Walking from Hammersmith to Vauxhall

My regular walking companion often suggests that we walk along The Thames and while I prefer new territory (which is increasingly hard to find) I like The Thames too so I often agree to his suggestion. The stretches close to Kingston and Richmond are very familiar to us so we prefer to start a little distance from home and on this day we settled on Hammersmith. The end point was to be determined later depending on time.

We followed Thames Path most of the way, crossing from the north bank to the south bank at Battersea Bridge with me forcing us to take a few small detours to take in roads that we had not walked before. Doing that enables us to discover things like South Park in Fulham and impressive looking Victorian school building opposite it.

The two highlights on the north bank were both newish housing development, Chelsea Riverside where we walked through the nicely landscaped grounds and Powerhouse where we admired the conversion of the former Lots Road Power Station.

On the south bank we took a scenic route through Battersea Park to walk around the lake rather along the river for the umpteenth time.

We almost came a cropper at Battersea Power Station where it looked as though we would not be able to get through the site and we got right to the end of the wide path along the river before we found a small turning to the right that took us back on to the main route.

One of the reasons we walk that section several times a year is because of the constant building works which means there is always something new to see and criticise.

One of the newer building is the American Embassy and it is always good to see the Palestinian flag flying nearby.

We had done 15km by the time we got to Vauxhall so that seemed an appropriate place to stop. It was only lunchtime so there was plenty of time for more walking later in the day.

My podcasts (January 2025)

Podcasts have become extremely popular in recent years allowing people to make podcasting their day job which is a far cry from when I first started listening to them in 2006.

I have written about podcasts a few times since then and I did a list of everything that I subscribe to in 2019. It is time for an update.

Looking back at that 2019 list there are a few podcasts that have been cancelled and which I miss greatly; these include Digital Planet, Material World and Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone. There are also several that I have fallen out of love with, hence the need for a new list.

I am not going to go through everyone of them, you can see what they are, but I will say something about some of the new ones.

The FT news briefing is my attempt to listen to financial news that focuses on the finance and leaves the political stuff to other shows. I gave up on all of the BBC finance shows for that reason and while it is far from perfect the FT news, being American based, is at least fairly neutral about UK.

Here Comes The Guillotine is funny chat with a twist of politics and I like that it is very Scottish with a strong dollop of Irish. The different perspective makes it more interesting.

Happy Heat Pump is new and has yet really to find its feet. I expect to be getting a heat pump in the not to distant future and I was hoping that this would help me with the various choices (water or air to water or air) but it, so far, added more complexity, e.g. solar panels and batteries, to what was already a difficult decision.

Trashfuture is an intelligent look at the world today through justifiable cynical eyes and is delivered with humour. I've been to see live recordings, twice.

The World This Week is another attempt to get away from the dreadfulness of BBC and covers the political news with a French perspective.

 

Cory Doctorow's podcast is cantered on his many books, fact and fiction, both of which have a heavy technical content which suits me.

Limelight is a BBC drama podcast. BBC seems not what to do with podcasts and it is unclear how they choose what to release as full podcasts, as podcasts that you can only subscribe to on BBC Sounds and which are just drama shows on BBC Sounds. I like the flexibility of podcasts (e.g. no 30 day limit for listening) and wish BBC would release more drama that way.

Moral Maze is there because sometimes we have Humanists debates on the same topics. It usually a pretty poor discussion and it drives me mad. I should stop.

The Political Fourcast is another BBC alternative, this time UK politics from Channel Four.

99% Invisible is a gem. It talks about design in a way that entertains and informs in equal measure. Unmissable.

No Gods No Mayors and Well There's Your Problem are adjacent to Trashfuture but lack its precise direction. If I walked less and so had less time to listen to podcasts then I would probably drop these.

The War on Cars does what is says on the tin. It is American where the car problem is even greater but the problems and solutions they discuss apply to us too.

Page 94 is a Private Eye fill-in between the print issues and is excellent.

It's Bloody Complicated is a political discussion from Compass, an organisation that I belonged to for a while. Not particularly original or challenging but it is good to hear something from the centre-left.

BBC Best of Today stopped before I could unsubscribe and is only here because of the special Christmas programmes where they have guest editors. If it every comes back properly then I will unsubscribe.

Trash Talk and Uncensored are comedy podcasts by well known comedians who manage to make some good political points along the way.

Michael Spicer No Room is a topical sketch show which manages to stand head and shoulders above the many other topical sketch shows. There has been one full series and a couple of once-offs. I am hoping for a lot more.

Walking to West Hampstead (8 Jan 25)

As long as I have sufficient time and the weather is not too unbearable,  I like to walk to the monthly British Czech and Slovak Association Get To Know You Social at Bohemia House ("serving the Czech and Slovak community since 1946") in West Hampstead. The factors driving my choice of route are the time available, location of Pokemon Go target gyms and finding roads I have not walked along before.

This time I had six hours available (I would have preferred more!) which had to include some sort of a break for lunch.

I started with a well walked path to Richmond, Isleworth and Brentford before following the canal north then west.

The time limited how far west I could go, it was walking in the wrong direction, and I turned off the canal at Glade Lane Canalside Park and headed through a part of Southall I had not walked before.

Previously I had walked thought the commercial centre of Southall which was far more interesting that the suburban area I went through this time.

I turned east to walk through parts of Ealing that I had hardly touched before. The map below is part of my CityStrides LifeMap with this walk highlighted. There is a very obvious barren area in the centre of the map around Park Royal. This proved to be a very industrial area and I will not be rushing back, despite the numerous unwalked roads there.

The aim of seeing new interesting things was not really achieved, though anything new always has some interest even if it is an industrial estate, and there were a few nice new places on this walk, such as the west to east crossing of Brent Rive Park.

The substantive aims of the walk were definitely met, I arrived in West Hampstead almost spot on 6pm having covered a decent 30km in a little under six hours.

I averaged 28,811 steps a day in 2024

I very mixed year for walking mainly thanks to health issues, generally I am fit and can easily manage 30k steps in a day but I had several stays in bed for a few days and a couple of operation too both of which seriously eat into walking time.

At times during the year I was hoping to average 30k steps, and was on target to do so, but flu type illnesses hit me hard in November and December and in the end I had to settle for just under 29k steps, which I am very happy with.

My totals for previous years are:

• 2023: 27,080
• 2022: 29,142
• 2021: 26,128
• 2020: 27,919
• 2019: 23,908
• 2018: 19,365
• 2017: 18,047

The big jump from 2019 is because I retired and had lots more time for walking. That shows that I am spending my retirement well!

Rainbow in Rock at The Cavern (13 Dec 24)

Rainbow in Rock are my favourite pub band by quite a large margin; my second favourite pub band is Memento which is the same musicians but with a different set list.

The Cavern in Raynes Park is regular venue for them and I get there to see them whenever I can, which is a few times a year things like health permitting. Raynes Park is a doddle to get to by bus and/or walking which helps. It also helps that they sell Wimbledon Brewery's Copper Leaf red ale.

I got their in good time and started the evening close to the band with a pillar behind me.  That position gave me an uninterrupted view allowing me to take this photo. I deliberately took it during one of the quieter moments, Catch the Rainbow from the 1975 album Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow by Rainbow - you can see where the band got their name from.

Rainbow in Rock play a wide range of Deep Purple and Rainbow songs nd they delight in choosing some of the more obscure ones while leaving out obvious songs like Smoke on the Water and Highway Star. Every Rainbow in Rock gig is different.

There is one ritual that they are keeping to, for the moment at least, and that is to end the first half with Child in Time and the second with Rainbow Rising. And long may they continue to do so.

A day of walking

I had little option other than to walk all day and so I chose a good way to do it.

I had to be at St George's Hospital in Tooting for 10:20 and at a bar in West Hampstead at 6pm which meant I either had to waste time getting home then going out again or I could simply walk an elongated route in the time available.

And getting to St George's meant two short walks of around half an hour first from home to Norbiton Station then from Wimbledon Station to the hospital. By the time I started the main walk I had done about 6km.

The walk from St George's to West Hampstead was dictated by CityStrides and was in two parts. Firstly it was long straight roads in areas I rarely walk south of the river then lots of meandering north of the river where I have walked many times and was looking to tick off as many new roads as possible.

I had no specific route in mind, other then to keep heading vaguely north but not to do so too quickly, and I used the CityStrides app to plan each 10 to 15 minute segment by looking at the roads ahead and seeing which ones I had not walked before, conveniently shown on the map as a series of red dots that I needed to walk through.

Choosing the route this way took me though some interesting places mostly, as you can probably guess from the map, quite well to do ones and I do like looking at grand buildings (even if the wealth they represent came from exploitation and theft, as all wealth does).

There was also plenty of other interesting things to see, particularly street art. I was walking not sight-seeing and the only thing I stopped to photograph was this stunning art. This is only part of the black and white drawing which extends a fair way to the left.

I had two breaks along the way, a superb brunch at Reyes a little north of Clapham Junction and a fair coffee and cake at Toast Cafe in Little Venice.

 

I kept an eye on the remaining distance to West Hampstead so I knew with some certainty how long it would take me to get there and I duly arrived just before 6pm for a well deserved pint in the recently refurbished The Railway. I had a further four pints later in Bohemia House at the monthly BCSA Get to Know You Social, my reason for going to West Hampstead in the first place.

The statistics do not really tell the story but, for the record, the walk was 35km and took me something over 7 hours, including breaks. I deserved those beers!

Parks and more

We had a rough plan for this walk, which we built on successfully.

The plan was my usual walking companion's idea and, not surprisingly, that included some parks; this time it was Holland, Hyde, Regents and Primrose.

Starting at Earls Court meant the ritual of waiting for the barriers to open at Richmond Station at 8:57 and joining the swarm of old people using our 60+ Oyster Cards at the earliest opportunity.

From Earls Court is was more or less straight north to Holland Park with a slight detour on the way to take in a new road for my CityStrides LifeMap.

I wanted to take in some new roads in Notting Hill on the way to Hyde Park but that would have meant more hills which my companions, quite reasonably, objected to.

We took an unusually simple route across the top of Hyde Park simply to avoid as much traffic as we could and also the Hyde Park Winter Wonderland!

The transition from Hyde Park to Regents Park is a confusion of choices with most of Fitzrovia laid out in a grid and with no clear best route. So we did the only sensible thing and hit as many new roads as we could! Of course these were all roads that we had walked only not when mapping the route.

Regents Park was something as a failure as Broad Walk Cafe was closed for substantial refurbishment. Luckily we had a Plan B.  

While avoiding hills is generally a good idea it is impossible to go to Regents Park and not climb Primrose Hill. The view their is always worth seeing because of all the notable landmarks but I was surprised to see so few cranes and the few that were there were all clustered in the Far East (Tower Hamlets?).

Plan B was to have coffee in cake in Alma jst to the north of Primrose Hill. We had discovered it on a previous walk and knew that it was good.

I had expected that to be more or less the end of the walk as, when he suggested the plan, my companion said he wanted a shortish walk but over coffee he said that he was good for another hour or so which meant that we could walk back all the way to Waterloo.

Overall we walked 19km in 4 hours (including the coffee break) which was a pretty fine start to the day.

National March for Palestine (30 Nov 24)

Four weeks after the last National March for Palestine I was back in Central London for yet another one.

This time we assembled in Park Lane before moving along Piccadilly to Eros, down Haymarket to Trafalgar Square then back along Whitehall for the final rally. A fairly short route but the roads were narrow in a couple of places and corners always slow things down and so it took me the best part of two hours to complete the route.

Another reason for the slowness is that I was marching with (or rather behind) a Socialist Workers Party group and they know how to maximise visibility of their banners through walking slowly and leaving a space in front of them, space for the people with the megaphones to lead the chanting from.

The good news was that in the intervening four weeks the the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister (Benjamin Netanyahu) and former defence minister (Yoav Gallant) but the depressing news was that had made no difference to the UK Government which remained committed to supporting genocide and war crimes by, amongst other things, supplying Israel with weaponry.

That attitude of our Government means that I fully expect to be marching again before too long.