07:00 Mug of tea
07:30 Crumpet
08:00 Paper shop
08:30 Evening Standard
09:00 Giving Parkrun a miss
09:30 Pigeons in the park
10:00 Leaden skies
10:30 Spits and spots
11:00 A church bell rings
11:30 Mug of tea
12:00 Cheese & Onion
Less dull Saturday morning
07:00 It's the weekend and a wealth of opportunities spread before us. Cultural, recreational, social, explorational, motivational, architectural, gastronomical, provincial, parochial, financial, retail, whatever. So many possibilities. Or you could just waste the day.
07:30 Just flicking through a copy of Tunnels & Tunnelling International magazine over breakfast. The proposed Stad Ship Tunnel looks astonishing, a mile-long bore designed to let cruise ships avoid the most turbulent section of Norway's fjordy coastline.
08:00 Buying my paper I interrupted the shop assistant who was trying to unload today's delivery of fresh milk into the chiller cabinet, and given the steady drip of construction workers nipping in behind I fear the bottles may still be in the aisle.
08:30 It's not a good sign that hundreds of copies of the Evening Standard remain in the hopper outside Farringdon station, having not been picked up last night. No wonder they're stopping printing a Friday edition from 2nd August (and Mondays from 5th August, and going weekly later in the year).
09:00 This guy in Hendon was loading a skip onto a truck but had parked diagonally across the pavement so the only way past was to walk out into the busy Edgware Road, and he didn't acknowledge me, not even a glance, but it's OK I'm still alive.
09:30 I don't know what's most surprising about the Barnet Millenium Walk, the fact the council no longer acknowledges it, the fact its signs only point in one direction or the fact they spelled Millenium with one 'n'. I failed to follow it beyond Silkstream Park.
10:00 I've always been amused that there's a whole neighbourhood of northwest London essentially called Colin. Today I left Colindeep Lane and found myself crossing Colin Gardens, Colin Crescent and Colin Drive. One day I will blog properly about the weirdness of Colindeep, but today I merely shuddered across its grim motorway footbridge/railway subway combo.
10:30 I was pleasantly surprised to get a 4G signal on the Northern line all the way from Golders Green to Camden Town, having totally lost track of how far the incremental rollout has progressed. It seems TfL have lost track too - the explanatory text on their website is behind the times (although the attached pdf map is better informed).
11:00 Even in this very meh weather London Bridge is still full of weekend sightseers and global tourists grabbing their chance to cross the iconic span and get a selfie with Tower Bridge in the background. "Look it's the tallest building in the world" said a mother to her children, pointing at the Shard, and I kept diplomatically quiet.
11:30 It's the weekend and a wealth of opportunities spread before us. Cultural, recreational, social, explorational, motivational, architectural, gastronomical, provincial, parochial, financial, retail, whatever. So many possibilities. Or you could just waste the day going to Burnt Oak and back. Still, I got my 13,000 steps in.
12:00 So yeah, I had no idea what to post today, having not been anywhere overly exciting yesterday and having decided I wasn't going to subject you to another day of transport-related waffling. What I've discovered is that you can get more comments by posting three dozen words than by writing 1500 (and that I probably needn't have written this extra exposition either).
