Rest day: I walked a mile in a tunnel full of exhaust and ran down a hill
(and then I went dancing).
Despite my best efforts to be on time I arrived at Rotherhithe half an hour early, and sat in the sun reading Downriver with some gross protein milkshake and meditating on the difference not only in racial demographics from area to area in London (Rotherhithe, from what little I saw, seemed to be predominantly white and working class, very different from where I live) but also body type (short, uneven men proliferate in South East London, becoming lumpy and asymmetrical in face & body, what I'd refer to as "quintessentially English" if I wanted to be mean).
This gave me time to work out which direction the entrance to the mouth of the tunnel was, so not an entire waste of time.
rotherhithe station is tiny and has railway pillars.
The tunnel itself was built in 1908 and the chief engineer revelled in the improbable name of "Maurice Fitzmaurice". It is a single bore tunnel extending just under a mile (0.9196 of a mile, in fact, or 1.48km) although if you include the terrifying traffic funnel at each end in which high tiled walls increase the sense of a descent into Hades rather effectively then it's pretty much bang on a mile.
The ominous tunnel mouth swallowed us, hankerchiefed and pollution-masked, and we wandered down along the narrow - though not as narrow as Sinclair made it sound - strip of pavement.
composite image.
Sinclair didn't make it all the way through, travelling alone, and was overcome by a case of existential claustrophobia; he bolted up one of the exit shafts and got horribly lost in Rotherhithe. In our day, some 30 years later, the exit shafts are all closed. The knobbly vestibules where the staircases (Edwardian, probably Listed) reside are now adorned with plaques telling you not to "linger" because of "exhaust fumes". We found a Wimpy box. Who the fuck was eating in a tunnel like this? Where is there still a Wimpy? Had we travelled back in time?
possibly we had.
A cyclist passed on the opposite side of the road, maskless, with a basket on his bike. Madness. Somewhere around the centre of the tunnel the ceiling and walls began to close in on me and I began to feel as if I had always been in the tunnel. I'd been born there, I'd die there, the tunnel was enternal and all-encompassing and frankly hellish. I made a joke of it to Charlie and the dizziness started to pass; this is why you take people down into places with you. Less in case you fall and break your neck and more so that there's someone to share the dread.
video of the Important Moment when we found the Light At The End Of The Tunnel.
We cheated the last leg, turning up the steps into a small park rather than funnelling back out with the aromatic traffic. I hacked up a lung onto the spring grass: we found an anenome, and later a whole bank covered in them.
Limehouse station was practically on top of us. We took to the tracks towards Greenwich, a cup of tea, and the strange seaside-town feel of somewhere that is still very much technically part of London. I can still taste cars in my sinuses.
The bus to Eltham from Greenwich takes ten million billion years, by the by. Eltham isn't really in London. Worth it for this spectacular display:
spring came on sudden.
At the top of what I think is Shooters Hill is Severndroog Castle, which is technically a watchtower and not a castle and also wasn't built in the medieval period so why the fuck would it be a castle (much like "Castle" Drogo in this respect); a castle, as any fule kno, is a combination of a smallholding and a military fort and an administrative centre. This place, otoh, had a tiny tiny cafe whose afternoon teas were on a Londonist List, Charlie and I shared some breand-and-butter-pudding (food of the GODS) and were accosted by an ownerless Puggle trailing its lead and eager to make our acquaintance and eat ALL the cake.
Also the castle door made the floor go gay
After a short break to a) pee and b) be mental about having touched two or three dogs already [Derek: happily eats shit off the mouse-infested kitchen floor but needs to alcohol sanitise his hands after touching living mammals, EXCEPT for cats and people he knows? Strangers & dogs = germs. Don't ask.], we went for a proper explore of Oxleas Woods, which are far larger than I was expecting, well-stocked with more dogs (Charlie made the acquaintance of a couple of girls with Yorkies and promptly lost their shit on being invited to hold one of said dogs).
composite including a second cafe we couldn't eat in because no cash. Not even for the £1 cups of tea. Includes at least one instance of two idiots (us) running down the side of Shooters Hill while yelling joyously because Sun! Running! No one allowed to tell you off for doing that when you're a grown-ass adult! Whee! And also one instance of gazing out over the panoramic view of South East London stretching on for absolutely fucking miles, and commenting, "This makes me feel very arrogant. Yes, I have conquered it."
(Plans hatched to attack the Green Chain walk in future, emphasis on Crystal Palace, Eltham Palace & Tudor Barn, Charlton House, and the Thames Barrier; some of these because I read about them in Brewers, some because I already knew about them and meant to visit, and the Barrier because of Sinclair but also because Josie Long used to do a bit about being sexually attracted to/romantically involved with the Thames Barrier [she's from Kent].)
bus to north greenwich took me both along a fucking motorway and also through what felt like an entirely different country. Still London, but looks like the suburbs of Paris mated with an American city and produced a terrifying architectural nightmare. No doubt it's filling up fast, people can't buy property in London quickly enough atm, but it's an eerie, fake-looking place.
Safely back in the welcoming embrace of normality/Shoreditch: tea in one place, matcha latte in another (but i really must remember that Shoreditch Grind's matcha lattes are gross), Downriver in both. Thought: remember seeing a Tumblr post about how the delineation of "species" is a human concept (meaning: the real world is more wishy-washy than that, categories are invented so that humans can make sense of stuff); it was on a specific blog and therefore the conclusion was "angry shouting about the oppressiveness of science in imposing order upon the chaotic systems of the world, something something white people", rather than on a different specific blog where I suspect the conclusion would have been "and that's why it's okay for me to fuck dogs". Although I'm sure the same argument could and probably has been made.
Then I went to a basement and injured myself repeatedly at the behest of a small Italian man who was trying very hard to look like the late George Michael, and on several occasions just flatly refused to do certain things because a) my back won't do that b) my knees won't do that and c) the person I have ended up partnered with for this bit physically cannot hold me up, she is half my size and I am heavy. It was not anything like as awkward as it could have been and I was not as embarrassed by it as me of ten years or even five years ago would have been, but parts of my body don't work, my reflexes are slow, and I am really ill. So it could have gone better.
Things I am looking for in a dance class:
+ beginners
+ instructor I can understand
+ not to have to touch people
+ not to have to bend over backwards since my back has some "fused vertebrae" flexibility issues
+ not banging my knees on the floor repeatedly, given that I still only have 3/4 of a kneecap between both knees as no amount of weight loss and working out will make my knee grow back
Things that have led to me making this list:
+ the absolute beginners introduction to contemporary dance class which very much did not fulfill any of those criteria, although it DOES get a weird cookie for being the only dance class I have ever been to where the men outnumbered the women.
NB majority of those men appeared to be straight and were universally very awkward. two had come with female friends, two had come in work clothes (jeans and shirts), three (including those two) volunteered the information that they worked in IT, one was clearly on-spectrum, and one more was very very muscular and very very awkward (he also had total alopecia, and braces, and was clearly very young). Also there was me, largely failing to remember to put anything together in a coherent manner and stridently not wanting to do things like "just let them take your weight! Lean back!"]
Conclusion after discussion on FB: Bhangra or Belly dancing might be good for me. Crawled along late to meet Jess, who was disappointed to discover that, despite having said the day before that I'd already made dinner for the day and thus entered it into the Robot Punishment Machine, I actually MEANT it and was therefore planning on going home (er, via the purchase of a large frozen fish) rather than going out for dinner with her. More or less collapsed on getting in and have now waved two fingers at my alarm around 7.30am and declared today to be a rest day as getting out of bed is making me make NOISES:
crunchy, wet, chest noises
and my entire self hurts.
my protein box arrived and tomorrow the announcement of THE NEXT NOVEL ON SALE shall go out like a shot around the world, or more probably sink without a trace into people's Friday lunches, but I suppose I can keep up a steady stream of nagging if I can stay awake.
Despite my best efforts to be on time I arrived at Rotherhithe half an hour early, and sat in the sun reading Downriver with some gross protein milkshake and meditating on the difference not only in racial demographics from area to area in London (Rotherhithe, from what little I saw, seemed to be predominantly white and working class, very different from where I live) but also body type (short, uneven men proliferate in South East London, becoming lumpy and asymmetrical in face & body, what I'd refer to as "quintessentially English" if I wanted to be mean).
This gave me time to work out which direction the entrance to the mouth of the tunnel was, so not an entire waste of time.
rotherhithe station is tiny and has railway pillars.
The tunnel itself was built in 1908 and the chief engineer revelled in the improbable name of "Maurice Fitzmaurice". It is a single bore tunnel extending just under a mile (0.9196 of a mile, in fact, or 1.48km) although if you include the terrifying traffic funnel at each end in which high tiled walls increase the sense of a descent into Hades rather effectively then it's pretty much bang on a mile.
The ominous tunnel mouth swallowed us, hankerchiefed and pollution-masked, and we wandered down along the narrow - though not as narrow as Sinclair made it sound - strip of pavement.
composite image.
Sinclair didn't make it all the way through, travelling alone, and was overcome by a case of existential claustrophobia; he bolted up one of the exit shafts and got horribly lost in Rotherhithe. In our day, some 30 years later, the exit shafts are all closed. The knobbly vestibules where the staircases (Edwardian, probably Listed) reside are now adorned with plaques telling you not to "linger" because of "exhaust fumes". We found a Wimpy box. Who the fuck was eating in a tunnel like this? Where is there still a Wimpy? Had we travelled back in time?
possibly we had.
A cyclist passed on the opposite side of the road, maskless, with a basket on his bike. Madness. Somewhere around the centre of the tunnel the ceiling and walls began to close in on me and I began to feel as if I had always been in the tunnel. I'd been born there, I'd die there, the tunnel was enternal and all-encompassing and frankly hellish. I made a joke of it to Charlie and the dizziness started to pass; this is why you take people down into places with you. Less in case you fall and break your neck and more so that there's someone to share the dread.
video of the Important Moment when we found the Light At The End Of The Tunnel.
We cheated the last leg, turning up the steps into a small park rather than funnelling back out with the aromatic traffic. I hacked up a lung onto the spring grass: we found an anenome, and later a whole bank covered in them.
Limehouse station was practically on top of us. We took to the tracks towards Greenwich, a cup of tea, and the strange seaside-town feel of somewhere that is still very much technically part of London. I can still taste cars in my sinuses.
The bus to Eltham from Greenwich takes ten million billion years, by the by. Eltham isn't really in London. Worth it for this spectacular display:
spring came on sudden.
At the top of what I think is Shooters Hill is Severndroog Castle, which is technically a watchtower and not a castle and also wasn't built in the medieval period so why the fuck would it be a castle (much like "Castle" Drogo in this respect); a castle, as any fule kno, is a combination of a smallholding and a military fort and an administrative centre. This place, otoh, had a tiny tiny cafe whose afternoon teas were on a Londonist List, Charlie and I shared some breand-and-butter-pudding (food of the GODS) and were accosted by an ownerless Puggle trailing its lead and eager to make our acquaintance and eat ALL the cake.
Also the castle door made the floor go gay
After a short break to a) pee and b) be mental about having touched two or three dogs already [Derek: happily eats shit off the mouse-infested kitchen floor but needs to alcohol sanitise his hands after touching living mammals, EXCEPT for cats and people he knows? Strangers & dogs = germs. Don't ask.], we went for a proper explore of Oxleas Woods, which are far larger than I was expecting, well-stocked with more dogs (Charlie made the acquaintance of a couple of girls with Yorkies and promptly lost their shit on being invited to hold one of said dogs).
composite including a second cafe we couldn't eat in because no cash. Not even for the £1 cups of tea. Includes at least one instance of two idiots (us) running down the side of Shooters Hill while yelling joyously because Sun! Running! No one allowed to tell you off for doing that when you're a grown-ass adult! Whee! And also one instance of gazing out over the panoramic view of South East London stretching on for absolutely fucking miles, and commenting, "This makes me feel very arrogant. Yes, I have conquered it."
(Plans hatched to attack the Green Chain walk in future, emphasis on Crystal Palace, Eltham Palace & Tudor Barn, Charlton House, and the Thames Barrier; some of these because I read about them in Brewers, some because I already knew about them and meant to visit, and the Barrier because of Sinclair but also because Josie Long used to do a bit about being sexually attracted to/romantically involved with the Thames Barrier [she's from Kent].)
bus to north greenwich took me both along a fucking motorway and also through what felt like an entirely different country. Still London, but looks like the suburbs of Paris mated with an American city and produced a terrifying architectural nightmare. No doubt it's filling up fast, people can't buy property in London quickly enough atm, but it's an eerie, fake-looking place.
Safely back in the welcoming embrace of normality/Shoreditch: tea in one place, matcha latte in another (but i really must remember that Shoreditch Grind's matcha lattes are gross), Downriver in both. Thought: remember seeing a Tumblr post about how the delineation of "species" is a human concept (meaning: the real world is more wishy-washy than that, categories are invented so that humans can make sense of stuff); it was on a specific blog and therefore the conclusion was "angry shouting about the oppressiveness of science in imposing order upon the chaotic systems of the world, something something white people", rather than on a different specific blog where I suspect the conclusion would have been "and that's why it's okay for me to fuck dogs". Although I'm sure the same argument could and probably has been made.
Then I went to a basement and injured myself repeatedly at the behest of a small Italian man who was trying very hard to look like the late George Michael, and on several occasions just flatly refused to do certain things because a) my back won't do that b) my knees won't do that and c) the person I have ended up partnered with for this bit physically cannot hold me up, she is half my size and I am heavy. It was not anything like as awkward as it could have been and I was not as embarrassed by it as me of ten years or even five years ago would have been, but parts of my body don't work, my reflexes are slow, and I am really ill. So it could have gone better.
Things I am looking for in a dance class:
+ beginners
+ instructor I can understand
+ not to have to touch people
+ not to have to bend over backwards since my back has some "fused vertebrae" flexibility issues
+ not banging my knees on the floor repeatedly, given that I still only have 3/4 of a kneecap between both knees as no amount of weight loss and working out will make my knee grow back
Things that have led to me making this list:
+ the absolute beginners introduction to contemporary dance class which very much did not fulfill any of those criteria, although it DOES get a weird cookie for being the only dance class I have ever been to where the men outnumbered the women.
NB majority of those men appeared to be straight and were universally very awkward. two had come with female friends, two had come in work clothes (jeans and shirts), three (including those two) volunteered the information that they worked in IT, one was clearly on-spectrum, and one more was very very muscular and very very awkward (he also had total alopecia, and braces, and was clearly very young). Also there was me, largely failing to remember to put anything together in a coherent manner and stridently not wanting to do things like "just let them take your weight! Lean back!"]
Conclusion after discussion on FB: Bhangra or Belly dancing might be good for me. Crawled along late to meet Jess, who was disappointed to discover that, despite having said the day before that I'd already made dinner for the day and thus entered it into the Robot Punishment Machine, I actually MEANT it and was therefore planning on going home (er, via the purchase of a large frozen fish) rather than going out for dinner with her. More or less collapsed on getting in and have now waved two fingers at my alarm around 7.30am and declared today to be a rest day as getting out of bed is making me make NOISES:
crunchy, wet, chest noises
and my entire self hurts.
my protein box arrived and tomorrow the announcement of THE NEXT NOVEL ON SALE shall go out like a shot around the world, or more probably sink without a trace into people's Friday lunches, but I suppose I can keep up a steady stream of nagging if I can stay awake.