Starting in Charlton

No, that's not Olga. That's a random dog I met when I walked another link of the Green Chain yesterday. It was tied up across the street from a shop, waiting for its owner and looking a bit anxious.

The weather was bright and sunny when I set out in the morning and took the tube and then a bus down to Charlton, near Greenwich. The route I planned to walk is a bit awkward -- it's shaped like a Y, forking about halfway through. I'd have to choose the A route or the B route, and being a completist, I wanted to do both. So I knew I'd have to figure that out.

I began in Charlton, where I met the dog, and walked through Charlton Park.

There was some tree surgery going on outside Charlton House. I hope they weren't cutting it down entirely, but I didn't stick around to find out.

I walked toward Woolwich and Plumstead, where I came across this brightly tiled pedestrian underpass. The interior was filled with mosaics of animals and angels. An odd combination, but colorful and intriguing.

I also passed this very ordinary block of flats that someone tried to jazz up with a Miami Beach-style canopy. I'm not sure it worked.

My walk took me across Plumstead Common, where I found someone's lost dog collar and tag hanging from a fence. Mindful of my own recent experience with losing a dog tag, I called the phone number and told the owner where they could find it. They seemed very appreciative so hopefully they'll follow through and retrieve it.

I then walked on to an area called "The Slade," where these houses overlooked a rather steep drop into a park with a pond. Those houses have a great view, and at first I thought that must be a desirable place to live. But then I wondered if they have to maintain that retaining wall. And what's their insurance payment like?

I walked all the way to Bostall Woods, where you may remember a couple of these Green Chain walks have taken me before. Don't try to use the public restrooms there, by the way. They're locked. Is there anything more annoying than being on a long walk and coming across a public restroom, only to find it inaccessible?

That was the end of the A route. I found that I could catch a bus down Plumstead High Street and pretty easily walk back to the fork in the path, so I could also take the B route. On the way, I popped into a pub and bought a bag of chips and used their loo. Thank goodness for pubs.

The B route also took me across Plumstead Common, but headed in a different direction, toward Oxleas Woods. As you can see, by this time clouds had settled in and the rest of the afternoon was gray and chilly. I passed these intrepid people out with their hula hoops. I haven't seen anyone use a hula hoop in ages.

"YOU SHALL NOT PASS!"

(I did anyway.)

This was quite a cat-friendly area.

After walking across some very high ground with spectacular views over the Thames Valley, I finished my walk in Oxleas Meadows, at the same cafe where I had lunch a couple of weeks ago. (It was closed yesterday, though, so my bag of chips turned out to be my lunch.) From there I caught a bus back to a tube station and returned home.

While riding on the bus, I passed this group of horseback riders from (I believe) the nearby military barracks at Woolwich:

Interesting that one of the horses is riderless. Is that a symbolic thing, or did someone just not show up for horse-riding duty?

All in all, I walked about six miles, counting some extra walking I did through Charlton at the beginning. After sitting around the house through so many recent rainy days, it felt good to finally get some exercise!

Bricks

The sun reappeared yesterday after a lengthy absence, throwing long shadows while Olga and I walked around the neighborhood. Clear skies mean colder temperatures, and it was chilly all day and below freezing last night. My phone says it's 28º F (-2º C) out there right now.

I put the cannas in the shed and brought in the geraniums. We covered the banana but didn't do anything to the tree fern. It's in a sheltered corner surrounded by windows so I'm sure it's fine.

I was going to walk yesterday but I started doing stuff around the house and I eventually gave up that goal for the day. Dave was on a conference call with his co-workers, so I had to single-handedly move all the potted plants on the south side of our patio so that the workmen could get to work on our exterior wall, which they did:

They removed the rotten wood trim, as you can see, and replaced it with fresh boards. They also found, in the corner at upper left, that the beams and floorboards beneath the neighbor's terrace (above our living room) are quite degraded. The neighbors and our landlords are going to have to do some reconstruction eventually, and when that happens, Dave and I may just move.

The lead builder also says he believes our living room wall moisture is actually coming up from the ground, not down the inside of the wall from the rotten trim. He says he sees slightly moldy walls like this all the time in England. I suppose that's what they call "rising damp." I don't know whether I believe him or not, but in any case, that problem has hopefully been addressed by their wall treatment and new paint. (And our dehumidifier.)

Such excitement! Can you stand it?! Be glad you're not hearing all the hammering and pounding.

I was recently looking back at a post I did exactly one year ago called "Who's Still Alive?" listing some aging celebrities who were still with us at that time. In the year since, we've lost several of the people I mentioned -- Norman Lloyd, Betty White, Cicely Tyson and Cloris Leachman. I think everyone else I named is still around, but it's interesting that Wikipedia has apparently stopped maintaining its page on "Living Actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood."  That link no longer works. What a shame!

(Addendum: Wikipedia did indeed delete that page last September, and I found a page containing the reasons for the deletion -- basically the ambiguity of the "Golden Age" time period, uncertainty about who may or may not still be alive, and an argument that the article wasn't encyclopedic because when everyone dies it would eventually be empty. It's an interesting discussion in its own right.)

La Mer on Old Compton Street

This (above) was going on around here yesterday. The workmen showed up to begin repairing the exterior wall of our living room, thus hopefully making it more impervious to moisture. We had to move a bunch of stuff out of the room and pull all the furniture away from the walls, which greatly alarmed Olga. For some reason, they insisted on beginning the job by painting the interior, which seems like the thing they should do last, but whatever. It was pouring rain for much of the day so I suppose they couldn't work outside.

Dave and Olga moved their base of operations to the dining room and I got out of dodge entirely. I had an appointment down in Soho.

I took the tube down a bit early, to walk around and do some sightseeing. Carnaby Street is already looking like spring.

Hey, Ms. Moon, did we know there's an entire shop on Carnaby Street devoted to the Rolling Stones? I can't remember if I've seen it before or not. I don't appear to have blogged it, so -- here!

Elsewhere in Soho, in front of a nondescript shopfront, I came across a little floral monument to Steve Bronski of Bronski Beat, who died a month ago. I'm not sure why that location was significant. I remember being introduced to Bronski Beat, the first unabashedly and even loudly and proudly gay pop band in my experience, by friends in the mid-1980s. So this was a poignant find.

And then I wandered down to Old Compton Street for my coffee appointment with blogger John Gray, who was briefly visiting London from Wales. We'd never met face to face, though we'd kicked around the idea before, so it was nice to finally get to see him. We sat in a French place called Cafe Boheme, as a recording of a woman crooning "La Mer" played in the background, and compared notes about the blog world.

John told me I seemed very "cultured." Little did he know that at that very moment I was carrying in my camera bag a card game I'd just bought for Dave called "Name that Bum Hole!" They're flash cards featuring the rear ends of various animals; you're supposed to guess the animal based on, yes, its bum hole. How's that for cultured?! I wish I'd thought to show it to John; he'd have gotten a kick out of it. We did manage to talk about "Ants!" starring Suzanne Somers, which as you know I recently viewed, so he's aware that I'm not all highbrow.

Anyway, we had a great time and John was every bit as warm and authentic as his blog. I only wish I'd also met his bulldog Dorothy and witnessed her toe-nibbling skills firsthand. Maybe next time.

I walked from there back up to Baker Street, where I caught the tube home. On the way I came across this rather provocative graffiti: "I farted in yoga."

I also passed some misinformed lunatic with a megaphone ranting at mask-wearers on the sidewalk on Oxford Street: "Are we living in Guantanamo Bay?! Get those face coverings off! You're damaging your children's health!"

I gave him this expression:

So, anyway, it was a fun day all around and I'm glad to have made a new real-life connection as a result of the blogosphere. (And to have gotten out from under the feet of the workers at the flat!)

Another Eye

Remember the utility box I blogged a few days ago -- the one with two eyes? Well, I was walking Olga yesterday and realized that the reverse side also features a big single eye. Would I have recognized it as an eye if I hadn't seen the others, though? Being alone, it has no context and seems more like an abstraction.

I'm reminded of that oft-repeated phrase from "The Handmaid's Tale": Under his eye.

Kind of creepy.

A quiet day around here yesterday. I read, I walked the dog. I framed and hung some pictures, including the ones I got for donating to preserve Prospect Cottage, the former home and garden of filmmaker Derek Jarman in Dungeness. (In addition to the pink image of the house I showed you in that post, I have a photo of the garden taken when Jarman was alive, showing his gardening overalls blowing on the clothesline.) I used one of my found Ikea frames from the Morocco pictures, as well as a glass borderless clip frame I found many years ago and tucked away in a closet.

In the clip frame were these:

Eight identical postcards from the V&A Museum featuring a photo by John Cowan taken at Buckingham Palace in 1961. It's a great picture, but it's even more hypnotic reproduced eight times over, isn't it? Anyway, now I have all these postcards. They're in mint condition despite sitting in a closet for the last five years, so if you'd like one drop me an e-mail with your name and address*. First seven people to request one will get a card! (I'm keeping one myself.)

*edited to remove my e-mail address for archival purposes

Dog Tag

I polished off another Newbery book yesterday -- I only have three left! Woo hoo! This one was called "A Year Down Yonder," about a girl who goes to live with her no-nonsense grandmother in southern Illinois in 1937. My favorite sentence was this one, describing an apparently homely neighbor: "Her eyes and her teeth aimed all over the room." I think that's brilliant.

Afterwards, Olga and I took a walk to the cemetery. Above, at Fortune Green, she posed in front of the wintry dogwood shrubs with their colorful stems.  We have a couple of those same bushes but ours don't seem as eye-catching. Maybe they're better in larger groups.

We had a bit of drama about two-thirds of the way into her walk when I realized her dog tag was missing. I wouldn't care, except that it has our names, address and phone numbers on it. I don't know why this bothers me as it's information that would have been in a phone book years ago, and is probably on the Internet now, but I hated to think of it just lying out there for someone to find. So we retraced our steps -- which ornery Olga hated because it wasn't our routine -- and darned if we didn't find the tag, lying in the mud at the cemetery gate.

The pile of discarded Christmas trees at Fortune Green is growing. This is nothing compared to what it will look like in a few days. Just in the time that we were walking nearby, people dragged at least four more to the heap.

Was this a mob hit?

Back home again, I finished the second volume of David Sedaris' diaries, which brought us right up to December 2020 and thus contained his reflections on Trump and Covid. I enjoyed the book and his writing is always entertaining, but it also seemed to drive home how obnoxious he can be. Some of the things he says to people seem downright mean-spirited. I guess a person doesn't become a millionaire writer by being polite, though, right? Break those social boundaries!

Parakeets and Brambles

As you can see, the parakeets are adapting to the new suet balls. I devised a trick to make them more palatable -- I break them open before I put them in the feeder. They really are ROCK hard. Tiger Woods could tee off with them. Dave's theory is that they're old and they've been hanging around Homebase for a while, which is certainly possible.

Don't you love the ballets the birds perform on the feeder? I love their perfectly balanced poses -- in this case, like a Valentine heart.

We get as many as three at a time, but I've seen more in the trees. The magpies and the starlings also like the suet balls. I haven't seen the little birds eat them much, but maybe they can't get past these linebackers blocking the way.

Here's what I did yesterday. It looks like a picture of nothing, but believe me, it's something.

See that tangle of brown growth atop the white yard waste bag? It's all old, dead blackberry vines (or "brambles," as the British so quaintly call them). I cut them out of that area just behind them and slightly to the right, next to the fence. I wanted to get that dead growth out of there to let more light reach the ground, where we have daylilies and bluebells. The poor daylilies didn't even bloom last year because they were so shaded out.

Cutting blackberries has to be the most miserable job in the whole garden. They fight back every step of the way, snagging on clothes and skin, drawing blood. I finally got them all cut up and packed away in bags for the rubbish guys to remove, but even though I wore gloves I am a scratched-up mess. I also cleaned out some other dead undergrowth (foreground) and pulled a bunch of ivy out of the bed at rear left, where the borage grows in the spring.

You can see how thin and muddy our lawn looks at this time of year. It's a sight.

There is plenty more to do, but we have a couple of months before anything starts growing again so I can pace myself. Dave and I have concluded that in our earnest desire to "re-wild" the garden we let it go a little too untended last summer. This year we're going to try to better balance the re-wilding with weed-pulling and trimming.

I don't see any sign that our burdock plants re-seeded. Maybe that's just as well. They were a fun experiment and certainly big and impressive, but a pain in the neck when they developed all those bristly seed heads. On the other hand, we have plenty of teasels.

Oh, and you can see my foxgloves, potted up and waiting out the winter at right. Some of them look better than others, and a few have died, but I think we'll still have plenty by the time we plant them out in the spring.

The Eyes Have It

Happy New Year, everybody! There is something exciting about starting fresh, isn't there? Even in the smallest ways. When I did the dishes last night, for example, I made sure to get the coffee press into the dishwasher -- we usually wash it only when we have room and just rinse it out the rest of the time, but it seemed important to get all of last year's coffee residue cleared away.

I finished "The High King" yesterday. It got better after about 150 pages, when I'd finally stopped resisting and immersed myself fully in the plot, but I certainly won't be reading the rest of the books in the series. What's interesting is, I looked up the book on Goodreads, and it has a very high rating. Lots of people raved about it. Some said it was one of their favorite books as a child. One said the series is every bit as worthwhile as Harry Potter.

I am completely bewildered by this enthusiasm, but I guess I can see how a certain Dungeons-and-Dragons-loving type of kid could get fired up about it. I tried to be somewhat gentle in my review. The last thing I want to do is discourage someone from reading a book that they might love. Not that anyone in our library reads that series anymore.

Here's the new cyclamen -- or "cyclurinamen," as Mitchell cleverly dubbed it yesterday -- on the left with the red flowers. And on the right is one of our canna lilies, which is looking a bit scorched by our earlier cold weather. I had to fill the pot with terra cotta shards because the freaking squirrels have recently insisted on trying to dig up the plant.

Oh, and those new fat balls I bought for the bird feeder? The parakeets don't like them. In fact none of the birds seem to like them as much as the ones we just used up. I think the new ones are harder, and the birds have to work more to break them apart. I guess if they get hungry enough they'll manage.

Dave and I did indeed drink our bubbly last night, and made a toast to the new year. We also watched "London Has Fallen," a silly thriller film from several years ago in which numerous London landmarks get wantonly (but spectacularly) demolished by terrorists. Come to think of it, maybe not the best choice for setting the tone for the new year, but oh well.

Come on, 2022! Don't fail us!

(Top photo: Some curious street art I found during Olga's neighborhood walk.)