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.