Capital Ring: Falconwood to Crystal Palace

There was something missing during the train journey from Lewisham to Falconwood.  In the days when I used that line to go to school, I would alight at Eltham Well Hall and the next station was Eltham Park.  Both had disappeared and been replaced by a new station called simply “Eltham”.  I didn’t grieve for Eltham Well Hall; my journey to school necessitated a short train journey followed by a bus ride and the connection was not coordinated.  In the days when train destinations were displayed on wooden boards manually swung into slots above the platform by porters and before the advent of electronic time indicators at bus stops, buses and trains heard a different drummer and I could wait for ages on draughty platforms unsure when, if ever, transport would show up.   This section of the Capital Ring passed through the school grounds, I knew, and it was not a prospect I relished.

My friend Andy had been staying for the weekend.  On Saturday evening, we’d been to the Arcola to see the chilling tragedy Punishment Without Revenge, part of the Spanish Golden Age season.  Its message contrasted vividly with the film we saw on Sunday evening The Railway Man which was an object lesson in the redemptive power of forgiveness.  Discussing these and other matters kept us up late on Sunday evening so it was after 11 on Monday morning by the time I set off.  Despite the late start, I planned to complete two sections of the Capital Ring.  Falconwood to Grove Park is only 4 miles and continuing to Crystal Palace would bring the total to a more respectable 12 miles.

The weather started bright and Eltham Park South was, for a weekday morning, busy.  After a while I realised that, almost without exception, everyone was accompanied by a dog.  Most people had one or two clearly genetically related beasts while paid dogwalkers, a profession of which I had been unaware until recently, stood out as they towed an odd assortment of breeds.  I began to feel slightly fraudulent touring the parks without the excuse of exercising a dog, my walking pole marking me out further as unorthodox.

As in the first section, most of the walk alternated between parks and nondescript suburbia punctuated by the occasional place of interest.  A handsome brick dome, semi-submerged in the ground I guessed to be an ice house.  The plaque proved me wrong, but only physically, not chemically: it was part of a 16^th century water supply system.

When I approached the environs of my school, I anticipated with foreboding being ambushed by a spot which I would suddenly realise was familiar from nearly half a century ago.  That moment arrived when I reached the unlovely Sidcup Road.  It harboured painful memories.  One evening I was cycling along the pavement in the dark and, not realising I’d descended a dropped kerb and crossed a side road, crashed into the opposite kerb at speed.  The front wheel was mangled but fortunately I was only bruised.  I hobbled to my friend Richard’s house, which was a few minutes walk away.  His sister still lives there so must perceive some hidden attraction in inhabiting a small semi next to a busy dual carriageway.  The next section covered familiar streets.  Victorian manses were interspersed with newer properties designed by young architects determined to make a name for themselves, even if it required the most grotesque novelties.  One carbuncle had its name, Grange View, etched in enormous letters on the staircase window.  Too bad if the next resident prefers Dunromin. 

Only arriving at school was worse than travelling.  For reasons that continue to baffle me, my parents, both ardent atheists, favoured a school which had been founded for sons of missionaries.  Even in the 1960s, the smuggest boarders were the scions of religious houses, their missionary parents still plying their toxic trade in Africa.  My parents’ disdain for sport, a god worshipped at school hardly less enthusiastically than the church based deity, amplified my alienation. Our physical distance from the school catchment area also made it difficult to nurture friendships with the other pupils.  When friends did visit, they were perplexed by our family’s idiosyncrasies (my father’s vegetarianism, the absence of a television) and rarely returned.

Unlike most of the boys who exhibited no aptitude for sports, I was not redeemed by academic prowess and kept my head down to avoid the regular physical violence meted out by teachers for minor transgressions.  Corporal punishment was an accepted feature of primary and secondary education in those days; to my distress, my pacifist parents didn’t bat an eyelid when, aged 9, I was summarily caned for playing hide and seek in the street while wearing school uniform. 

Partly as a temporary refuge and partly because even in those days I was developing a taste for walking, most lunchtimes a friend and I would set off across the playing fields, buy a sandwich from a newsagent and occasionally share a bottle of cider in preparation for a particularly dull afternoon of Latin.  Usually we would head for the grandly named River Quaggy, in reality a small brook that bordered the school grounds.  Like characters out of an Arthur Ransome novel, we’d dare one another to jump across ever wider places.  On one occasion, the branch I was using to execute a particularly daredevil transit snapped and I found myself sitting in a foot of water.  Oddly, no one back at school commented on the fact that I attended afternoon lessons wearing soaking trousers.

As I turned into the narrow passage bordering the school playing fields which was the scene of these exploits I noticed it was now separated from the grounds by a 2 metre steel fence.  Since the path had also been used by boys living in Grove Park as a short cut home they presumably now need to take the long route via the road.  The Quaggy, previously a muddy meandering stream, is now canalised in a soulless concrete channel.  The far side, which had been a low bank with scrubby bushes, is guarded by impenetrable Leylandii.  No schoolboy leaps across the Quaggy now.

Despite my abhorrence of the school, I am grateful for the brand association which boosted my early career in much the same way as my employment with PWC and IBM did subsequently.   

After the relative prosperity of Mottingham, Grove Park was run down and depressing.  Endless neglected council houses were moated with discarded garbage and burnt out vehicles littered the cul de sacs.  I was getting peckish and paused to investigate a small parade of shops.  There was a fried chicken shop, a kebab place and a chippy.  All looked equally uninviting and I decided to continue, spurred on by the vision of a cosy café and hot cheese panini.   The guidebook mentioned a cafe at Beckenham Place Park and since the sky was becoming overcast I estimated I could reach sanctuary before the inevitable downpour. 

In the woods, the Capital Ring signs, normally so reliable, became ambiguous and I found myself back at a bridge I’d passed 15 minutes earlier.  The woods didn’t offer many clues, especially as I’d been even more inattentive than usual, fantasising about my upcoming snack so I reached for my GPS, always a symptom of defeat, I feel.  As I did so, a couple of dog walkers emerged from the gloom.  They said there were two ways to the house: either through the woods or across the golf course.  I confessed I’d already got lost in the woods and they cheerfully admitted that they had too, which made me feel better.  As I set off across the golf course, torrential rain started and I was steaming by the time I reached John Cator’s eighteenth century mansion.  It must rank as one of the ugliest Grade II listed buildings and the interior, now home to a golf club, was malodorous and dilapidated.  Nevertheless, hot coffee and a grilled ham, cheese and tomato sandwich was on offer.

The rain had abated during my late lunch, although there were intermittent showers on the way to Crystal Palace so that I was glad to get on a train without properly exploring the famous dinosaur park which will have to keep for next time.

© David Thompson 2014

Road warrior

The aphorism “home is where the heart is” might sometimes more accurately be stated as home is where the heart should be.  For 15 years, I spent more time travelling than at home and I once calculated that it was over twelve months since I’d slept more than three consecutive nights in my own bed.  It is a common conceit of consultants, stated in a regretful tone but with implicit pride, that Heathrow is their real home.

For the road warrior, hotels become second homes, and one becomes highly attuned to their nuances and imperfections.  Occasionally during my travels I suffered the intruded hotel room.  Not the scenario beloved of romcoms where a fey beauty inadvertently enters the wrong room (same number, different floor) with predictable results.  Less dramatically, after checking in and interrogating reception to ensure that the allocated room meets my requirements (no smoking, high floor, away from the elevators) I open the door to find the room, although empty, has not been serviced.  Used towels on the floor, bedclothes rumpled, chairs askew, I retreat in horror.  The disjunction between the expectation and the squalid reality jangles more than is justified merely by the sight of an unmade bed.  Such a scene in a friend’s flat would elicit no reaction beyond the silent observation that their domestic habits betray divergence from their public persona.  But the success of a hotel depends upon sustaining the illusion that what is essentially a public place has all the attributes of a private space, so that it is acceptable to perform there the intimate behaviours normally confined to home.  The recreation of a pristine environment is an essential component in constructing the fantasy that you are the first and only person ever to occupy your room and it must be flawlessly executed to mask the knowledge that you are, in fact, a passing guest, that someone else slept there last night and that there will be a new incumbent tomorrow.  Any evidence of previous occupation punctures this facade and even erodes faith in the wider competency of the institution.  This is why hotels have rigorous inspection regimes to detect cleaning transgressions, trivial in themselves, such as the odd hair in the shower.  Canny travellers know how to milk any shortcomings in their experience.  Managers keen to retain the goodwill of regular guests are empowered to rectify disappointments by offering minor privileges normally reserved for more distinguished clients: a complimentary bottle of wine, a room upgrade or access to the executive lounge. Lubricated by a top tier loyalty card, I was once offered a free weekend at a Hilton in Brussels.  On redeeming the offer, I was shown to a tiny room which could have passed for a converted broom cupboard.  After I pointed out that this exacerbated, rather than compensated for, the previous disappointment, I was immediately moved to the best suite. 

When my business travel days ceased, the status of my London flat subtly changed.  Instead of being a fleeting stopover to collect mail and do laundry, it became my permanent residence, punctuated only by holidays and occasional visits to friends’ houses. In other words, the normal position for most of the population.  With no early morning flights, my body clock gradually recovered equilibrium.  I no longer routinely carried a passport and my suitcases were relegated to the loft.  Successive letters from hotel chains and airlines signalled my demotion down the ranks of valued customer.  Eventually they gave up completely; for the purveyors of travel facilities I might just as well have died. 

As a transit lounge, my flat was ideally located: midway between the office and London City Airport.  But as David Lodge remarks in Changing Places, praising a location because it’s easy to get away from is at best a backhanded compliment.  Minor inconveniences in the flat, which I hadn’t noticed or simply overlooked during my itinerant days, erupted into irritations. Why were the legs on that chair perpetually falling out, how come all my plates were scratched or chipped?  Even the furniture seemed to be in the wrong place to make the most of the flat’s only substantial asset, the river view. The outside environment came under scrutiny too.  Certainly the flat’s location guaranteed relative peace and my regular three mile evening walk around the deserted docks was an enduring pleasure, but otherwise the neighbourhood had severe limitations.  Where were the pavement cafes and street markets which enliven most European cities, and even other parts of London?   

Learning to live in a flat which had been selected primarily to function as a pied a terre has been a voyage of discovery.  Now I lounge by the window in the newly positioned chair, sip my coffee and watch the aircraft arriving and leaving London City, the ascending planes rising in tandem with those landing, as though linked by an invisible thread passing along the runway.  The Thames is corrugated by a quickening wind and the horizon is defined by the breast of Shooters Hill, nippled by the disused water tower at its summit, its profile uninterrupted since the demolition of the Tate refinery.  

Anchored in Docklands, it seems the heart has tentatively taken up residence in the home.

© David Thompson 2014

Capital Ring: Woolwich to Falconwood

January is not the most auspicious month to undertake a long distance walk in the UK, even one as mundane as the Capital Ring.  The winter of 2013/14 saw legendary rainfall: London endured half its typical annual quota in three weeks, with the upshot that unpaved ground everywhere is sodden.  A few years previously, in a fit of rookie enthusiasm, I embarked on my first long distance walk, the South Downs Way over four weekends in February and March. Each weekend was wetter and windier than the last, culminating in a downpour so penetrating that the final weekend, undertaken with my son Leon, was abandoned on Saturday night.  Meteorology punished us for our timidity: resuming in June we encountered the hottest day of the year.

The Capital Ring is the kind of enterprise on which my father, a walker of the same metal as myself, might have embarked.  In his youth, I’m told he was a serious Lake District walker, clad in woollen clothes and hauling the canvas rucksack I discovered years later in his loft. In the leisure afforded to him after 40 years of teaching and research, before the modern craze for walking generated the plethora of urban and rural routes we enjoy today, he would take the Underground to its uttermost tips and explore the plangent suburbs.

After resolving to embark on the walk, it was a while before I took any action. The weather was uninviting with periods of seductive blue skies interrupted by unpredictable and torrential showers. Sitting snugly at home and gazing out of the window at the Thames it was easy to delay setting off.  After all, there was no deadline and one day was as good as the next. Eventually I opened the guidebook. The 75 mile route starts at Woolwich on the south side of the Thames, proceeds clockwise and ends on the north shore.  The venerable Woolwich Free Ferry joins the dots. The prospect of that eventual celebratory river crossing did little to inspire starting. The walk could, I guess, equally well have been designed to start at the westerly Thames crossing point, surely a more enticing prospect, especially as I had recently walked the Woolwich environs with the Ramblesiders and it’s not an area which improves with familiarity.  But I will take every precaution to minimise the chance of getting lost so I resolved to start at the official beginning and moreover printed the online directions to the first section as back up to the published guide which, absurdly, shows the route superimposed on OS maps, rather than the more suitable A-Z scale. My print cartridges were almost exhausted so the map emerged in pallid brown, and could have passed for an ancient manuscript recently disinterred after centuries in a vault.  It did not seem an auspicious sign.

The Isle of Dogs is a peninsula so every journey away from the island, as locals call it, begins with the DLR train and passes through the portals of Canary Wharf.  When I moved to the area in 2000, its glittering towers were an anomaly in the post industrial wasteland of docklands, as though a kink in spacetime had allowed a fragment of Manhattan or Hong Kong to penetrate the tumbleweed and deserted shipyards.  Now, with the relentless eastwards expansion of the financial centre and the encroachment on its surroundings of the attendant infrastructure – apartment buildings, shops, transport hubs –the opposite seems true with memories of the east end’s proud manufacturing past confined to a few listed buildings, plaques for tourists and a local museum, an outpost of the Museum of London.

The start of the walk was a mile from Woolwich DLR station, which was adorned with posters exhorting passengers to celebrate its fifth birthday, a reminder of the inexorable growth of the DLR network which originally comprised a single line (Tower Gateway to Beckton, since you ask) and constructed for a niggardly £75m by the London Docklands Development Corporation, a quango charged with regenerating the area.

From its start, the Capital Ring is waymarked to within an inch of its life.  The satisfaction I derive from walking is the simple rhythmical pleasure of putting one foot in front of the other.  I like maps, but wearily consulting gradually shredding paper in steady drizzle and biting winds is a challenge I can resist.  (Sometimes I think that I should simply occupy a treadmill in the gym for the day; a steady 3 miles an hour in warmth and comfort with entertainment and hot drinks on tap would be an easy swap for wrestling with unreliable trains and inclement weather.)  The signs were not only plentiful but also comprehensive.  As well as the Capital Ring, the Green Chain Way and other local routes featured on many of the signs. Charlton, I noticed, was vigorously advertising its own walks; I guess it’s logical that the least appealing areas have to work the hardest to promote their attractions.  With signs appearing regularly, I switched off my GPS.  Predictably, within five minutes I had lost the path.  The hazard of following signage is that you only need to miss a single cue to be completely at sea.  A helpful dog walker redirected me and thereafter I paid more attention.

I was peeved to realised that after Charlton, the route swings resolutely south, evading the gravitational pull of Blackheath and Greenwich, surely the most notable open spaces in the area but presumably not at the requisite radial distance to qualify for the Capital Ring   I anticipate other notable parks, such as Battersea, will fall foul of the same cartographical stricture. We'll see.

Much of the scenery comprised dreary suburbs epitomising middle class preoccupations with loft conversions and mock Victorian conservatories, interspersed with parks which were predominantly flat green fields and whose principal functions are to provide facilities for dog walking and football, pursuits which, in more ways than one, frequently conflict.

I was resigned to the monotony of alternating parks and between the wars semis when an unexpected sight greeted me at Stadium Road.  Here was Woolwich Common, an area of wilderness with scrubby bushes, clumps of trees and, best of all, not pancake flat.  It could have passed for Hampstead Heath.  The downside of this rure in urbs was an unpaved path which unremitting rain had turned into a quagmire which wouldn’t have shamed some of the Pennine Way bogs I had encountered in 2012.  I was grateful for my boots and began to wish for my walking pole.  After a short stretch, tarmac resumed and with it a prospect of encircling grey tower blocks, windows glinting in the low sun.  Not Hampstead after all, then.  All the same, it did feel remote enough for me to indulge in a favourite test.  I ventured a ”good afternoon” to an approaching dog walker and was rewarded with a smile and a reply.  Ha, perhaps this is an island of pseudo-countryside after all: no one responds favourably to an unsolicited greeting on city streets or in urban parks.

This small idyll was bordered by the South Circular, the vehicular equivalent of the Capital Ring and its predecessor by several decades.  Crossing Shooters Hill Road the path enters Oxleas Wood preserved as part of Britain’s ancient woodland dating back 8,000 years.  A steady climb took me to the dizzying altitude of 400 feet, a pimple in Lake District terms but affording a worthwhile view over London, most of which sits close to sea level in the Thames floodplain.  The woods are alive with birds, notably ring-necked parakeets, descendants of escaped exotic pets, whose squawking drowns out the more sedate native species.

I reached the café on the far side of Shooters Hill just before it closed at 4pm.  My request for cappuccino was stonily refused. Studiously ignoring a shiny coffee machine the size of small nuclear reactor, the proprietor offered indifferent coffee, which I drank, shuddering to imagine Seymour’s verdict. 

The remainder of the walk was continuous mud and I nearly slipped on several occasions so I resolved to bring my walking pole on the next walk and risk the ridicule.  It might be a good defence against aggressive dogs, too.  I encountered one in the final section of the wood, called to heel by its owner who shouted the usual unconvincing platitude “eewonurcher”.  By the time I reached Falconwood, the sun had set and it was civil twilight (the sun was between 0 and 6 degrees below the horizon) so I determined to bring my beloved headtorch on future sorties.

My expectations of the Capital Ring had been modest but were pleasantly exceeded by my experience. More than threequarters of the walk was indeed in green spaces, the remainder was along tolerably pleasant quiet roads and the plentiful waymarking and convenient transport connections made for a relaxing half day excursion. I'm a  convert!





© David Thompson 2014

Retirement

The least likely utterance of primitive man must be “I’m bored”.   In between hunting for food, fending off predators and finding protection from the elements he can have had little time to indulge in existential angst. Likewise it is unlikely he ever suffered from the state we refer to as stress.   The status quo was all he knew or could aspire to, whereas stress requires experiencing deviation from expectation.

Ironically, having evolved into what we flatter ourselves is the state of civilisation, boredom and stress are ever present.  Although working can be stressful, not working, I have discovered, is both stressful and boring since, annoyingly, one does not cancel out the other.

Cursed by a company pension which is adequate to sustain me but insufficient to allow any spectacular indulgence, I am deprived of the necessity of seeking work and obliged to conjure inventive ways of using endless time.  I can muster no interest in the four Gs (golf, gardening, grandchildren and god) which sustain the stereotypical retiree. Yes, I recognise thatI am luckier than many and much luckier than most, yet relative good fortune is no fortification to the disconsolate.  Analogously, little more than half a century ago, practically nobody owned a television; nevertheless, nowadays anyone who can’t afford one is deemed to be in poverty.

When everything is possible, nothing seems worthwhile.  In the 1970s, a friend of my first wife had somehow obtained a round the world plane ticket, an unheard of treat in the days before budget airlines.  He had made it from his native New York as far as London, he where spent a week cross-legged on the floor of our Hampstead flat paralyzed by indecision, eventually simply returning home.  A perfect illustration of the tyranny of choice. The comforting corollary of lack of choice is absence of responsibility and maybe this explains the otherwise incomprehensible appeal of coach holidays where choice is willingly surrendered in return for transfer of responsibility.

The concept of retirement as a cliff edge experience where the gold watch marks an almost palpable frontier, with work on one side and the sunlit uplands of unending leisure, on the other is an outdated notion.  The Guardian reported recently that the number of people working past state retirement age, out of choice or necessity, has almost tripled over the past 15 years.  l have dodged the question "Are you retired or still working" by becoming an independent consultant, a convenient cloak to wrap around occupational indecision, but little help in furnishing the tracts of time between occasional

contracts.

Satisfaction, i have discovered, can be derived from the least prepossessing of activities (decades of office work have reconciled me to this dismal reality) so the lesson is that doing almost anything is a better prospect than doing nothing. Such pragmatism does not guarantee fulfilment, retirement’s elusive promise, but as the aphorism reminds us, we shouldn’t allow the best to be the enemy of the good.  Or, as the stern injunction of the dogooder runs: keep yourself occupied. With this in mind I have resolved to tackle the Capital Ring, a modest 75 mile walk around London, taking in the wealth of parks and other green spaces which leaven the numbing dullness of the inner suburbs. None of the starting points is beyond the reach of the Underground, so that courtesy of my Freedom Pass, transport costs are zero, and the maximum altitude achieved is 400 feet. You may justifiably

remark that "modest" is a rather inadequate adjective to describe this enterprise. Nevertheless, it is a bona fide long distance walk, even though I plan to tackle it in daily chunks, always home in time for dinner.

© David Thompson 2014