Category: London walking

I’ve got a bit behind with these since I got back to work. I’ve been very busy looking at spreadsheets and imagining how much fun it must be to be dead.

Anyway, more dreary suburbia. I’m sure the people here are nice. They have hopes and dreams. Sometimes they know joy. All of the hot food in the hot food cabinet in Sainsbury’s had been purchased by midday.

I made do with a cold sausage roll, which I ate hastily on my journey through Winchmore Hill, apparently “the suburb that thinks its a village”. If you live in a boring suburb that thinks it is anything other than a boring suburb I encourage you to lock your doors then burn your home to the ground.

Grovelands Park has signs up that cannot emphasise enough how little they will do to accomodate you. They will not grit. You are not worth grit. Slip and fall. See if they care.

I now learn that the big house at one end of the park a) contains an octagonal dining room designed to make you feel like you are inside a bird cage and b) is The Priory what you have to go to if you are on the telly and put too much drugs up your bumhole.

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I reckon this might be a bit unsettling if you’re a recovering smack addict. But as far as I know I’m not.

On the other side of the park is Southgate, birthplace of your hero, Simon Mayo. It goes on.

Lavender Hill Cemetery, Enfield.

Cemeteries are a bit unnerving. Partly because of all the dead people. Partly because of the grim reminder that one day I’ll be one of them. Mainly because I don’t the idea that this sort of thing will happen to my gravestone and no-one will bother to fix it as by that point I will inevitably have alienated anyone who found me even slightly bearable:

Possibly the answer to this is to be buried in a gigantic golden sphere embedded into a hillside. It could be one of a series of spheres that form a massive picture of my face. Maybe some of them could move in such a way as to make me wink at space. Tasteful, not like this rubbish:

This belongs to a Moseley, although not any of the ones who are famous for being a sexy Nazi.

If you ever visit Lavender Hill cemetery, be advised that any problems in the cemetery are not to be reported to the cemetery lodge, as this has been flogged off as a private residence. “Overlooking a delightful garden of local remains.”

Just outside is a shop selling gravestones, including one in the shape of a teddy bear. I involuntarily uttered the word “Christ” and pressed on to Gordon Hill, which in deference to the nature of geography is a railway station rather than a former Manchester United player. At least it had stopped snowing.

Last time I was on a farm I got chased off it by a dog. One of many reasons not to go to Amersham. This time I appeared to be on a legitimate public footpath and got out of the farm without having my leg chewed, to meet the heartwarming sight of the M25, welcoming the lost Londoner home with a message of hope:

Unfortunately on the other side of the M25 there wasn’t hope. There was Crews Hill. Have you ever thought “I wish there was one place where I could buy a shed, some fertiliser, wedding decorations, a lizard AND PRETTY MUCH NOTHING ELSE”? That place exists! It is called Crews Hill!

I’d call it an industrial estate but industry seems going a bit far. It goes on and on like this for pointless acres. My advice for the people of Crews Hill is that if you’re living in Crews Hill you almost certainly do not want to know what the future holds for you.

If anyone from Crews Hill is reading this and feels that I’m being a bit unnecessary about the place, I would remind you that I voluntarily spent over half an hour of my holiday walking through it. I am not suggesting that you are the only people who have problems. And you have that garden centre with a fake windmill outside it for no particular reason. You do have that.

After some more walking I got to Clay Hill. I didn’t spend much time there but I get the feeling that life can be difficult in Clay Hill. They have to explicitly tell people not to bring their own drink to church functions. They still use Clip Art.

But I didn’t have time to get to know Clay Hill, to get a true sense of this place. I had to trudge south through a graveyard to yet another hole with the word Hill in the name, for absolutely no reason.

The other day I took the train to the village of Cuffley. Apparently not many people go to the village of Cuffley because the village Cuffley got quite excited about it.

I though this might mean that I’d finally made it, but Myleene Klass lives in the village of Cuffley according to the internet and she didn’t meet me at the station, so probably not. Maybe she was too busy protesting something called an Anaerobic Digestion Plant which someone apparently wants to build in or on or under the village of Cuffley. I’m told this also happened in Radio 4 programme The Archers. Maybe it was why David Archer chucked that man off a roof.

The real aim of my visit to the village of Cuffley was to walk very far away from the village of Cuffley, which is lucky, as the village of Cuffley didn’t look very interesting, unless you’re a fan of naff churches.

I did find a house with loads of pictures of young boys pasted to the upstairs window. I was a bit worried that this might be the bedroom of a dead child and that the pictures were some kind of loving tribute to his life. It’s probably not okay to take a picture of that and mock it on the internet.

Luckily on closer inspection it turned out that at least 2 of the pictures were of Justin Bieber, and no-one can say that there’s anything wrong with taking photos of a 12 year old girl’s bedroom window and posting them on the internet.

For unrelated reasons I decided to get the hell out of the village of Cuffley and walk through some fields next to the railway line. It started to snow.

And who doesn’t? Onward, onward, under the M25 and into the hell world of Crews Hill.