocean-liner & Swedish styling. It makes for a rather curious contrast – but it’s fantastic. The house has been restored well by English Heritage & they have a lot of the original furniture & paintings. As well as the great design work (the huge glass dome in the entrance foyer is spectacular), the house had a lot of up-to-the-minute technology – underfloor heating, multi-room audio system, central vacuum & an early PABX. As expected, the gardens were beautiful & very pleasant to walk around – there were even some tunnels surviving from four or five hundred years ago.

Battle was to be the next place visited, but as Andrew was taking his two young daughters (Shelley is now back at work two days a week) to see all the planes at the RAF museum in North London, I thought I would tag along & tick that off my list. In the end I only got to half tick it off, as there are so many planes & so much history to read that I still have the Battle of Britain hall & the History of Flight hall to go back & see. The collection of WWI era aircraft was quite fascinating, as it is not so often one sees surviving examples of these plane. A couple of them had no fuselage – just a cockpit, then a big gap & then the tail.

I quite liked the Bomber Hall too; it’s always quite difficult to get photos of planes in museums as it is difficult get far enough away from the planes (particularly bombers) – but here is a Lancaster (WWII) & a Vulcan (built to drop nuclear bombs in the ’50s & ’60s).

There was a good doco film about the Dambuster raids – an event, that if not entirely successful, never fails to catch the imagination. That Barnes-Wallis sure was a smart guy – also was able to appreciate the size of a Grand Slam that he designed (a massive bomb that only specially modified Lancasters could carry that would penetrate deep in to the ground before exploding with earthquake effect – used against infrastructure [bridges & so on]). I was impressed that the girls were so well behaved – hardly heard a peep out of Amelie & Vittoria was able to be amused most of the time, even if she did seem to think she had spent the day looking at dinosaurs. Andrew was pretty good too.

Saturday was perhaps the warmest day of the year so far, & I took the opportunity to go for another ride through the northwest Kentish countryside. I managed a loop down to Shoreham & up the other side of the valley (good views out towards the Thames Estuary), through Eynsford again (brief stop at the ruins of Lullingstone Castle). It was a great day to be out & plenty of other people thought so – a lot of ramblers, people sitting roadside at pubs & it would seem every one in a twenty mile radius with convertible drove past with the top down. I managed about forty kilometres & some reasonable hills in there too – but not particularly long. Along the spine of the hills back down to Eynsford I was intrigued by the sound of a motor behind a large hedgerow – it didn’t sound like farm machinery, more like a circular saw. As I reached a gap in the hedge I spied a group of people gathered in a field for an afternoon of model helicopter flying. At first, the helicopter looked barely in control as the pilot (I suppose you could call him that) took it flew a whole lot of turns, dives, spins, loop-the-loops; but as I watched it fly around in a cloud of smoke the manoeuvrability as it seemed to bounce around on thin air was quite incredible. That’s more than enough of that.

Another outing I had been meaning to go on for a while was to ride to Down House near Biggin Hill. Down House was of course the home of Charles & Emma Darwin for about forty years in the nineteenth century. I went for the just-about-countryside-all-the-way route to get out to Downe & some how managed to get another forty-odd kilometres of road riding in. The house itself is recreated as it was in Darwin’s day downstairs with a lot of original furniture, paintings & decor; while, upstairs is an very good exhibition on the family history, the Beagle voyage & his subsequent work. The garden was also quite interesting (unfortunately a bit of it was closed, so good photos of the house were difficult to take), as quite a few of Darwin’s experiments were done here over many years. It seems Darwin was not the typical Victorian father, so there quite a few amusing family-life anecdotes.

around home, bikes, family, friends, history, London, MTB, UK

Back to the gloom – but now we see the sun

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The London weather has turned over a new leaf for March – the last two days have heralded brilliant sunshine & something bordering on warmth. Apart from that, the last two and a half weeks since returning from Canada have been pretty gloomy & wet. Not that that has mattered too much as I’ve been staying up much too late watching the Winter Olympics – fantastic & quite addictive viewing Consequently, I haven’t taken a single photo since my return & may have some trouble remembering what I’ve been up to. Nice to catch up with NZ cousin Chris for his birthday the day after my return – & good to see the expecting couple Sasha & Blair, who are planning their return to NZ in a couple of months.

I haven’t been quite the tourist around London that I was when the weather was more conducive. Nonetheless, I’ve managed to finish off looking around the National Gallery – unfortunately mostly during the very busy period of half-term. I particularly enjoyed the English landscape work of Constable, Turner & so on. While the National Portrait Gallery is a lot smaller, I enjoyed looking around there yesterday – will be back some time to finish – I liked to see the pictures of various scientists from the 1800s, especially Faraday & Lord Kelvin.

A couple of days last week I had to head in to the city briefly & it was definitely museum weather. The first time I went to the Hunterian Museum (Royal College of Surgeons) before heading out to catch up with the Patricks. The museum is roughly a third of what it was before it got hit during the Blitz and is what remains of John Hunter’s collection of all sorts of anatomical specimens from humans & animals – from the days of surgery with public viewing, a shortage of corpses for scientific study, & grave-robbers supplying the demand for bodies. It was much larger than I was expecting & the history of the medical profession was fascinating; I’m sure all the displays would have been even more interesting if I was medically trained. The best part however was the rather extensive display of surgical instruments (some quite disturbing of course) & the history of the surgical instrument making trade. This was of interest to me as it was in this trade that my grandfather apprenticed in for seven years from 1939 & then worked in. It was great to see quite a few (ten to a dozen) instruments made by the company he trained & worked in (Down Brothers) during the period in which he was there – even if he didn’t make the exact instruments I saw, I’m sure he must have made some ones that were identical to those on display.

Opposite the Hunterian Museum, across Lincoln’s Inn Field is another fantastic free museum. The Sir John Soane Museum was left to the nation by Soane on the condition that it be free for everyone to enter & it be left in the state in which it was when he died. Soane was one of Britain’s greatest architects (his work on the Bank of England) may be his most well known, even if little of it except the imposing outer walls survives after expansion in the 1920s & ’30s. The museum is based on his three adjoining houses – Number 12, 13 & 14 & is filled with his vast collection of paintings, architectural drawings, sculptures & ancient artefacts. Soane was famous for his use & exploitation of natural light in a time when there was no electric or gas lighting in buildings. This was perhaps best demonstrated in ‘The Picture Room’, a reasonably small room in which there are over a hundred paintings (& not all that small ones at that) ingeniously hung on the front & back of large hinged false walls. The two series of Hogarths in there are quite something; there are also numerous pictures of Soane’s designs & buildings. Outside of The Picture Room two Canalettos of Venice are pretty neat, as is the sarcophagus of the Egyptian King Seti I (died 1290 BC) that Soane bought after the British Museum refused to pay £2000 for it. The Bank of England museum was only a couple of tube stops away & with spare time, I very happily whiled away a couple of hours learning about the history of the bank, the British currency & currency in general. As one would expect there is a bit of loose change of various ages lying around – also some ingots of gold, one of which you can pick up ever slightly (the case it is in is somewhat restrictive).

Saturday last I was down in Farnborough staying & riding with a MTB mate – Andy. It turned out to be the largest group ride I’ve ever been on – almost thirty people (& one dog, not on a bike) I think. Naturally, it had been raining for quite a few days before so the forest (mostly in & around MOD) land was pretty wet & muddy – just as well the sand drains reasonably well, or else it would have been even worse! We all met at nine o’clock (the earliest I had been up & out of the house in a couple of weeks) near the Basingstoke Canal – after general flaffing around & waiting for a straggler we were out riding just after half past. Thankfully the ride was a pretty easy pace, mostly due to the size of the group I think, & there were no real hills – this was good as it was my first MTB ride for the year & it was really wet (but not cold). There were some nice bits of singletrack & as always, I was pleased to be back on the bike. It was a little odd riding near a military firing range – there were some pretty decent booms not all that far away from where we were. Returning back to Andy’s place we were of course soaked & needing to clean bikes & ourselves (with the final bike clean this morning I’ve found I am in need of a new pair of rear brake pads – I’m sure they weren’t that old). After sorting myself out & watching Italy beat Scotland in the Six Nations, it was a pretty short drive up the M3 & M25 to the Patricks where I was babysitting for the night.

Yesterday was the first of the cracking days of sunshine, so Walking London came off the book shelf & I tried to find a walk that I hadn’t done yet in the central city (didn’t want to head too far out as the ground is still pretty soggy). Found I hadn’t done the Covent Garden walk yet, so that was a pleasant stroll. Not too much I hadn’t seen before – a lot of theatres of course, & the houses of all sorts of literary figure & the rather fancy Savoy.

That’s about all the news – apart from the half-hearted start to the job-hunt; it’s a bit of a trade off between finding a job I could do & starting to earn some pounds or waiting for a job that I like the look of & might be a bit more challenging. And I’m going to Madrid on Thursday for ten days – that all happened very quickly. For half the time I’m volunteering at some English language internment – where basically you sit & speak English to Spanish people who are learning the language. I don’t know too much about Madrid, but it looks pretty neat, so it should be a good week & a bit.

around home, family, history, London, UK

Walking around London when there’s agreeable weather

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It’s coming up three weeks since I returned to London & I’ve been plenty busy exploring London & being strangely domesticated. As Trish (a cousin of Mum’s) broke her leg the day after I left for Kenya & is now housebound I’ve been doing a lot of cooking, cleaning, shopping & running of errands. In amongst that I tend to run in to London for a day when it is fine (usually manage three days a week of suitable weather) & continue with the walking tours – I’ve now completed nineteen of the thirty in the book. I’m thoroughly enjoying exploring London & discovering, both obscure & well-known bits of, its history. My London geography is slowly improving & I am often surprised at how close many things are to each other. Heading in to the city for the day is also a great excuse to catch up with friends & family for a drink or a meal or both.

The first day of walking since returning, I strung three walks together from Waterloo. The first around Lambeth & Southbank was around an area I was already familiar with, but new sights for me were Lambeth Palace (the palace of the Archbishops of Canterbury) & Archbishop’s Park.

Since I was last on the Southbank, a German Christmas market had sprung out of somewhere & was selling all sorts of traditional wares & food – a reminder that the festive season was pretty close, something that wasn’t all that apparent in Kenya. I was pretty thrilled to pop in to Somerset House & see that a small ice rink had been made in the courtyard – I have since seen quite a few others, including one in the (former) moat at the Tower of London.

The second walk had me crossing back over the Thames to Bankside & Southwark on Blackfriars Bridge – next to Blackfriars Bridge you can still see the large piers that formed the foundation for the first railway bridge over the Thames. Soon I was in the area that was previously filled with theatres & bear-baiting pits – the rebuilt Globe Theatre being the only one still around. I was surprised to see the HMS Belfast has had a camouflage painting since I last saw it & pleased to see that Tower Bridge (still one of my favourite London sights) is in the process of getting a fresh lick of paint. My last walk that day was around the City of London & was mercifully short – as there is so much to see in quite a small area – but great fun going through all the little alleyways. Highlights for me were: Lloyd’s, the Bank of England, Wren’s St Mary-le-Bow Church (you were considered a true Londoner if you were born within earshot of its bells – that were damaged in WWII), and Wren’s Monument – a monument to the Great Fire.

As Thursday last week turned out to be a stunner, I took the opportunity to venture a little further out of the city towards Highgate & Hampstead. Despite the cold, it was pretty easy to keep warm as this turned out to be one of the hilliest walks I’ve done around London. Starting out, it wasn’t long before I was walking around Highgate Cemetery – I couldn’t believe how sprawling & overgrown it was. The most famous resident here is Karl Marx.

At the top of Highgate Hill, was the first of many great views of the city for the day. Steeply descending from Highgate, I was soon rambling across Hampstead Heath – which is over three hundred hectares of quite-wild-in-parts grass, woods & scrub. I stopped & had my lunch in the sun outside Kenwood House & was quite pleased with the art collection inside.

Getting my shoes & the cuffs of my jeans nice & wet & dirty & making my way out of the heath & I was in Hampstead. Hampstead all of a sudden found itself a popular spa resort in the early 1700s, so there were many watery names around the village. Famous former-residents include Constable, Keats, & Robert Louis Stevenson. Near the end of the walk there was a delightful little local museum, which was also a welcome escape from the frigid late afternoon. I managed to get my weary legs home somehow.

It’s surprising how many times I’ve been asked in the last few weeks if I am working yet or looking for a job. Somewhere in amongst the walking & sightseeing, I’ve started to think about looking for one. That basically means that I got around to starting to update my CV, emailed some referees, made a Job Hunting folder on Firefox & filled it with useful sites & then got distracted. I’m in no rush as going away for four weeks in January/February is a whole block I am going to be unavailable. Having said that, I think those four weeks will be quite a drain on my remaining finances & returning to the UK I will have to begin the hunt in earnest.

Friday the eleventh saw me head in to check out the Covent Garden Christmas market – which was disappointing – & then to continue my intermittent gazing at art at the National Gallery. The gallery is quite manageable if you only try to do a little bit at a time – I think I would go mad if I tried to do it all at once. I’m now half way through the collection, but definitely enjoyed the works I saw on my first visit more. I managed to get out to Rayner’s Lane to see the Patricks before it got dark (i.e. before half past four) – always great to catch up with Andrew, Shelley & the girls – even if I did get thoroughly confused trying to learn how to play Knights & Cities.

Over the last weekend the weather took a little bit of a turn for the colder. I was getting quite comfortable with high in the mid-high single digits; now I’m getting used to highs of zero to low-single digits. Still, so long as it’s not windy or raining & one is well wrapped up the walking has been more than pleasant. On Monday’s Islington & Clerkenwell walks I was particularly interested in the New River. It wasn’t really a river at all, but for almost four hundred years this man made channel brought London’s potable water supply from springs about thirty miles north in Hertfordshire. Now of course, it has been superseded by something a bit more modern &, being the geek that I am, was fascinated by details of the new ring main that is twice as far under London than the most of the Underground & is a little like the M25 – but it’s for drinking water. Walking around Highbury Fields was quite nice too – it was here in 1666 after the Great Fire that one diarist saw “200000 people of all ranks and degrees dispersed and and lying along by their heapes of what they could save from the fire, deploring their losses, and though ready to perish for hunger and destitution, yet not asking one penny for relief”. On a less sobering note, I also stumbled across Arsenal’s rather large Emirates Stadium. Near the end of the Clerkenwell there was a flurry of interesting sights – the Smithfield Meat Market (on this site William Wallace was hung, drawn & quartered after being dragged behind a horse from the city; also more than two hundred were burned alive under Queen Mary’s reign – charm the paint off walls, these guys [sorry, Jason Statham quote]), the oldest church in London – St Bartholomew-the-Great (coincidentally, St Bart’s day is the same as my birthday) & where the St John’s Ambulance was launched in 1877.

Before meeting (NZ) cousin Chris in the City on Tuesday it was another good chance to take advantage of the sun & string a few more walks together. These were a little bit closer to the West End – starting with the Notting Hill walk, I then continued on from Bayswater to Belgravia (through Knightsbridge) & finally Marylebone. There was of course a lot of interesting things for sale on Portobello Rd (even if it was only Tuesday); generally, Notting Hill was a lot of nice houses – although it was interesting to learn that there used to be a racecourse around the top of Notting Hill & the top of the hill was used as a natural grandstand – it didn’t last too long as the jockeys refused to ride on it as the ground was so heavy as to be dangerous. I also found one of those delightful book shops near the Holland Park tube – the one where you want to leave with cases of books. From Bayswater it was through Kensington Park (lunch by the Round Pond was quite cold – I resolved to start wearing my Icebreaker leggings, jeans just weren’t cutting it) to the museum district & Knightsbridge before trooping around the quite fancy area of Belgravia – a lot of embassies & consulates. Marylebone is just north of Oxford Street (I never really enjoy the crowds of shoppers here) & once was one of the closest villages to central London – it of course, has long since been swallowed up. This a very pleasant walk with lots of nice squares; the biggest find on this walk was the Wallace Collection – the art collection of several successive Marquises of Hertford. As I walked past, I resolved to return & see it – as it turns out after popping out from the cute shopping street of St Christopher’s Place (nice lights) on to Oxford St, & scooting around Harley St I had plenty of time to pop in to the collection for an hour or so before heading off to meet Chris.

So Hertford House didn’t look overly big for a grand old house & wandering around the ground floor confirmed this. I particularly enjoyed of pieces on Venice by Canoletto in the Dining Room & then in the Back State Room the nature & hunt paintings by Oudry were particularly cool – there plenty of pheasants in these ones, & for a change they weren’t all dead. As it turns out one of the larger rooms downstairs was closed for refurbishment, so when I went upstairs after admiring many miniatures, paintings & ornaments from the sixteenth century, I was blown away by the size of the place – especially the aptly named Great Gallery. After finishing up & having a cursory glance around the shop, I was surprised to find a huge armoury – mostly European, but a bit from India, Persia, Japan & Arabia. The size of it was staggering & I only had enough time for a quick whizz through – I later found out its one of the, if not the, best armoury in Britain. That ended that very nice hour or so – it’s always cool to stumble upon something like that completely unexpected – I had no idea that I would be seeing works by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian & Gainsborough – to name a few. That stumbling across such delights is one of the things I love about wandering around & exploring London. Always great to catch up with Chris & share a few drinks & a meal (even if the city was packed due to the holiday season).

Wednesday was a very domestic day with shopping & various errands – but made much more exciting by the first snow of the winter. It snowed for a good few hours, but was never enough to settle in more than a few small places. Consequently, I was well prepared for the possibility of snow on Thursday’s walks – the forecast was favourable for the day. As I had an appointment a little west of the city, I took the opportunity to head out & explore around the Thames & Richmond & then Barnes to Putney & Fulham. The Richmond walk was quite a long one & there was alternating patches of (comparatively) brilliant sunshine & cloudy gloom.

I saw what little was left of Richmond Palace – where Edward III, Henry VII & Elizabeth I all died. Climbing up away from the river towards Richmond Park (which has deer roaming free) it was possible to get some nice views of the surrounding area.

The best was from King Henry VIII’s mound (the highest point in the park & so called because he apparently watched from here for the flare from the Tower of London confirming that Anne Boelyn had got the chop – there is a good Snatch quote that goes with that turn of phrase, but it’s probably not appropriate) & was an unobstructed view of St Paul’s ten miles away. It’s a great view as St Paul’s looks as though it is standing alone in the city – most of the view is framed by an avenue of trees that prevents you seeing much else. My little camera doesn’t give nearly as good as image as the monocular on the mound, but you get the idea (if you squint).

Descending through the park, I was soon back by the river & the sun popped out to give me this picture, for the Oamaru Pheasants, of the Royal Star & Garter (top right, & just like the Oamaru one, I’ve never been inside).

Just as I was getting back in to the centre of Richmond a massive cloud came over & dropped snow on me for ten of fifteen minutes before I caught a bus to Barnes Bridge.

Barnes Bridge is passed during the last stage of the famous University Boat Race & as I made my way down to Putney Bridge (where the race starts) I was to see a lot of boat houses & boats. I was curious to find out what the flashing blue lights were there for as I approached Putney. It turned out that the fire brigade was attempting to winch a VW Golf out of the incoming Thames – some clown had parked a little to close to the edge. So that provided a bit of a distraction for a while – they eventually got it out, but I’m not certain if it was too damaged to be written off. The cabin may be a little wet, but the engine & electrics hardly got flooded (the alarm went off as the tow-rope was connected).

Chatting to another bystander, I found that another car was not so lucky – parked a bit further down the Thames at the top of a boat ramp, that BMW had been carried off to the depths of the river. Crossing the river I quickly checked out Fulham Palace (the traditional summer residence of the Bishops of London that has only in the last thirty-five years been given up by the bishops). Another big old house, but it had a nice walled garden that was far removed from the city & had a few neat moving sculptures. After my appointment in Putney it was off to Earl’s Court to meet a university classmate for another worthwhile catch up. The snow started again on the train from Charing Cross & was not to let up for the rest of the night.

Consequently, when I eventually got up this morning there was a good two inches of snow everywhere – quite exciting for someone who has spent most of their life living in a decidedly temperate climate. When I made it out to get some bread & post more of Trish’s Christmas cards, it was quite pleasant (i.e. above freezing point, just) & these are a few of the photos I snapped around the neighbourhood.