blahflowers

To promote the new Paddington Bear movie there was one of those gotta find them all!' things towards the end of last year with plaster models of Paddington decorated by anyone foolish enough to pick up their phones when the promoters called. I found almost all of them, of the ones I didn't, one was at Heathrow and I wasn't going to go all the way there just to get a picture of that, one was in Covent Garden but I just couldn't find it (the place was so busy with Christmas shoppers I suspect it hadn't been put out the day I visited for fear of blocking foot traffic even further) and one I just plain forgot about. As with the elephants and the Easter eggs of previous years the decorations were a mix of inspired, amusing and dull. The ones above are probably my favourites but again you can see (almost all) the rest on my Flickr.

It's a regret for me that I didn't get more of the London LOOP done last year. Partly I didn't have time, partly I just clean forgot about it for a chunk of the summer and partly people I was going to walk with weren't available. In the end I walked two sections totalling around 20 miles by myself in October before the days got too short. Transport for London have apparently taken down the website with all the details for the London LOOP and all the other chain walks in London. Certainly doing these two sections I found it often difficult to work out which way I was supposed to go and several times went completely the wrong way and had to double back. So far I've been saved from disaster because the route has still been in the bounds of my London A-Z. The next walk goes outside that. I think on the ground signage is being vandalised and not being replaced or repaired which is a shame. I finished up the year in the commuter land beyond South Croydon. Must do better this year.

Two walks I did in August. The first was down to Richmond Park. I passed through it briefly when doing the Capital Ring several years ago and although I meant to go back often since then I'd never quite got my act together to do it. I will need to visit it again, my thought was that I would do a complete, or near complete, walk around the perimeter starting from one of the north gates and either finish there or, at least a western gate so I could walk into Richmond. What happened in the end was that I made it about a third of the way around and then joined the Capital Ring route through the middle and down to Richmond station. In my defence I had walked down from North Sheen station and detoured into the cemetery first. Oh well, there's always next summer.

I don't know whether it's just me but whenever I've seen a suggestion about walking along the Regents Canal path it always seems to be talking about the Western side of the Regents Canal. The route from Warwick Avenue along the path to Camden Lock is not very long that seems to be one that is often recommended. I have never seen anything suggesting to people that once the canal re-emerges from under Islington but it's worth people's time to continue alongside it. But then, until last August I wasn't really consciously aware that the Regents Canal did come out from the underground again, so maybe my ignorance of the latter is the reason for my ignorance of the former also. Of the two sides I think the East actually beats the West. From Little Venice to Camden Town the canal is mostly in a gully, uninteresting stone and then overhanging trees at Regents Park. Sure, you might get a glance of a warthog or some rare bird as you go past the zoo but it's unlikely. The eastern side has a variety of different views, the canal is now closer to street level so you could stop off Haggerston and visit the Hackney City Farm or take a break in Victoria Park. At Mile End you bypass the aggressive swans and, if you walk away from the river for a short while you can cross over the Mile End Road via the green bridge. True, the canal does reach the Thames through uninspired Limehouse attempts to redevelop itself as a playground for the ultra rich and their yachts but it's still a worthy journey and you can continue west through Shadwell, which I've always found to be a curious collection of narrow streets. Even Wapping has its charm now that the News International stench has finally been lifted.

This photo was from just before I joined the eastern Regents Park path. Found in Duncan Terrace Gardens near the Angel tube station it brings the concept of close neighbourhood housing, such as the tower blocks that loom nearby, to nest boxes. I was here at the wrong time of year to see, I wonder if any of these boxes get used by birds in the spring?

And so, we reach a month when there's so much to choose from. This was the month when T.F.L. had their display of buses through the ages up the length of Regent Street. This was the month that the Serpentine Gallery showed yet again that giving stupid amounts of money to artists won't dissuade them from vomiting terrible pavilion designs in your back garden. But in the end it was Brazil day in Trafalgar Square for the World Cup kick-off (boom tish!) with the people demonstrating up on the terrace and the life-size table football down by the lions. I was surprised by the fact I got quite into watching football this summer. If you treat the England team as the clowns on at the start then it becomes quite exciting when they're out of the way to watch the trapeze acts, the would-be lion tamer's and the high wire performers. I picked a team to support only because one of the players was named after a Marvel superhero.

The other picture is of David Rosenberg, who took a party of us on a fascinating tour of Islington and Clerkenwell, pointing out the offices of the A.N.C-in-exile, Lenin's flat and the graves of clowns. His website is East End Walks and you should all go on at least one of them this year.

So, if you live in London or come to London on a day out and want somewhere to visit and you have at least a passing interest in transport history then I can heartily recommend the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden. It's fascinating, it's not very expensive, indeed it's only real disadvantage is that it is in Covent cocking Garden, one of the parts of London that have evolved purely to be extremely fucking annoying to Londoners if they have to visit it. Honestly, Tavistock Street, then Tavistock Court, then a hard right and then you can be in with a minimum of having to fuss about with dodging dullards tripping over the cobblestones. However, if you look at the London Transport Museum website for events you'll see that a couple of times a year they open their depot at Acton for the public to visit. From my minimal visits, admittedly to go to Gunnersbury Park, which I recommend because it's a lovely park, Acton seems like a nice enough place. The L.T.M. Depot is bizarre. It's Slimelight for trainspotters. It's literally a huge shed in which the L.T.M. keep all the crap they don't want to display at Covent Garden. It's also just a big warehouse so you're walking around interesting looking tunnelling equipment or control boards from seventies underground junction boxes with none of the signs you would get in a museum explaining what they do and no staff on hand to ask. What you do get, or what I got on my visit was a large crowd of men who looked to be either approaching or rocketing past retirement age all trying to sell their old videos about trains. Not DVDs, videos. Taking up about half of the back of the warehouse were a number of underground train compartments which looked as though they were there because the L.T.M. had managed to get their hands on them when they were decommissioned rather than any particular design merit (although to be fair, who can judge that?). There were also buses from the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, some of which I would see again later on in the year on Regent Street, and this time in some sort of order! The thing that interested me most was the little gallery stuffed with signs and posters and information from stations. Again, if this were not just the L.T.M. shed then someone might have ordered these in some way so that people could see the evolution of London Transport's design aesthetic. Instead it was just a random collection of stuff.

I've managed to go to the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, as was, twice. It's my own fault, I'm not one for buying tickets randomly just to see what I get so invariably when I find out about a film that I'd like to see all the tickets are long gone. This year, thanks to a friend, I got to see Kate Bornstein is a Queer and Pleasant Danger which was a delight. I'm a big fan. It's a shame that the arts did so much to push queer culture out there when it was still outlawed and yet now we're in a situation where there is more freedom for people who love one another to have that relationship recognised and yet the culture is now lagging behind. Most of these films, pretty much all of them, never get a wider release and if you miss seeing it here then it's likely you'll never get another chance to see it.

Well here we go again. Running a bit late time round because I was working for the last few days of last year and didn't give myself time to do this. Also I can't find the 'search by date' on Flickr. I found it once since their latest redesign but that was by accident and even the help forum isn't helpful so I had to manually cycle back to the start of the year to get these two. Still, onward and upward!

The first photo was from a visit to the Wellcome Collection the day after New Years. Most of the building was closed for redecoration so I mooched around the permanent exhibit and the 'Foreign Bodies, Common Ground' exhibition. It was supposed to be about artists being based in medical research centres around the world, what actually seemed to happen was that almost all the artists went out of the medical research centres and instead spend their time directly in the communities and working with them to produce various pieces.

The second photo was taken on one of the dry days in January when a friend and I walked a green chain walk and ended up on Shooters Hill. Although our experience was nowhere near as bad as the parts of the country that were now underwater we had traversed muddy fields and even muddier woody paths and were now heading home when I saw this. I think it was in the grounds of a church.

Another cemetery photo, another of the Magnificent Seven, this was a walk after a half-day at visit, then the bus home. It was also a journey which gave me enough time to listen to Electric, the new album from the Pet Shop Boys and probably my favouritist music of the last year. Bare in mind that most of the time I'm listening to my iPod or iTunes. Since it was uploaded in September I've listened to it fourteen times. Possibly that's not lot but other tunes I've listened to 14 times include most of PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories From the Sea, loaded up in 2007, a good chunk of stuff from The Orb, loaded in 2006 and a selection of Manic Street Preachers stuff, put up in 2005, probably when I first had a computer with a big enough memory to hold all my music and not fall over. My relationship with music is a mostly cerebral one, as I like a lot of music you can dance to and do not dance to it. The whys and wherefores of this are not particularly ones I've thought too much on but I expect deal with a lot of insecurity, teenage gawkiness, the fact I'm still uncoordinated in my movement today and some body images too. I don't feel I'm missing out on anything, which is why I'm quite happy to sit and tap my hands on the back of the chair in front at a gig while everyone is big fish, little fish-ing on the dancefloor. Something as defiantly rhythmic as Electric is very good for giving you a pace to work to when walking any distance and the fact the Pets never write meaningless lyrics also helps.

Ahh, the Boris dangleway. It would be amusing to follow it's complete failure as a serious mode of transport of London if the public weren't subsidising it. I've been on it twice now, once from south to north years ago to see what it was like and then this time north to south because I was right by it for something else and needed to get back to Peckham in a hurry. In theory there isn't really anything wrong with it, it's just that Boris is playing Sim Mayor and thought it more important to unlock the Prestige points for having one rather than actually putting it anywhere useful. The two times I went on it I had minimal queueing, having my Oyster I didn't need to queue with the tourists for tickets and inside the queues to get on where short, due to the poor placement of the ride meaning there aren't many passengers. The actual journey was smooth, though that's because they have to close when the weather is bad or the winds too high. I presume Boris has done a deal with Emirates that they will hold on until he's not mayor any longer so that the inevitable closure of the cable car will be pinned on whoever replaces him.

By August I was dieting. I'd started mid-July so by the time I took these photos I'd already dropped a couple of kilos. I suspect that part of the reason I finished off my London walking this month was due to my needing to walk so much to take my mind off the fact I wasn't eating. Doing something, even working was fine, sitting around doing nothing though, that was tough. That's why I decided not to diet during the winter. As it is, my weight has remained around the level it was when I stopped dieting in mid-September, which is very positive. Talking with plumsbitch the other day I said it was a virtuous circle with no clear start, I feel good, I want to dress good, I feel that, for my current definition of 'looking good' involves being slightly thinner than I was, I do that and feel good, I want to look good... It's not 'fat is bad', it's more 'there is a level of fat which I do not want to be'. And it's also to do with how I feel of the shape of my body in a suit.

So I feel very fortunate to be fit enough that, if I have a few hours to spare, I can walk up to Crystal Palace on a summer's afternoon.