South Riding 19: Muswell Hill

It is hardly worth writing about the journey from Wood Green to Muswell Hill. It is only a couple of miles and in my mind they are both part of the same area. We had a small flat on the higher priced hill then moved down to somewhere nearby where we could afford a larger flat. That was all.

So here I am in Dukes Avenue, late morning on a weekday and everything is exceptionally quiet. There is nobody  in sight and no movement apart from an occasional car. It is amazing how peaceful residential streets can be in the daytime. There are picturesque villages near me, full of people who have escaped ,the rat race of London that are busier during the day. It is just one of those minor paradoxes that you can find patches of quietness amongst the bustle. 

In the same way cities and towns can be better places for running than rural areas.  There are parks and quiet roads, and often specific facilities designed for active leisure, whilst in the country open fields are enclosed for agriculture, the footpaths are not necessarily suitable for running and roads don't have pavements. Sometimes the visual appeal of fields and landscape, whilst important and stimulating, is not necessarily everything.

So here I am thinking like a city boy and looking at another paradox: it is easy to think of cities as places of constant change but here the only thing that has obviously changed is the barriers. Just as at Wood Green, I could walk down this road and feel like I had only been away to buy a newspaper. 

Because it is the obvious change I focus on the barriers. As a generality I don't like pedestrian barriers (I often think they come from the same people who specify useless cycle paths). They herd people, make the pavement constricted, are visually ugly, and close things off.  I don't know how much they protect pedestrians from traffic and if that could be proved then I would have to eat my prejudices. This little barrier is a case in point at first sight it looks totally footling but I have a smidgen of doubt: do the flowers at the base of the tree mark an accident?

That  not a lot has changed is one of the charms of  Muswell Hill. One of the first things I did when arriving was to check how many of the local shops still survived. Many do. First I went to the bookshop, as I know the independents are really struggling, and I was heartened to see it still there, with the separate shop for children's books (something I really like). I worry though, as the fixtures and fittings look worn and this is probably a sign that there is not much money to spare for investment  Next was the cheese shop – yep still there, smelling strong. You can tell quite a lot about the character of a place from its shops and a specialist cheese shop could survive in very few areas.  

However the key shop to check was http://www.wmartyn.co.uk/">Martyn's. If my journey has been about continuity and change than what finer example of continuity than something that has been here for 123 years.  Wonderfully it still roasts its own coffee. This is one of my favourite smells, also evokes childhood memories. When I was a little boy,  visiting my grandmother in Croydon, a treat was to go to a wonderfully old fashioned cafe, Wilson's, for a doughnut (a lovely proper doughnut: round, sliced at the top, and with the gash overflowing with jam). Wilson's also roasted their own coffee. The roaster in the window and I can remember being fascinated by watching the drum rotate and its brown patina. 

This is the last stop of the South Riding and this small detail links it to the first. A tiny circle is completed

South Riding 18: Wood Green

I have had a number of discussions with people who don't like London and can always understand their point of view. They cite noise, pollution, traffic, too many people, griminess, aggression, lack of vistas, litter, lack of community and interactions -any number of things. None can be denied as the bad is inextricably tangled with the good; so I say “yes but” and point out the beauty of the view from Waterloo Bridge, buildings, history, institutions, the higgledy piggledy excitement, the variety. They respond with a “yes but” of their own and so it goes - getting nowhere. There is no right or wrong only a viewpoint but when someone doesn't like somewhere, bad is all they see and dark overwhelms the light.

I can retort by saying (as I do now when I looking at my old home) “well I enjoyed living here” but it is not an argument, it is a simple statement. I would never stoop to using the Doctor Johnson quote: “when a man is tired of London he is tired of life” not only because it is too cheap a cliché but because taken by itself, it is bollocks. It is perfectly possible to feel the claustrophobia of rush hour, long for mountains and and open space and have a great zest for life. However I might use the second part of that quote because it is far more interesting: “for there is in London all that life can afford”.

When living in Wood Green I fully appreciated the value of the diversity. Within a short distance there were all sorts of local shops, serving different communities; as if the rest of the world was just round the corner. At the time this was an enormous boon because we were changing our diet away from traditional meat based English cooking, and the supermarkets did not then stock the variety of squashes, pulses, vegetables, and spices we now take for granted. Because of where we lived we could find almost everything and freely experiment with recipes from around the world.

Changing your diet is not easy because it is an intellectual choice initially at odds with your habits and instincts. The years have accustomed you to a pattern which you think of as a natural way of eating and established scales of tastiness by which you judge and crave food. Breaking that pattern needs a lot of conscious attention and thought about recipes. We talked about food in a way we hadn't done before. For sure we had always been interested in cooking and eating but it is different when you need to establish a totally new balanced diet.

The impetus came from a realisation that methods of intensive agriculture meant that our relationship was seriously out of whack (Intensive piggeries and battery chickens are just wrong) and we were also influenced by reading 'Diary for a Small Planet' and thoughts that an excessively meat based diet was not sustainable. Although our philosophical position was actually no different to that of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstalll, we became vegetarian. When we lived here though we knew we were on the soft end of the scale. The person in the flat below was a Buddhist and therefore very strict, whilst the next door was a squat of animal rights activists who would have no truck with any animal product whatsoever and could barely walk in the garden for fear of treading on some small creature.

That's the thing about living in a place like this: you never know who you might meet. For example our Buddhist neighbour was a musician and there were a number of other musicians nearby: a hidden enclaves or network. I like this idea. In any average looking street there can be an interesting mix of people. From the outside though you would never know

As Dr Johnson said somewhere in London you can find all that life can afford.

Running Interlude: An Uplifting Story

I must remind my self that this is a running blog.

So here is a short video about the way running has transformed someones life. You can only watch and applaud.

South Riding 17: Millennium Bridge and Challenges

Source: http://www.freefoto.com/images/31/01/31_01_13_prev.jpg 

I left Bankside in good spirits, looking forward not only to the shortest day's cycling but also retracing roads I had once used regularly. The challenge was to see how well I could recognise the roads and landmarks and hence find my way. It would be an experiment because I couldn't fully picture the route in abstract, before I started, I couldn't really remember it clearly at all. All I knew was that I would start by walking the bike over the Millennium Bridge after which it would be St Paul's, then Old Street.

As I walked over the bridge I marvelled at its elegance (I enjoy economy of form and clever engineering). It is a triumph of design, never mind its troubled beginning. I was there on the day it opened, when it became famous for its wobble. Watching from the Tate Modern we were saying to each other “Surely its not meant to do that” as we saw people clinging to the handrails, looking very queasy. To my shame I didn't think there was anything wrong, I thought it might be a design feature and they had allowed from movement to add an extra bit of excitement. “Cool”, I thought (Shows how superficial I am). 

But there two related benefits from the disaster. The first was learning from mistakes. The engineers had to examine why their original design could not withstand the congruence of two exceptional circumstances: high wind and masses of people walking in file (the wobble was brought on by a charity walk). Their conclusions have added considerably to the knowledge of bridge design. The second is that they worked on the bridge until it was right and now it is great. In some ways I appreciate it all the more because of its difficult beginning.

I take a great deal of comfort from both those aspects of the story and always want to apply them to my running. The famous phrase of George Sheehan is that as a runner you are an experiment of one. It is very easy to look at that and concentrate  on the idea of individuality but to me the key word is experiment. We should approach our training with the attitude of an engineer. First we should look to existing knowledge, design a programme, and then evaluate. It is important to be able to recognise mistakes (and sometimes this is difficult because we become irrationally attached to a certain way of doing things) and then redesign, try again, and work until things come right. 

Failure is important for learning and it is one of my failures that during my life I have too often tried to avoid its lessons. This does not mean I have lead a life of smooth success (far from it). It means  that too often I have closed my eyes rather than admit something was wrong, and at other times I have gone out of my way to avoid situations where I might fail. The latter is particular grave because on many occasions I have shunned challenges and suffered through sitting on the sidelines. Only now, as I grow older, am I able to face up to this as a mental fragility. Perhaps I am a very, very late developer or maybe I just discovered running too late. 

It is through running  and treating it as a series of challenges that I have been able to find a prism through which to look at other aspects of my life and see things more clearly.

I see this cycling journey as a continuation of this process, which is why I am happy to write about it in a running blog. I am using the  physical exertion as a mechanism to look at my past more clearly. Just like running, being on a bike gives you the sense of being part of the landscape and so gives you a strong sense of place. It is this sense I want to unlock so that I can clearly picture myself as I was and remember things I had forgotten. Physical exertion also has a way of clearing the mind and helps you look at things more objectively. 

This is important because this is not a sentimental journey - it is one of discovery.

South Riding 16: End of Day 2

Eventually I will again write something about running but in the meantime I continue to try to catch up with my journeys.

End of Day 2 - mileage: 48.7 miles; total mileage 115.2

Deep into the afternoon and all that remained was the final stretch to Bankside and my stopover. But I needed refreshment before setting off, so just like yesterday, it was a fruit booster and pastry from Café Nero. On a hot day, after exertion they are a good choice.

I sat by the window, calmly watching the world go by, pleased to be here, both surprised and unsurprised by how much I could recognise. It was very easy to slip back and picture myself as a teenager walking past. The basic structure of the town was the same, as was the housing stock and all was well kempt. I could have sat there for a long time, in a state of dumb contentment but when you still have miles to ride you cannot let that happen. So I winched my limbs out of the seat (and really it did feel as if I needed to by moved by block and tackle)and got on my way.

When I said that I had had to commute all of my working life I forgot to mention that this has been the case ever since secondary school. When in Cheshire Chester was nine miles away, here I caught the train from West Wickham to Clock House and then walked along to what was Beckenham and Penge Grammar School. Today I cycled that route and passed the old school building, which is now used for adult education with what was the canteen block now a primary school. I didn’t stop to take photos. I now wish I had but at the time the need to keep going was more compelling. Looking at it I was reminded of what a strange pastiche it was - a vague imitation of an imaginary public school. In fact I can remember when I transferred I was given an interview to see if I was suitable; as my parents and I walked up the driveway my mother looked at the building and in an impressed sort of whisper said "it's very publicky isn't it?". As a building it was thus a piece of theatre, trying to suggest a grammar school ethos based on the past. At the time I though no more about it than I did about having to wear a cap as part of the uniform but I later found out it was built in 1931 and was saddened the architecture had been so backward looking. But when I went it didn’t matter – it was just a school and overall it was probably quite a good school.

After that I went along the roads behind the school towards Catford. I passed a number of roads that looked familiar and though that some friends had lived in this area but I could not remember exactly where. IIt was all a blur. So I carried on through Lewisham, New Cross, Old Kent Road, Borough High Street.

My overnight was just behind Tate Modern in one of the LSE’s halls of residence, which is available for Bed and Breakfast in the summer holidays. I knew exactly what the room would be like: student accommodation is the same everywhere. There must be a factory somewhere that makes the basic kit of small single bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe, desk and small bookcase so that every student has the same basic experience. I don’t think the designs have changed since the Sixties. Not luxurious but it does a job.

For my evening meal I went to Leon, which was next door, and somewhere I enjoy and go to regularly when I visit the Tate. After which everything was right with the world but again I was dog-tired. When I got back to my room I tried to read but my eyes were too heavy.

Unexpectedly, for this journey, my book had been a piece of excess luggage.

Another Short Interruption

I have not yet finished writing about the South Riding but already the next journey calls; so this morning I will be leaving to cycle to Chester via Birmingham.

There will not be posting for a few days but when I get back get back I will try to catch up.

When I started I didn't realise the whole process would be so long winded!

South Riding 15: West Wickham

A fairly common sight: what was a small garden front garden, now tarmac. A bit boring really. This time there has also been a growing of hedge to ensure privacy and a darkening of the front room. I prefer things to be more open.

The first thing I notice about the house is the change of windows and garage door. This is inevitable as we had the original metal, Crittall windows . Oh were they cold! No insulation at all – I can remember many a winter's morning waking up to the intricate patterns of frozen condensation on the windowpanes. It was actually quite pretty to look at (like snowflakes under a microscope) when you were snuggled under the covers; but the cold was a definite disincentive to getting up. 

The garage door is now up-and-over. When we were here there were two, traditional wooden doors, which opened out. I have recently seen adverts for the Vauxhall Meriva, which make a virtue of the rear door opening outwards from a hinge at the rear, rather than from a hinge in the mid pillar. When we lived here we had a car with a similar arrangement. One day someone left the rear door slightly open whilst the garage door was angled in a bit (i.e. not fully open), when my father tried to drive the car into the garage the two doors became perfectly aligned. The garage door stood firm but the car door crumpled badly. let this be a warning for any potential  Meriva purchasers.

Moving on from that trivial and irrelevant car anecdote. You can see from this street view that it is a quiet residential, suburban road that would have looked very similar in the 1920/30s when the houses were built.

We moved into this house when I was 13 and my sister 11 but the price meant that my mother had go to work to help pay for it. We were lucky in that we had our mother with us for our crucial young years. Lucky and, of course being children, totally unaware of how fortunate we were to have an emotionally stable and nurturing environment. Before the decision was made though there was a family conversation to check we were not upset by the idea of coming home to an empty house. We were quite relaxed (even quite liked the idea); it was my mother who needed the reassurance. 

Standing outside the house now I have a stream of memories, far more than I can report here, because I lived here at the time I developed self-awareness. But more than that, for society as a whole, it was a time of changing social attitudes and so it was exciting to be a teenager. 

The centre of these changes might have been West Central London but the suburbs were quite close and not a bad place to be. You could rub shoulders with David Bowie at the Three Tuns when he was setting-up the Beckenham Arts Lab (the picture shows how he looked then) and music was everywhere, with some amazing people playing small local venues. If I were to pick out one moment from a local gig it would be Peter Green and an intensely sad and beautiful solo on ‘tears in my eyes’. The song itself is a standard slow blues but I can remember being completely transfixed by the translucent quality of the guitar playing. George Harrison might have written 'While my guitar gently weeps' but believe me none of the guitar heroes, be they Hendrix, Clapton or Page, could make a guitar weep like Peter Green.

But it was not all 'white boy' blues, there was music of all kinds, and I was just as likely to follow the Mike Westbrook Concert Band as I was to go to Les Cousins to see Bert Jansch and John Martyn. I was far from alone in being happy to range over folk, rock, jazz or anything thing that seemed experimental - it was the spirit of the age. It somehow seemed all of a piece.

I believe that at any time there is always a dominant art form that erupts to drive and influence all surrounding creative endeavours. At that time, in the Sixties, it was music and for me it was a prism through which I saw much of the world.  Unfortunately I am not at all musical so I was forever condemned to merely appreciate, and never participate. Nevertheless I had the odd moments of insight. 

The platform for those insights was formed when I lived in this house.

South Riding 14: Horley to West Wickham

I could gloss the next part of the journey, pass over it as if it didn’t happen, and nobody would be any the wiser. I could have written about the cycling part of this leg and it would have been perfectly truthful. But that wouldn’t be right. I have to be truthful by implication as well as in fact.

With all the messing around in the morning and general leg weariness, I was behind schedule and felt unable to push to catch-up. The A23, most of which I had done yesterday, seemed an awfully dull schlep and I really could not summon the enthusiasm. So I cut it out and caught the train to Croydon. I ought to have felt guilty but I didn’t. The16 mile rest was vital to reaching my overnight stop in good time and good shape. In any case it was a chance to revisit an often used rail line and I enjoyed watching the familiar places roll by

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:East_Croydon_Station.jpg 

When I used East Croydon Station it was a worn-out throwback. It had last been rebuilt in 1895 and looked as if it hadn’t changed since then, except to get gradually shabbier. It was not as if it had been built with any care in the first place. It was the standard Southern region pavilion on a bridge over the tracks, with covered walkways sloping down to the platforms. For a busy station and important stop, it was a bit of a disgrace and it took no imagination to picturing it as it would have been in the 30s, say,full of people, thronging along the smoke-hazed walkways, all wearing hats or caps, getting ready to hand in their stubby cardboard tickets.

It was modernised in 1992 but I have only used it a few times since then. For this sentimental journey my mind went back to the old days.

Directly outside the station there is a major change that I knew about but had not seen: a tramway. This is very exciting, I like trams. I  am too young to remember when Croydon had trams before but I have a picture in my mind of the road junction near West Croydon Station as a confusion of tracks, where they must have gone. I can however remember trolley buses with their overhead wires. They were fun with their big arms reaching up to touch the overhead power lines and the streets almost tied together by these wires; Far more theatrical than normal buses. I can understand why they went and why it would be difficult to bring them back – but with emissions becoming the critical issue, who knows? 

The journey between East Croydon and West Wickham was smooth and pleasant - another example of a transport improvement. There was a cycle path marked clearly on the road, with a good surface and not only was it wide enough, it was also a red route so there were no parked cars in the way. All cycle-ways in London should be this easy.

I arrived in good shape and happy with my journey, even its cheaty section. During it I had moved from trolley buses in the 50s to arrive at where I lived between 1963 and 68. Not a huge gap in years but a completely different era.

South Riding 13: Horley

I knew this would have changed. It would have been impossible for it to continue. There might still be a small, one bedroom flat above a shop but there is no way that shop would still be a little, general electrical store that sold a few appliances but really specialised in repairs. There are no such shops anymore. 

Changes in domestic technology and their support services are the great signifiers of the times. Such electrical shops were anachronistic, even when I lived here. They were a remnant of an age when types of electrical devices were fewer, they were proportionally more valuable and they could be repaired.  The age of Bakelite. Now we have a different relationship with machines: they are used for all aspects of life, they are infinitely better and more reliable, and they are almost all sealed boxes. For the most part you cannot trace how things work; instead you can look at the patterns on a circuit board. We do not repair – we replace.

This is one of the reasons I like bicycles, think of some of them as aesthetic objects. They might be amongst the last machines where it is possible to see exactly how it works and how it is made. It is completely exposed, everything pared down to the minimum and the perfect embodiment of the Modernist dictum of form following function. At the same time it displays the continuity of its evolution: you can see the principles of design evolved in the Nineteenth Century.

Anyway back to my old home. The shop now sells double-glazing, something about which I have absolutely nothing to say. 

The rest of the street feels just the same. There is a consistency in the dowdy areas of a town.

Here is the iron footbridge, looking every bit of its 100+ years, with traces of rust and neglect. I walked across it not only for nostalgic reasons but because the kid inside me still likes watching the trains pass underneath. Sharing the bridge with me was a mother and young child. The little girl was having a great time waving at the trains and getting very excited when one of the drivers waved back. At that precise moment my spirits lifted and all was well with the world. The driver, the young child, the waving: it could have been my own children, when they were young, it could have been me, or any child back to Victorian times. Damn it - It could have been the 'Railway Children'! 

I came on this cycle journey looking for both change and continuity - and here were both, within a very few yards in a small inconsequential area of Surrey. 

South Riding 12: To Horley

As I went to pay for a coffee in Horsham I reached into my pocket and felt the room keys from the Guest House. Bugger! It meant that I had to retrace my route to return them.

This could have been a major setback if my route was to be taking me further away but it wasn’t. Horsham was the trip’s southerly tip and the next stop was back to Horley, so it was only a minor of detour. However my rather pleasant memory of a long fast downhill would be reversed if I went back exactly the same way. But that is the point of having a map with contour lines and so I found a different way, again on small beautiful country lanes, but with slightly less of a gradient. Most of the route was quite close to Gatwick Airport but it was amazing how the noise only really affected quite a narrow band of land directly below the flight path. A little outside the path and it felt  a remote country area - all lush beauty.

Then into Horley, and my first thoughts were not of memories but of food. I was feeling very tired (the exertions of yesterday were still in my legs), hungry, and in need of a break. The energy reserves, needed for the rest of the day, were critically low and I really felt like a nap. I thought of the man in Wimbledon and smiled – there was no way I could nap like that, sitting upright. But one thought led to another and I had the idea of a take-away  chow mien, which I could eat on a seat in a newly pedestrianised street. Good choice - excellent food for cyclists.

I then started to look around. There had obviously been changes: a new Waitrose for example, but not too many. In essence it was still a town beside the London to Brighton Railway - another place of transit.

I have probably lived in too many places of transit, places that are not destinations in themselves but allow access to somewhere else. This is probably related to being a commuter all my working life. Wherever I have been I have needed to be somewhere else. It is probably a mistake. It is better to live somewhere you are happy to be; somewhere you are content to spend time. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy my time living in these places – I did. It is just that they do not give you a sense of place, a feeling of identification.