More Hidden London

Saturday 3 February

Following last October’s Euston tour, I offered to treat Ray to a ticket to another one of the tours as a birthday present. Ray is cursed by having been born on Boxing Day and therefore doomed to a lifetime of birthday sidelining due to everyone being too exhausted/bloated to celebrate it much. I’ve always tried to make some effort to acknowledge his birthday but was ashamed to realise that I don’t think I’ve bought him a birthday present the past few years, so decided to redress the balance.

This tour was titled “Charing Cross: Access All Areas”. Its focus is the disused Jubilee Line areas at Charing Cross, plus the construction tunnel that runs under Trafalgar Square. We took the Elizabeth Line (useful service, this) from Reading to Tottenham Court Road and then walked down to Charing Cross. We had a bit of time to kill before our slot for the tour, so wandered briefly into Victoria Embankment Gardens. Amazing to think that this gateway was once actually at the water’s edge.

Gateway that used to mark the north bank of the Thames

Charing Cross was formerly, but is no longer, on the Jubilee Line; today it’s on the Bakerloo and Northern lines only (both older than the Jubilee). Several different underground stations seem to have been called Charing Cross: Strand (Northern line) and Trafagar Square (Bakerloo line) were combined when the Jubilee Line opened in 1979 and renamed Charing Cross, while the original Charing Cross tube station was renamed Embankment in 1976.

Original route of the Jubilee Line

The original Jubilee Line opened in 1979 and ran between Stanmore in the north to Charing Cross in the south, as per this from the closed area we visited at Charing Cross. Evidently it was actually supposed to have opened in 1977 to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee but overran by two years – according to our tour guide, this was due to a cock up in the construction of the new escalators at Charing Cross (which, ironically, were destined only to be in use for 20 years). (The Jubilee Line was originally going to be called the Fleet Line, but was renamed in honour of the Jubilee. One hopes that the impact of this patriotic gesture hadn't worn off a bit by the time the line eventually opened.)

The Jubilee Line extension opened in 1999, providing a connection through to the redeveloped London Docklands. The extension was started from Green Park, the last but one station on the original Jubilee Line, and bypassed Charing Cross. The reason for abandoning Charing Cross was something to do with tunnel alignment and avoiding twisty-turny bends under the Thames. This useful image that I nicked from the internet shows the current Jubilee Line; the new stations are to the right of Green Park.

The lead tour guide proved to be the same exuberant young chap from the Euston tour, though he split the talking with an assistant guide on this occasion. We started off by going down the stairs to the tube station concourse at CC. After another exciting being-led-through-usually-locked-doors moment, we found ourselves at the top of a set of escalators. We walked down these (they’re switched off now) into what was the Jubilee Line area.

The escalator we'd just walked down

The disused Jubilee Line area at Charing Cross

Although the Jubilee Line at Charing Cross is no longer on the live Tube network, its tunnels are still used for storing trains and its escalators and platforms are hired by TV and film companies. We paused in the above hall area to watch some video footage of various TV shows: I can’t remember all of them but they included an episode of Spooks I think, plus something showing Matt Damon running through a crowd (The Bourne Ultimatum?) plus the James Bond film Skyfall, in which Daniel Craig (or possibly his stunt double) slides down an escalator in pursuit of a baddie. Evidently the disused platforms and other areas get customised to represent whichever tube station is required for the production, as with the faked Circle and District Line sign below. The (empty) train in the platform picture had just pulled in when we got there; I think the guide said that the old platforms and tunnels are still used as holding bays for TfL stock.

One of the disused platforms. Train not in passenger use

The escalator used in Skyfall

Ah, British Rail

Fake Circle and District Line sign

For the next bit of the tour, we were taken into the construction tunnel that was dug in the 1970s to carry away spoil from the alterations to Charing Cross to accommodate the new Jubilee Line. According to the tour booklet, this was to allow the spoil to be loaded onto trucks in a quieter location rather than cluttering up the Strand. The tunnel goes right under Trafalgar Square, with a bend in the middle to avoid the foundations of Nelson’s Column. The unloading site was where the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery now is, and the last part of the tunnel has been blocked up and backfilled (bit of a shame - would have provided lots of material for an art heist movie).

The bend in the construction tunnel to avoid Nelson's Column

The blocked-off end of the tunnel

The last thing we were taken to see was the Craven Street ventilation shaft, built at the time of the Jubilee Line's construction to allow heat to escape from the tunnels. For this, we were issued with specially-reinforced caps as we had to duck under some low bars to get to it. According to the tour booklet, it’s almost as tall as Nelson’s column. Afterwards we walked round into Craven Street to identify the outside of the building that houses it.

In my reinforced cap

Looking up the ventilation shaft

The exterior of the Craven Street ventilation shaft

After the tour, we walked up through Bloomsbury to King's Cross and had a nice lunch at the Kimchee.

More books I have read

'The Night Tiger' by Yangzse Choo

Semi-mystical story set in 1930s Malaya (as ‘twas then). There are two protagonists: Ren, an 11-year-old orphan employed as a houseboy, and Ji Lin, a young woman in her late teens apprenticed to a dressmaker. They do not know each other but from the start are obviously on paths that will lead them to meet each other at some point.

The story centres around a severed human finger, its origins and a quest to reunite it with its owner. The detached finger belonged to a Dr Macfarlane, Ren’s employer. When Macfarlane is dying he asks Ren to find his finger and reunite him with it before 49 days have passed. The body must be made whole again before this deadline, or Macfarlane’s soul will be doomed never to find peace. After Macfarlane dies, and following his instructions, Ren travels to the home of William Acton, a surgeon and friend of Macfarlane’s, bearing a note vouching for Ren and asking Acton to take him on as a houseboy, which he does. It later transpires that Macfarlane lost his finger during a hunting trip with Acton, who donated the finger as a specimen to the hospital where he works.

Ji Lin is doing a secret second job as a dance hall hostess, to pay off the debts her mother has run up playing mahjong. Ji Lin comes into possession of the severed finger from a punter at the dance hall, who dies shortly afterwards. She is later approached by another man at the dance hall, who asks if she knows where the finger is and claims that it’s a family heirloom of his and the first man stole it from him. Later, Ji Lin helps her stepbrother Shin, a medical student, to tidy the pathology storeroom at the hospital where he is working over the summer, and they discover a lot of specimen fingers are missing.

This book was a perfectly enjoyable read but I think I lost the plot a bit (Reese Witherspoon informed me on the back cover that I wouldn’t be able to put it down, but I’m not sure I’d go that far). It was a bit hard to keep track of who had stolen the finger from whom/where. Ren and Ji Lin keep having very similar dreams involving Ren’s twin brother Yi, who died three years earlier. There are five bearers of Chinese names that form some sort of set corresponding to the five Confucian Virtues: Yi (righteousness), Ren (benevolence), Ji Lin (‘ji’ meaning wisdom), Shin (‘xin’ meaning faithfulness) and a mystery fifth element, Li (meaning ritual or order), whose bearer is not identified until late on. Several different people are doing wrong things: turns out Yi has been causing bad things to happen to his brother in the hope that Ren will join him in death; an orderly at the hospital is selling body parts as good luck charms; and a third person is able to bring about other's deaths through force of will. That's quite a talent.

The story makes reference throughout to the legend of the ‘weretiger’, a tiger who can assume human form (or was it the other way around?). The finger is rumoured to have been a weretiger’s finger. There are hints dropped throughout that Dr Macfarlane was a weretiger, but the story stops short of confirming the legend as reality - it does state that prior to his death Dr Macfarlane had been thought to have been losing his mind a bit. This blog post discusses weretigers and mentions Choo's novel under 'The Weretiger in Modern Media'.

'Deep Country' by Neil Ansell

Neil Ansell’s story of his five-year tenancy of a remote cottage in the Welsh mountains. Mum passed this on to me. I’m not as interested as I probably should be in extended descriptions of wildlife and scenery, but was reasonably interested in why Ansell had made this decision and how he had managed to live. As it turns out, it’s never made clear why Ansell moved to such a remote place, but he refers to “having burned what few bridges I had left”. While reading the book I kept expecting that at some point he would explain what he meant and what had led him to choose such a lifestyle, but in fact he never shares what took him to the cottage. Evidently he knows the owners of the estate that the cottage is on, and took over its tenancy from some friends of his who had decided it was a tad too primitive for them. Prior to Ansell’s occupation, the cottage had last been lived in full-time over 40 years previously. He apparently moved in with only a bag of clothes, wanting to “know how lightly I could tread on the earth”.

The cottage seems to have had pretty much no modern facilities, being without electricity, gas, running water or plumbing. He doesn’t go into detail on how he coped with the last, but refers to bathing in local rivers. It seemed incredible that he decided to do without a cooker: he declined to buy the previous tenants’ two-ring cooker, on the grounds that he didn’t want to lug gas bottles up the hillside and instead elected to cook over the fire – I was amazed that he'd managed to successfully cook anything by this method, though I realise that people must have done so in the past. Also incredibly, he managed without a car, relying on hitch-hiking for local travel, and indeed also to get to the cottage in the first place. I had no idea anyone still hitch-hiked.

Ansell is incredibly self-sufficient, living in primitive and isolated (by UK standards) conditions. He seems to have been able to turn his hand to all manner of practical tasks, to the extent that I suspected he must have had some previous experience of backwoodsmanship. He earns occasional money doing chainsaw jobs in the woods, and also did some work (voluntary, I assume) for a local field centre, monitoring bird boxes and the like. He picks mushrooms – he does note that he knows his way around mushrooms – and preserves them in vinegar and herbs. He makes jam, from what I can’t remember. One winter he was snowed in for six weeks, and evidently managed. I was amazed at how well he must have stocked up if, as he relates, he didn’t need to immediately rush to town to buy anything when the thaw came.

There’s a LOT of detail about birds and bird behaviour, which was quite interesting though the extended descriptions didn’t always hold my attention very well. I’m not all that knowledgeable about birds so kept having to Google images of the creatures Ansell was describing, as well as e.g. the relative size of a goshawk vs. a thrush. There’s additionally other, furrier, wildlife: foxes, polecats, stoats, hares.

He’s not overly heavy on the introspection, but of the snowy winter just mentioned, he notes “it felt liberating to wake in the morning and know that today there was no chance whatsoever that I would see anyone, nor tomorrow either”. There are some interesting reflections on thinking you know yourself and discovering that there is, perhaps, no fixed self. It’s certainly an amazing amount of time to have spent alone – he occasionally meets local farmers/farmworkers during daylight hours, but relates spending most evenings staring into the flames of his fire.

Ansell lived in the cottage for five years. In the latter stages of his time there he developed what sounds like a pretty serious thyroid condition, involving hospital treatment, and reluctantly has a phone installed as a consequence. It’s not clear though that even this illness was what made him revert to living in a town. As he relates it, after five years, he felt he had to move back to ‘normal life’ if he was ever going to, or he would end up staying at the cottage permanently.

‘Deep Country’ was published in 2011. In this Guardian piece from the same year, Ansell expands a bit on his life prior to moving to the cottage and on his reasons for leaving it.

'Solitaire' by Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman is my OU colleague Guy’s niece, and secured a six-figure publishing deal for Solitaire when she was still a teenager. I wouldn’t usually put Young Adult fiction on our book group list, but I was quite curious to see what sort of book a publisher buys from a teenager. (Guy actually recommended Alice’s later novel Loveless in preference, but I’d already put Solitaire on our list by then.)

The story: Victoria ‘Tori’ Spring is in Year 12 at Harvey Greene Grammar School for Girls, or ‘Higgs’. There’s also a boys’ grammar school in the town, which Tori’s brother Charlie and his boyfriend Nick attend. ‘Higgs’ accepts boys into the sixth form, so some boys have transferred over, including Tori’s primary school friend Lucas Ryan, and one Michael Holden, with whom Tori becomes friends, albeit she seems unwilling to think of it in those terms.

‘Solitaire’ – or rather Solitaire.co.uk – is a blog which is initially blank but then messages start appearing on it. It comes to the school’s attention when its creators start playing music over the school tannoy, putting posters up around the school and hijacking the school's computer systems. As the messages progress, Michael observes to Tori that they seem to be particularly relevant to her. Things eventually turn sinister at a house party, when a post appears on Solitaire inciting the partygoers to beat up one of the Year 12 boys present. Bothered by this, Tori decides that she must stop Solitaire.

Tori’s brother Charlie, who is in Year 11, has had various issues including an eating disorder, obsessive-compulsive behaviour and self-harming. A couple of the others expressed reservations about the relative ages of Charlie and Nick, in that Charlie is only 15. I can’t say that aspect of their relationship bothered me overly, or indeed had even occurred to me (they’re only one school year apart, for God’s sake – it’s not as though Nick’s 35) but other aspects of it didn’t seem entirely healthy, namely the degree to which Nick seems to be expected to look after Charlie and the pressure put on him; Tori’s blaming of Nick after Charlie’s brief relapse seems entirely unfair. (Slight sidebar: this might be my age showing but a world in which the school rugby captain can have a boyfriend, and this not be worthy of remark, seems like Utopia to me. Is this really how it is in schools these days? Or was this slightly rose-tinted thinking on Oseman’s part?)

Tori thinks her classmates are all soulless conformist idiots and that she’s miserable because she has some sort of deep insight that her parents and friends lack (actually, in fairness the latter part isn't stated explicitly, but you get the strong impression that that's her view). She appears to be in a bit of a down phase of recent-ish onset: her grades have slipped since entering the sixth form, perhaps due to some sort of fallout from her brother’s problems; perhaps due to difficulties with her friendship group, albeit that her ill-feeling towards her best friend Becky is pretty transparently due to envy of Becky’s social standing. Becky is evidently still fond of Tori, as evidenced by the final storyline where she runs to the school still in her pyjamas to try to rescue Tori from whatever it is she’s planning to do. Despite studying A-level English Literature Tori hates books and doesn’t read them, because none of it is real – though she loves films, which she admits herself is illogical. (At one point I found myself thinking, in grandma fashion, that she’d probably be happier during the day if she didn’t stay up all night watching films.) 

I thought Solitaire was an OK read. I didn’t hate it, and it was quite interesting to get a taste of the sort of thing that the modern teenager might read. An important message seems to be Tori’s discovery that everyone’s a bit miserable really, or certainly a lot of people of her age. There was plenty that was irritating about Tori, but that’s not to say she’s an atypical portrayal of a teenager - she's probably pretty spot on. And I did keep trying to bear in mind that I’m hardly this book’s target audience.

Oh, and I've never read The Catcher in the Rye, so have no idea whether the comparisons are remotely justified.

Postscript: Solitaire was first published in 2014. The first thing you encounter on opening the edition I read was an author’s note from Alice Oseman dated 2020, urging her readers to ‘Please read safely and responsibly’. At this, I muttered that reading is not meant to be a “safe” endeavour – it’s meant to expose you to new ideas and sometimes to scary or unpleasant things. The note appears directed at readers who are fans of Oseman’s more recent graphic novel series Heartstopper, which has been picked up by Netflix. It sounds rather as though she has made some edits to Solitaire for her Heartstopper audience – are they younger? I don’t know.

Postpostscript: do UK secondary schools now have tannoys? I mean, they might do for all I know. V. American. Also, it's a bit odd that the term ‘sixth form’ is even still used given the switch some while back to American naming of school years – I mean, it made sense in my day when the last two, non-compulsory, years of secondary school WERE actually the lower and upper sixth, but less so now that they’re termed Years 12 and 13. (As far as I can gather the UK has still stopped short of adopting the US terms for the final four years of secondary (high) school (freshman, sophomore, junior, senior) but perhaps it’s only a matter of time.)

Hawksmoor walkabout

Saturday 17 February

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

From T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land:  Part I. The Burial of the Dead

The Waste Land. The keynote of a selection of T. S. Eliot poems that formed part of my A-level English Literature syllabus. As a sixth former, the literary references and constant foreign-language insertions helped to make the whole poem opaque to me – evidently our teacher had expected this, because my A-level text has annotations next to practically every line where she had had to explain to us what Eliot was believed to have been talking about. I’m aware that TWL is regarded as a significant poem and am quite prepared to believe it is, but it was certainly lost on me at the time. I’ve just re-read Part I in the course of locating the above quote, and enjoyed it rather more than I remember doing at 18. Perhaps having to study something always takes the life out of it a bit.

(For a long while now – quite possibly ever since my A-level – Mum has suggested that I read The Four Quartets, especially Little Gidding, as giving a more positive impression of Eliot. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t think I’ve read them yet.)

The reason for the quote from TWL was its reference to the church of St Mary Woolnoth. Various small snippets from TWL had stuck in my mind over the years, of which the name of this church was one, though I had never specifically sought it out before. Mum visited me in Reading a couple of weeks ago with a view to visiting some of the churches designed or contributed to by Nicholas Hawksmoor, an associate of Sir Christopher Wren who assisted with the concerted rebuild of churches that seems to have taken place after the Great Fire of London.

We took the Elizabeth Line from Reading to Liverpool Street, Mum armed with this useful map by Blue Crow media (pic nicked from their website). We ended up visiting six churches, the first five clustered reasonably close together in the City. Of the six, only two (St Mary Woolnoth and Christ Church Spitalfields) were fully designed by Hawksmoor; the others he contributed bits to, spires in the case of three and the top part of the tower in the case of one. There are a total of six churches wholly designed by Hawksmoor but visiting all of them would have meant travelling around a bit, and we decided to largely confine ourselves to several churches close together in the City of London, with a detour at the end at my request to view CCS. Unfortunately we had both overlooked to check in advance whether any of them were open on a Saturday, and none of them were – or perhaps Christ Church Spitalfields was, but we were tiring by then and didn’t bother to investigate. So we had to confine ourselves to viewing them from the outside - but had an interesting walkabout in the process.

St Michael, Cornhill

There was quite a large group of people assembling outside SMC – we couldn’t tell why, maybe waiting for a tour guide. I couldn’t photograph it properly without getting them in, hence this oddly-angled picture of the tower. Did snap this information board though. Apparently the upper parts of the tower were by Hawksmoor.

St Mary Woolnoth

Hawksmoor’s only City of London church out of the six wholly designed by him. St Mary Woolnoth is an unusual and severe-looking church, crammed onto a ridiculously tight plot at the junction of King William Street and Lombard Street. It was hard to tell whether at some point it had had a churchyard – it doesn’t appear to have one now. The little walkthrough behind it (Post Office Court) looks relatively modern so maybe the churchyard was sold off for building at some point. The church seems to have done well to still be standing – by all accounts it was threatened with demolition more than once and had Bank underground station constructed underneath it, losing its crypt in the process. Additionally, part of it seemed to be housing a Starbucks when we passed. Amazed it's maintained its dignity throughout all that.

St Mary Woolnoth

St Stephen Walbrook

The church of St Stephen Walbrook has a plaque on the side noting the founding of the Samaritans by its then-rector Chad Varah. Apparently the first Samaritans branch operated from a crypt beneath the church. Looking at the Wikipedia page, it doesn't actually mention any involvement of Hawksmoor in this church, but it appeared on Mum's leaflet so presumably there was something - a spire, I think.

Near to this church we found ourselves passing the Bloomberg building, and I mentioned the Mithraeum to Mum in passing. As it looked open, we decided to pop in - it was much more crowded than when Ruth and I had visited in January 2020 but we were able to catch the “immersive experience” where they dim the lights and play some recorded Latin chanting, such as the lads at the Temple of Mithras might have indulged in in the past.

St Stephen Walbrook

St Michael Paternoster Royal

After leaving that, we went down past Cannon Street station and along Upper Thames Street for a look at St Michael Paternoster Royal, where Dick Whittington is allegedly buried though no one now knows exactly where his grave was. Unlike the others, this church did have its door open, but we weren’t sure whether it’s still actually a church – there were some young people with musical instruments going inside. We poked our heads inside; the building seemed to be split into a church area in one half and what seemed to be some sort of meeting hall occupying the other.

St Michael Paternoster Royal

St James Garlickhythe

Hawksmoor designed the spire for this Wren church. I remember going to look at it briefly on a walkabout with Ray some years ago, probably amused by its name (see also St Andrew by the Wardrobe).

St James Garlickhythe

After St James G, we decided to seek lunch and after a bit of indecision found ourselves in Koya City, a Japanese noodle restaurant in the Bloomberg Arcade. I had fancied some Asian food but thought this looked full on passing it, but Mum spotted a table in the corner. Apparently Dad thinks she has a knack for e.g. finding a parking space in a car park that appears full. I had the Kamo Hiya-Atsu, duck in hot broth with cold udon. The duck soup was delicious; I wasn't so sure about the cold noodles. Mum had a frankly intimidatingly large tempura prawn: I think we had been expecting a selection of smaller prawns.

My lunch

Mum's massive tempura prawn

Christ Church, Spitalfields

After lunch I decided I wanted to go and see CCS, this being the only of Hawksmoor’s churches I could have visualized in advance. We retraced our steps back towards Liverpool Street and then veered off to the east, though ended up taking rather more of a meandering route than I think we needed to have done. On the way we passed this statue in Devonshire Square.

'The Knight of the Cnihtengild' by Denys Mitchell

We viewed the striking church from the side and the front before heading back to Liverpool Street.

CCS from the side

CCS from the front

Since our trip, I’ve learnt about Peter Ackroyd’s 1985 novel Hawksmoor, apparently about a series of murders committed in the Hawskmoor churches. Thinking this sounded a bit of a laugh I’ve just ordered a copy off AbeBooks for £2.95. Mum has been wading through Ackroyd’s London: The Biography for a little while now; I am hoping the novel proves somewhat lighter.

Walk with the Ramblers from Checkendon, 7.5 miles

Sunday 21 January

Another walk with the Mid Berks group, organized by Robert, whom I’d chatted to on the Lower Earley walk a couple of weeks earlier. There were only four of us on this walk – me, Robert, Alison, who’d also been on the Lower Earley walk, and a guy of about my age called Douglas, who works in financial services for Bloomberg and commutes to their City office a couple of times a week. (I did comment that I’d been in the basement of his building and what a lovely job Bloomberg have done with the Mithraeum. I might be remembering wrong but I’m sure he said something about having had to do a Mithraeum Quiz as part of his induction. That might have been a joke, I suppose.)

This walk started and finished in Checkendon, a village about eight miles north of Caversham and about a 15-minute drive. We met in a small car park by a recreation ground. To get there, I made use of what3words for the first time – it worked very well.

From the car park, we crossed the road and took a path across a field, stopping to look back at Checkendon Court. We then took country lanes towards Hammond’s Wood, turning left before we got to it and crossing over the A4074. Before we got to the road, Robert pointed out John Buckley’s ‘Nuba Survival’ sculpture in the distance over at Hammond’s Farm.

Shortly afterwards we had a bit of a conundrum as the footpath is signed through the grounds of a property called Massey’s Pightle, but there was also an enticing sign next to it informing us that there were dogs running loose. We decided to skip that and carried on up the lane, which joined the footpath a short way on, though when we looked back the way we’d come there was a sign sternly saying “Field Cottage Only”. Clearly the two properties are fighting it out as to who likes walkers less.

Looking back at Checkendon Court

We followed footpaths through Woodcote and then took a path leading through the grounds of the Oratory School – in fact the right of way leads right past the front of the main school building. After passing the school buildings, we walked towards a bank of trees running alongside the A4074 and down a set of deep steps down to the road, which we crossed (again) and went up a set of steps on the other side. I’d guess these steps aren’t all that well used – I’d never noticed them when driving past (you wouldn’t, really; also, it’s a dangerous stretch of road and you’d do well to have your eyes on it) but did locate them on Google Maps/Street View later. Here are the ones on the Oratory School side of the road:

From Exlade Street we followed the path through fields up to Corker’s Lane and then turned right and into woodland, where we stopped and sat on a fallen tree trunk to eat lunch.

Field near Exlade Street

Woods

After lunch we carried on through the woods to Busgrove Lane, and then walked uphill through woodland towards Wyfold Court. Our route didn’t pass close by the house, though we did pause to get a glimpse through the trees of its turrety exuberance.

Wyfold Court just about visible through trees

Here’s a much closer-up picture that I took on a walk with Ray back in 2014.

We completed the walk via Basset Wood and Ipsden Wood back to Checkendon.

Route of the walk:

Walk with the Ramblers around Lower Earley and Earley, 4.4 miles

Sunday 7 January

I think I joined the Ramblers towards the end of the lockdown era, probably fired up with some desire to do some regular group activities, as well as discovering some new footpaths I wouldn’t have discovered by myself. However, although I’ve been enjoying receiving the quarterly magazine, with its invaluable sock rash tips, as at the start of 2024 I’d only actually been out on two walks, a pleasant ‘Caversham Byways’ walk with the Pang Valley group, in January 2022, and then another walk in September 2022 with the ‘Berkshire Weekend Walkers’, a rather faster-paced 10-mile country route from Kintbury via Inkpen (written up by the walk leader here as walk 537). But that’s managed to be it.

Copies of 'Walk', the Ramblers' quarterly magazine

The organization now seems to be known just as the ‘Ramblers’. Perhaps they felt the ‘Association’ bit was offputting for today’s younger folk - not that I have so far been on a Ramblers walk that included anyone much under about 45. I note in fairness that among the Berkshire groups there is one specifically for people in their 20s and 30s, which is probably a good idea in terms of attracting younger people - I don't suppose in my twenties I'd have wanted to go walking with a bunch of elderlies, much as you do meet some very interesting older people in the Ramblers.

Anyway, in a fit of New Year re-evaluating life/banging head against table etc, I decided I would try and make more use of my membership and actually get out for more group walks. The walk I chose was a gentle start, billed as ‘Leisurely’ and a modest length of only four and a half miles. This was a walk around Earley and Lower Earley, with the Mid Berks group. Lower Earley is an enormous housing development on the SE edge of Reading, apparently reckoned to be the largest private housing development in the UK at the time it was developed in the 80s/90s. (Indeed, this Wikimapia page reckons it was the biggest in western Europe, but it's hard to verify these sorts of stats.) I lived there for a year in the early 1990s in a rented house share with my sister Hannah. Here I am in the doorway of the house we rented (I appear to be wearing just a shirt and tights, but I suspect I had a short skirt on – ah, far off youth). It was quite a nice house and a pleasant enough area.

Me outside our rented house in Beighton Close, Lower Earley

For this walk we met in a car park by Chalfont Park in Lower Earley, near the Asda complex. I turned up early – having chosen to get the bus and therefore been limited to its timings – and a youngish (40s) chap also waiting in the car park eventually sidled up to me and we established that we were both there for the walk. Eventually around 10-12 people turned up for the walk, led by a spry 70-something lady called Jean, who has lived in the Earley area around 50 years and therefore seen the whole Lower Earley development be built up. She was able to tell us lots of interesting stuff including niche stuff such as which footpaths used to be through roads, which is exactly the sort of info I like.

We started off by walking past Asda and out onto Elm Lane, one of several former roads that are now no longer through routes for cars. Then crossed Rushey Way and proceeded partly along paths and partly along quiet estate roads to the Laurel Park recreation ground, which we walked along the edge of and then into the Maiden Erlegh Nature Reserve, which includes a lake. I assume that this nature reserve was originally part of the grounds of Maiden Erlegh House.

Maiden Erlegh Lake

After the lake we turned back towards Lower Earley, taking in Radstock Lane, another former road now partly footpath. Towards the end of the walk we did a circuit of Redhatch Copse and walked through the newish housing that’s been built on the site of the former Sibly Hall, one of Reading University’s halls of residence and somewhere I lived for a term while I was studying there in the 1990s (being on some sort of quest for the first half of that decade of pointlessly moving house as often as possible). Sibly was a somewhat bleak building that rose like some sort of beacon among the sea of housing that surrounded it. It was demolished around ten years ago and the company responsible posted a video on YouTube of the demolition - somewhat tastelessly to my mind, but I guess they need to advertise their services.

Another view of the lake

Definitely felt afterwards as though I'd taken part in some constructive activity/mixing, so we'll see if this continues. 

Route of the walk:

More books read recently

'A Favourite of the Gods' by Sybille Bedford

I had never heard of Sybille Bedford until Ruth picked up a biography of her a while back (Selina Hastings' An Appetite for Life) after reading a review of it. At around the same time, Mum’s book group read this novel as one of their book choices. Ruth recommends the biography, but as it doesn’t make much sense to me to read a biography of a writer without having read any of their books, I thought I would read this first. I seem to have written far too long and rambling a review of this moderately dull novel, but I can’t be bothered to edit any further so here it is.

The novel opens in the late 1920s. 15-year-old Flavia and her mother Constanza are on a train, travelling from Italy to Brussels. They have just crossed into France, where they are planning to change at Nice to pick up the express train, when Constanza discovers she has lost a ruby ring she was wearing. Seemingly most of the train’s staff get involved in looking for the ring, while Flavia and Constanza miss their stop at Nice (because Constanza refuses to get off the train without her ring) and carry on through various stops along the French coast. They eventually get off at a small unnamed coastal town where they book in to the local hotel. At Brussels, Constanza was to meet up with Lewis, the man she was due to marry, while Flavia was to carry on to England for educational purposes. However, the Prologue ends with Flavia noting that they stayed where they were for eleven years.

Part I is set in Rome and looks back over Flavia’s American grandmother Anna’s marriage to her father, a prince. It details, somewhat tediously, Anna’s wealth, beauty and abilities to charm anyone she comes across, and also relates how beautiful, spirited and clever her daughter Constanza was. Part I ends with Anna, having finally been told of her husband’s 20-year-long affair of which everyone else in Rome already knew, seeking legal advice and leaving Rome for London. She leaves her younger child Giorgio with his father, but takes Constanza with her, additionally setting up some legal thing that prevents Constanza’s father Rico from having any access to his daughter. Constanza has to say goodbye to her father, who has been a decent enough man to risk losing his daughter rather than use her as a bargaining chip. We feel sorry for Rico – at least, I did.

Part II is set in London, where Anna and Constanza have now settled. Constanza throws herself into London social life and has a good time. (We later learn that even Rico’s daughter knew about the affair of which her mother was oblivious.) In due course Constanza meets a young Englishman, Simon Herbert, who has lived in Rome and is acquainted with her father. World War I breaks out. After the end of the war, Simon asks Constanza for a divorce in order to marry his lover (Constanza has been taking lovers for a while now, but doesn’t seem about to request a divorce on the strength of that. Perhaps that was being Italian for you).

In Part III, Constanza flits about Europe. Anna continues taking a different house according to the season, before eventually settling back in Italy after the war ends. The story ends by joining up with the Prologue, with Constanza and Flavia living at the (possibly fictional) French fishing port of St-Jean-le-Sauveur. This section is pleasantly atmospheric, with talk of villas, sardines, red wine – and ends with Constanza meeting yet another new beau. (I admired Constanza’s distaste for being anyone’s wife, and unwillingness to be tied down – desires that, presumably, wealth would have made it much easier to indulge.)

I reasonably liked the book – in the sense that it’s well written, nothing wrong with it, etc – but it stops only just short of being quite boring. Bedford litters the novel with a number of Italian (and occasionally French) words that necessitated a pause while I asked Google to translate them. And even a few English words – while I consider myself to have a good vocabulary, I was stumped on “persiflage”.

I assume the title of the book refers to Constanza, the more-or-less heroine, though Constanza’s mother Anna also plays a significant part in the novel. Anna is the most atrocious person – she manipulates those around her by sulking, taking to her bed and refusing to eat whenever she is annoyed at something. She spitefully burns a letter from Rico seeking a brief audience with Constanza in London, threatening a court injunction to prevent him having access to his daughter, leaving Constanza to draw the conclusion that her father simply does not want to see her. After her death in the later stages of the novel, she delivers a coup de grâce by having hand-delivered to Constanza an envelope containing what turns out to be a revised version of her will leaving all of her considerable estate to Constanza’s feckless brother Giorgio as a last act of spite. I liked Constanza on the whole, though I wanted to shake her for some of her decision-making – she irritatingly agrees to be the Guilty Party in the divorce in order to save Simon’s fledgling parliamentary career when it is Simon who has requested the divorce and loses custody of Flavia to her mother as a result, and, more horrifically, when presented with Anna’s revised will after Anna’s death, considers that it is legal and she must abide by her mother’s wishes, even though it would have left her more or less destitute. Luckily, only Constanza and Flavia know about the revised will and, sensing her mother’s indecision, Flavia burns it and tells her mother it blew off the veranda into the sea. Thank God for Flavia.

A Favourite of the Gods was published in 1963. Sybille Bedford was born in 1911 in Germany, to wealthy parents, but seems to have lived most of her life elsewhere. This Spectator review of Hastings' biography calls it a soundtrack “to one version of the 20th century”, a reference to Bedford's privileged background and lifestyle. This novel’s moneyed heroines, who take houses and flats in whichever European city takes their fancy with no concern for the cost, seem to fit with that.

'Remarkable Creatures' by Tracy Chevalier

Enjoyable story based on the real-life fossil-hunting activities of Mary Anning in and around Lyme Regis in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chevalier outlines in a postscript which bits of the story are based on fact and where artistic licence was taken. The story focuses on the friendship between Anning and fellow fossil-hunter Elizabeth Philpot and is told from their alternating perspectives.

Elizabeth Philpot is one of three unmarried sisters living together in a cottage in Lyme Regis, funded by an allowance from their married brother John, a solicitor. The sisters have been obliged to leave London to live somewhere that will enable a reasonable standard of living; John is evidently under obligation to provide an annual allowance for them but this would not have stretched far in the capital. The younger Mary Anning is a working-class girl, the daughter of a cabinet-maker who dies prematurely leaving the family in poverty. Philpot first meets her outside Mary’s father’s workshop, tending a table of fossils to be sold as curiosities (“curies”). Despite their age and class difference, the two strike up a friendship based on their shared interest in fossils. Elizabeth focuses on collecting fossils of fish, to add to her personal collection; Mary, unable to indulge in such hobbies as collecting, looks for anything she might be able to sell to improve her family’s finances.

One day Mary finds what seems to be the skull of a much larger creature, an icthyosaurus (though Mary initially terms it a crocodile, and later an “ichie”), which attracts the attention of people beyond Lyme Regis. Much of the rest of the story focuses on Elizabeth’s attempts to ensure Mary gets fairly paid for her finds, which are by now enhancing others’ collections, and to get Mary recognition from the men-only world of fossil collecting and the scientific study of fossils; this culminates in Elizabeth stoutly travelling alone to London and trying to gain entry to a Geological Society meeting (women aren’t allowed in) in order to defend Mary against an accusation that she has faked a plesiosaurus skeleton by sticking together bits of two separate creatures.

It hadn't occurred to me that the question of what fossils represented might have raised thorny and controversial issues vis à vis Christian belief: if fossils were the bodies of creatures that no longer existed, did that mean that God could think better of some of his creations and allow them to die out? Her faith a bit shaken, Elizabeth consults the local vicar, who won’t have any truck with such notions and advises her that God placed the fossils in the rocks when he made them, in order to test people’s faith. Elizabeth leaves unconvinced, but with her faith in the vicar a bit shaken.

'The Rake's Mistress' by Nicola Cornick

A Mills & Boon Historical romance.

It’s 1803. Rebecca Raleigh is a glass engraver, living alone above her workshop in Clerkenwell. Rebecca learned her trade from her uncle, who ran the workshop and died a few months before the story opens. Since her uncle’s death, the business has lost custom and Rebecca has fallen on increasingly hard times. Her friend Nan gets her a lifeline in the form of a lucrative engraving commission from the Archangel Club, an exclusive London club for gentlemen of “exotic tastes”. After a meeting at the Archangel to discuss the commission, Rebecca is being driven home in one of the club’s coaches when she runs across Lord Stephen Kestrel, an upper-crust young man who has been the victim of a prank that has resulted in him being stranded in the street in a state of partial undress. Through this encounter with Stephen, Rebecca meets Stephen’s older brother Lucas, who initially wrongly assumes Rebecca to be a courtesan who has seduced his brother, leading to their having a fiery exchange within the carriage. Turning up at Rebecca’s workshop the next day to return the cloak she’d lent Stephen to cover himself, Lucas ends up placing an order for some engraved glass as a wedding present for another of his brothers. Lucas and Rebecca are increasingly overtaken by strong feelings for each other and, after rescuing Rebecca from a masked ball at which she has rejected the advances of the unpleasant Lord Fremantle, they spend a passionate night together.

However, although Lucas’ attraction to Rebecca is real enough, he has an additional motivation in pursuing an acquaintance with her. He and his brothers, led by their oldest brother Justin, Duke of Kestrel (yes, I know) are engaged in trying to crack a spy ring operating from the Suffolk ‘Midwinter’ villages, where the Kestrels’ home is. The spy ring communicates via a pictorial code and the code’s cipher is engraved on glass. Lucas has been doing the rounds of London’s glass engravers to try to identify the style of engraving that will match the examples of the code that the Kestrels have in their possession. In Rebecca’s workshop, he spots what he is pretty sure is the style of engraving they are looking for, on some pieces engraved by Rebecca’s late uncle George Provost. The Kestrels need to trace the identity of the person who placed those orders with the studio. Feeling guilty, and under pressure from the Duke to get more use out of Rebecca as she seems to be their only possible link to the spy ring, Lucas fesses up to Rebecca regarding his underlying motive to gain information from her. Rebecca is angry and lobs a good many fiery words at him. Lucas also declares that he wishes to marry her, and Rebecca tells him not to be so ridiculous. Lucas takes her by force to the Kestrels’ townhouse in Mayfair for a discussion with the Duke and the Kestrels’ friends Lord and Lady Newlyn. The outcome of these discussions is that Rebecca agrees to accompany the party to Suffolk, posing as a cousin of the Duke.

Lucas is convinced that Rebecca is telling the truth about her ignorance of anything to do with the spy ring, but senses that she is holding back information about her family background. Rebecca becomes agitated when questioned by Lucas about her brother Daniel, disclosing that Daniel is at sea but allowing Lucas to think that he is in the Navy when Lucas suspects this not to be the case. Additionally, both Lucas and Justin spot that Rebecca’s manner and level of assurance while in the Kestrels’ London home is not consistent with her being from a working background. In due course the Kestrel brothers find out that Rebecca’s family name is De Lancey, that her father was English gentry who married a French Huguenot girl and assumed her name as a way of sticking two fingers to his Parliamentarian father and that Rebecca's brother Daniel is a privateer and possible French spy. Lucas reacts badly to this and challenges Rebecca angrily, and they have another falling out.

The following day, while out in a nearby harbour town, Rebecca gets herself abducted by local gent Sir John Horton who is evidently aware of her true identity. Turns out John, plus local couple Lord and Lady Benedict, are the actual spies. They set sail in a yacht with Rebecca locked downstairs, but there’s heavy mist and the yacht runs aground. In a splendidly ridiculous sequence, Rebecca unscrews the glass of one of the portholes with her engraving scribe, climbs out, jumps into the water just as the yacht capsizes, and swims for it; as luck would have it, she is rescued by her brother’s ship which appears out of the mist in the nick of time and throws down a rope for her to climb up, which she manages to do despite presumably being weighed down by long skirts. Onboard, Daniel – who doesn’t spy for the French, he’s just an excitingly free-spirited outlaw – persuades Rebecca that Lucas is known to be an OK chap and that marrying him would probably be a good idea given that she’s poor and alone and all, and he (Daniel) is away at sea. On Rebecca's arrival back at Kestrel Court, Lucas declares his love for her and proposes again, and this time Rebecca agrees.

I enjoy the occasional romance novel and this isn’t a bad one. Lucas is a pretty attractive hero and the epilogue, in which Cornick additionally provides the austere Duke with a bit of romance, is a nice touch. TRM was apparently the third book in the ‘Bluestocking Brides’ series, the earlier two being The Notorious Lord (about Cory Newlyn) and One Night of Scandal (about the second Kestrel brother, Richard). (We learn on page thirteen of The Rake’s Mistress that Stephen Kestrel has two sisters in addition to his three brothers, but the sisters do not appear in the novel at any point. Maybe they do in the others. Or maybe I shouldn’t be too exacting towards a M&B). A close friend of mine may have just ordered both from the Amazon Marketplace. Well, these winter evenings are long and dark.