Back to Barn Hill
On Saturday afternoon, Dave and I finally completed the Capital Ring, our 75-mile trek around the greener outskirts of London which we started back in May. We’d intended to finish a long time before this, but free days at weekends seemed to become sparse as we got embroiled in flat redecoration and trips to Canada.
Saturday dawned with glorious weather and miraculously free of engineering works on any of the Tube lines we needed so it was the perfect day. We headed out to Greenford on the Central Line and then found that we seemed to have left the hilliest part of the walk until last, as we climbed through Paradise Fields up Horsenden Hill, up to Harrow school and down across its rugby pitches, through Preston Park and then back up to Barn Hill, overlooking the City and the everlasting building site of Wembley Stadium. We felt pretty proud of ourselves as we sat on a bench at the viewpoint beside a pond, surveying the conurbation beneath us. The Capital Ring is not a difficult walk, but it’s taken a reasonable degree of commitment to get all the way around it.
Like all of London, the Capital Ring embraces contrasts. You see some of the most opulent (Richmond) and some of the most squalid (Hackney Wick) parts of the city suburbs. There are palaces (Syon House, Eltham) and sewers (the Greenway). There are streams, canals and rivers, forests, woods, parks and open meadows. There is the world’s ugliest hospital (Ealing). There is a windmill (Wimbledon). There are cranes, swans, ducks, coots, squirrels, rats, voles, mice, woodpeckers, jays and rutting deer. There is dogshit (Crouch End’s Parkland Walk). Some areas are undergoing rapid change and construction, such as the Docklands and 2012 Olympic Park to be. Some are undergoing painfully slow change and construction (Wembley and, if I think about it, the 2012 Olympic Park to be).
It’s quite surprising to find ourselves still in London so late in the year. Dave still has job applications pending, and I’m currently very in and out of work and needing to make a significant improvement to my level of income. Subtitling in the UK is finally dying a dismal death, as our rates have been cut by 25-40% in the last 12 months and the work is increasingly being sourced out to India, Kenya and Malaysia, so that London-based companies have a chance of keeping up in the ridiculous price war our Burbank clients have initiated. Quality of output has plummeted but no one but the subtitlers seems to care.
Despite having had several subtitling-free days since September, I haven’t found the time to blog. Or the time to brush up my German or write that novel or do anything else of note. I have done a lot of painting – and that’s emulsion on walls, not watercolours on parchment. It’s amazing how when you have infinite time to do all those things you think you’d do if you didn’t have to work, you achieve precisely nothing.
REBECCA
Saturday dawned with glorious weather and miraculously free of engineering works on any of the Tube lines we needed so it was the perfect day. We headed out to Greenford on the Central Line and then found that we seemed to have left the hilliest part of the walk until last, as we climbed through Paradise Fields up Horsenden Hill, up to Harrow school and down across its rugby pitches, through Preston Park and then back up to Barn Hill, overlooking the City and the everlasting building site of Wembley Stadium. We felt pretty proud of ourselves as we sat on a bench at the viewpoint beside a pond, surveying the conurbation beneath us. The Capital Ring is not a difficult walk, but it’s taken a reasonable degree of commitment to get all the way around it.
Like all of London, the Capital Ring embraces contrasts. You see some of the most opulent (Richmond) and some of the most squalid (Hackney Wick) parts of the city suburbs. There are palaces (Syon House, Eltham) and sewers (the Greenway). There are streams, canals and rivers, forests, woods, parks and open meadows. There is the world’s ugliest hospital (Ealing). There is a windmill (Wimbledon). There are cranes, swans, ducks, coots, squirrels, rats, voles, mice, woodpeckers, jays and rutting deer. There is dogshit (Crouch End’s Parkland Walk). Some areas are undergoing rapid change and construction, such as the Docklands and 2012 Olympic Park to be. Some are undergoing painfully slow change and construction (Wembley and, if I think about it, the 2012 Olympic Park to be).
It’s quite surprising to find ourselves still in London so late in the year. Dave still has job applications pending, and I’m currently very in and out of work and needing to make a significant improvement to my level of income. Subtitling in the UK is finally dying a dismal death, as our rates have been cut by 25-40% in the last 12 months and the work is increasingly being sourced out to India, Kenya and Malaysia, so that London-based companies have a chance of keeping up in the ridiculous price war our Burbank clients have initiated. Quality of output has plummeted but no one but the subtitlers seems to care.
Despite having had several subtitling-free days since September, I haven’t found the time to blog. Or the time to brush up my German or write that novel or do anything else of note. I have done a lot of painting – and that’s emulsion on walls, not watercolours on parchment. It’s amazing how when you have infinite time to do all those things you think you’d do if you didn’t have to work, you achieve precisely nothing.
REBECCA
posted by Rebecca Dodgson | 10:31 am
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