One Man And His Dog

Inspired by and restless after our adventures on the Capital Ring, Dave and I have started walking the London LOOP. This walk is twice the length of the Capital Ring and far more rural, circulating at zone 6 as opposed to zone 3. Our first stretch was from the ever amusingly named Cockfosters to Enfield Lock. After walking through Trent Park and Salmon Valley and ending up with about three fields’ worth of sodden clay soil attached to our trainers, we stopped for a wintry picnic in Hilly Fields park beside Turkey Brook. We were next to a football pitch where a man and his daughter were playing with their rather aggressive and clearly untrained mock-pitbull dog. This being in a week where dangerous dogs had been rather in the news for mauling children, we kept our distance. However, the dog soon spotted our sandwiches and charged over to us, leaping right onto Dave’s lap, covering him with mud and growling ferociously. The dog didn’t appear to have a name – its owner just called out, “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” and wrenched the dog back to their ball game. Thirty seconds later, the process was repeated. Not a word of apology to us though – the owner said it was our fault for eating our lunch “in a dog area”. I don’t like to think of our public parks purely as “dog areas”. And it’s extremely worrying that they thought their dog’s almost vicious response to an innocent bystander consuming food was acceptable. But a dog-owner who is prepared to apologise for their canine’s actions is a rare British breed indeed.

Heaven V?

The Holmes Place chain of gyms was recently taken over by Richard Branson’s unstoppable-despite-being-crap-at-everything Virgin empire, so our Crouch End branch is currently being rebranded. Now that we have the tacky Virgin Active logo emblazoned everywhere we look, I am starting to notice some additional changes which also typify the Virgin approach to business. Suddenly, like on their Pendolino trains, the toilets are out of order. The timetables are in chaos. There aren’t enough machines or locker space available to meet the demands of the sudden but annual upsurge in attendance of members with resolutions at the start of a New Year. The swimming pool is closed for essential engineering works. We are promised 20 million pounds of investment which so far seems to have gone into buying impractical black sweat (and I mean sweat) shirts for the personal trainers to wear, changing the name of the health and beauty spa into something too embarrassing for the reception staff to say (see the title of this entry) when they answer the phone, and nasty new-look membership cards. No doubt as more investment pours into the club the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” will be ignored and any money will be ill-used and impractically spent and everything will end up being worse than before. And no doubt unless we book our training sessions or swims four weeks in advance, eventually walk-in membership prices will soar. Holmes Place was in debt and our fees were being used to pay off overdraft interest, so something needed to be done, but what a shame that a takeover wasn’t offered by a company with a greater sense of style and experience in the sporting world. Why couldn’t Virgin have just stuck to making records? And why oh why is that grinning man with the trimmed beard, bad cardigans and ballooning ambitions so bloody successful?

REBECCA

Theme Parks

One thing I like about London is the ease of having “themed days”. For his birthday in 2005, I took Dave out for a penguin day. I had adopted him his own Magellanic penguin (called Sausage – don’t ask) on Magdalena island off the coast of Chile, and to build on this, I took him to London Zoo to see the penguins being fed (including the star Rockhoppers Rocky and Stanley, sent over from Whipsnade as a punishment for having been naughty, frequently playing football with eggs that were supposed to be incubating), and to see the film March Of The Penguins which had been released the day before. A few years before this, I indulged in a medically-themed day, going to the Old Operating Theatre at London Bridge and then to see the Spectacular Bodies exhibition at the Hayward (subtitled The Art And Science Of The Human Body from Leonardo Till Now). And earlier this week, Dave and I had a Foundling themed day. We spent the afternoon in the Foundling Museum at Coram Fields, gaining the background to the Foundling Hospital established by Thomas Coram in 1739 and its famous benefactors and patrons of the arts, Hogarth and Handel. We went because in the evening we had tickets to see the magnificent Coram Boy at the National theatre. A breathtakingly wonderful and moving production that everyone should see because it was the London stage at its absolute best.

REBECCA