I've now managed to eke three posts out of my trip to Gladstone Park, which isn't bad given I was only there for half an hour. This was nineteen days ago, just before 'non-essential travel' was outlawed, and I kind of wish I'd been somewhere more exciting than Neasden.
Since then I've been no further than walking distance from my front door, which means my backlog of non-local excursions has now dried up.
I won't be crossing to the other side of the Thames, or revisiting Neasden, any time soon. I'd quite like to see central London under lockdown, but I'm having to experience that through the tweets of others. I wouldn't mind a trip to Richmond, but that's a treat for later. Anywhere outside London is so now far away as to be unimaginable. I've even thought of a really good reason to go to Hornchurch, but that'll have to wait.
So this is going to make blogging more challenging. Not only am I unable to go anywhere to research new stuff, but there aren't any new projects or developments to report on, only relentless mothballing and awkward societal changes. But I'll find a way.
I can still get to the Olympic Park, and have been heading there a lot (n.b. no more than once daily) for regular constitutionals. The Olympic Park is conveniently huge and varied, so there's always something to report on even when nothing much is happening. I reckon I could knock up at least 20 posts about the Olympic Park, or at least inspired by the Olympic Park, without running out of ideas. I've also taken enough photos of the Olympic Park over the last fortnight to keep me stocked up even if sunbathing hordes invade and get the whole place locked down for weeks.
But that would be dull, so I won't just do that. Indeed you'll have noticed over the last couple of weeks how I've been managing to blog without going anywhere much at all. There's always historical research to undertake, or speculative safaris to pretend to go on, or musings on the strange state of limbo we find ourselves in, or reruns of past excursions 'on this day', or interactive features to devise, or thought experiments on how the trains might be running, or oddities from the suburbs to list, or all of the above as and when necessary.
Best of all I have thousands and thousands of photos of London (and the wider world) I've never previously shown you, usually because they weren't relevant or weren't very good, so I ought to be able to put together all sorts of illustrated posts about places I haven't visited recently. My Neasden posts were padded out with vintage shots from 2006, 2012 and 2017, for example, so I'm sure I can always do something similar again.
So I'll be blogging on... health, computer and wi-fi permitting. Let's see how much of lockdown I can pad out. After all, what else is there to do?
