I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again)

My claim back in May that  I have walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames got a slight setback this week. Not that unexpected but unwelcome none the less.

The app I use to keep a record of everywhere I have walked, CityStrides, is based on OpenStreetMap which is maintained by a community of users, including myself (much as Wikipedia is) and it gets updated both with changes to the physical world, e.g. new streets, and by clarifications, e.g. marking streets with locked gates as private.

These changes get uploaded to CityStrides periodically and when these changes create unwalked roads (or parts of roads) the unwalked sections appear as red dots.

The latest update for Kingston upon Thames created a few red dots for me, as shown here.

Frustratingly none of these were new roads, just roads newly marked s walkable, and I would have walked them when in those areas had they been marked as walkable at that time. Still, things are what they are and so I set out to walk them all.

More frustratingly, some of the dots were at the very southern tip of the Borough (I live on the northern boundary) so it was a longish ride on two buses to get me to Malden Rushett. 

From there is was a pretty dreary walk up A243 all the way to the large junction with A3, an even drearier walk along both sides of A3 to the border with Surrey and back then further along A3 to Tolworth and just beyond. That accounted for three of the four groups of red dots.

Then I was lucky. I was expecting to continue along A3 to the final group when I learned that I could directly there on a 265 bus, so I did.

The final group was a little bit more of annoying A3 but the final two streets in my quest were in an exclusive private estate so I had lots of impressive houses to look at while tracking the final dots.

And that was it, I have now walked every street in Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames (again).

Gold Rush at The Half Moon (19 Oct 25)

I was always going to see Gold Rush on their latest return to The Half Moon Putney and this time I made something of an afternoon of it by tackling some location-based challenges in two phone Apps.

I collect Gold Gyms in PokemonGo (I have 750) and this means making repeated visits to specific locations to battle the gyms there, gaining more points each time until you read Gold level. I had a few targets in Putney and Wandsworth that I wanted to revisit, two of them in particular. Over the afternoon I got points at seven gyms and went Gold at two!

The other target was walking new (unwalked) streets for my CityStrides LifeMap. I had already walked most of Putney but there were plenty of gaps heading towards and into Wandsworth. It is a non trivial task to walk out the best route to cover new streets, I had to walk down and back a few dead-ends, but in the end I was pleased to tick-off 19 streets. This raised my total for LB Wandsworth to 975 streets which is just a midge shy of 60%.

I had to look after myself too and that started very well with an All Day Vegetarian Breakfast at Sweet Tooth in Putney, continued reasonably with a coffee in Black Sheep Coffee Wandsworth and finished correctly with another coffee and a cake at Nlack Sheep Coffee Putney.

I had not forgotten the main purpose of my trip and I duly arrived at Half Moon Putney around 6:30pm, in good time for a rest and a pint before the music started.

I do not have a lot to say about the Gold Rush concert that I have not said several times before, so I will mention Tom's guitars instead!

Tom have half a dozen or so guitars on stage and he surprised us on one song with a bright yellow one. He explained that he had been doing something else during the day (he is a co-founder of charity Electric Umbrella) and a helper had put the wrong guitar in the wrong bag.

He also had issues with his black guitar, pictured above, and had to swap it for a less iconic one for the last few songs.

Every Gold Rush concert is different, just as every Neil Young concert is, and my mood is different each time too, so different songs strike me harder each time. On this occasion my stand-out performances were Down by the River, Cortez the Killer (loved the keyboard intro) and Cowgirl in the Sand.

The night ended something over two hours after it started with some good news, Gold Rush had booked to play the The Half Moon four times next year. I will be there.

The Poltergeist at Arcola Theatre

My mission to watch every performance of a Philip Ridley play in London (and easily accessible places beyond) continued with The Poltergeist at Arcola Theatre, were I had first seen it almost exactly two years earlier.

This time it was on downstairs in Studio 2 where front row seat A12 was a sound investment at £25.

I planned the day to give me a little time in Dalston beforehand and I did a little exploring while also looking for somewhere to eat. 

It struck me that gentrification had failed to stick and the posh places that I had eaten at previously were all gone. And so I found myself, yet again, at The Speakeasy which despite being little more than a marquee is a friendly place and serves reasonable beer with good food; it was a pint of Camden Pale Ale and some veggie tacos this time. 

I remembered the gist of The Poltergeist but, as with all Philip Ridley plays, there is so much going on in the dialogue  that I knew I would be surprised, stimulated and entertained.

This was a solo performance (monologue seems inappropriate) and the heavy duties were given to Louis Davison who played the narrator, Sasha, and a host of other people. Incidentally, Sasha is a deliberate unisex name and many of Ridley's solo plays can be performed by a woman or man.

The stage was empty and the only props Davison had to play were his clothes and in his simple outfit in which he strode the length and breadth of the stage assuredly telling Sasha's story for eighty minutes.

On one level it was a simple story with Sasha and his partner attending a family child's birthday party which Sasha found difficult for reasons that gradually became clearer. Through the many conversations with the many party attendees, all played by Davison, we learned that Sasha had once been a promising artist until he had some sort of breakdown, the causes of which also emerge. 

The richness of the plau is in the dialogue, not the plot, and I was totally engaged for the full eighty minutes as I desperately tried to catch each quickly delivered word. And despite the core subject matter, a mental breakdown, the mood was often light and I laughed out loud quite a few times.

Philip Ridley has a distinctive style and voice which appeals to me immensely and The Poltergeist was yet another great example of why that is.