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I am surprised I have not thought about doing this before. Since the 1990s I have periodically met up with a friend of mine, affectionately known as Bacchus and we have walked around an area, usually in London, trying out a range of pubs and typically having a meal along the way. Sometimes we do not stray too far, sometimes there is a lot of walking involved. I should have made more effort to capture our journey in 1995 that began at 07.00 at the 'Hope & Anchor' pub next to Smithfield Market and included a huge cooked breakfast and beer. It involved going up into the dome of St Paul's Cathedral, lunching close to The Clink in Southwark and finished off in Lambeth around 19.00. The walking tended to counter-balance the beer intake. Other trips have involved Wapping, Whitechapel-Bethnal Green, Walthamstow, Battersea, Twickenham, Holloway-Archway-Hampstead-Highgate, Charing Cross Road-Tottenham Court Road-Euston, Bloomsbury-Fitzrovia, Holborn, Mayfair, Marble Arch-Edgware Road, Hammersmith with sojourns to Cookham, Oxford, Reading, Norwich, Winchester, Guildford and Bournemouth. My preference is for lager, Bacchus favours good bitters and real ales.
There are a couple of reasons for including such exploits on here. Not on the basis of boasting of how much alcohol I can consume. My limit is usually 4 pints, perhaps 6 if spread over a longer period and alternated with tomato juice. Bacchus has protested that too many people 'spread their lives all over the internet', something of which I am now worried about doing. I am torn by seeing it as egotistical yet the whole purpose of this blog was for me to cast stuff out into the internet in large part for my own benefit. Latterly this has become a tool for mentally sticking my life back together. Along the way I have found I actually lost more than I realised. Along with the house and chickens went probably my only chance to ever marry.
The main purpose of covering such activities on here is a bit in the line of the flaneur approach, i.e. recounting what you might encounter walking through various parts of the country and also may suggest to you some pubs and even restaurants you might want to try out or in fact avoid. On this basis, I certainly recommend breakfasting at 'Hope & Anchor'. A visit to 'The Mitre' in Holborn, if you can find it, is worthwhile doing as it is the closest you will get to a Harry Potter like pub in how concealed it is. I know Bacchus would mention 'The Prospect of Whitby' in Wapping. I have also returned to 'The Sussex Arms' in Twickenham which actually plays records and sells a wide range of beers and ciders, always changing.
So, today's posting is about our trip to Esher. We went on a Sunday, so it was pretty quiet, there was no horse racing on which changes the whole nature of the town. The first thing to note is that it a 20-minute walk from the station and there is just busy residential road and then the horse race track to get passed before there are any commercial outlets, bar a branch of 'Café Rouge' which ironically we ended up eating in.
On this trip we visited three pubs. The first was 'The Bear' which says it is a hotel but has a substantial bar area with stripped wood floors and a mixture of sofas and high stools. It looks pretty much like a stylish wine bar and maybe the attitude of the staff come from that. Being stockbroker belt Surrey you are not going to pay less than £4 (€4.60; US$6.12) for your pint of beer. There is a reasonably large outdoor area. The staff were young and while seemed to be good enough at doing their jobs, seemed to view the customer as the least of their concerns, they would rather play around with people. For Esher the clientele were quiet. I was surprised they were not doing more business selling food being a Sunday, but maybe their prime time is evenings. I bought peanuts and they were very expensive, you only get a small dish for paying £2.50, I would rather have a packet. However, I guess I was not the kind of customer 'The Bear' is looking for; it might have been different if I had bought wine. The range of lagers was not particularly good; Bacchus very much disliked the place.
We crossed the very busy road to 'The Albert Arms'. The exterior was being refurnished, but did not really impinge on the experience. In some ways it reminded me of a narrower version of 'The Three Kings' in Twickenham, with bright wood flooring. Its range of beers was better than 'The Bear' opposite. Perhaps this was why, in contrast to 'The Bear' where women had been in the majority, this was dominated by men, some of whom were loud and very pretentious, but again, what you would expect in most places in Esher, they are bred like that. I could have tolerated this place. Bacchus is not usually overly picky about the environment, especially if the beer is reasonable. However, we pressed on to the best pub of the day.
'The Wheatsheaf on the Green' as the name suggests is in a quieter part of Esher, it is worth walking up the low hill from the high street to reach it. The interior somehow reminded me of a colonial hill station refurbished around 1965, but that was nice compared to the samey looking pubs you find everywhere. Whilst we do not eat there, food seemed popular with the locals and they had a good range of Thai dishes and seemed to be doing very good business. The attitude of the staff was in sharp contrast to the previous two pubs and we stayed here for another feeling very comfortable. The pub managed to straddle successfully between dining families and serious drinkers like us. Overall, a pleasant place to be and I would not mind returning. It is pictured below with Bacchus pixelated to spare his discomfort.
As it now seems possible that I will be leaving London for the South Midlands, this may be my last review from this region and you will see others from elsewhere. It might be of no interest, but this posting has been enjoyable and I regret not capturing my trips of the past.
After losing my house I had no option but to live with my parents or be homeless. As I have noted on this blog over the past few months, I took the first option. Though it proved to be stressful it was less debilitating than living on the streets or at some council's pleasure in a bed & breakfast. That delight will probably come when I am bullied at work again and my parents have died. Anyway, after weeks of searching for a room; being rejected by the bulk of them because I was too old (at 45) or too male or was impudent to ask that there was heating that worked, I finally found the room I mentioned. I am a sub-tenant of a Lithuanian family in a house with another lodger plus the family of two adults, a child and a dog. The dog only understands Lithuanian and looks at me with a bewildered stare whenever I speak to her in English. In contrast, the child flicks between both languages with immense ease.
In London it is expected that you commute to work. My parents live 30Km outside London and the route I took meant I could do that in 30 minutes. I was offered rooms that were 18-19Km from my workplace but with the trains being radial rather than around the circumference and the traffic in so many one-way systems between these rooms and work it easily too 2 hours to cover this distance. I was fortunate that the room I ended up with is less than 3.5Km from where I work. Since losing the house, my weight had risen by 3Kg. My mother had kept trying to persuade me at least to walk around the town where they live, for exercise. However, having been bullied for ten years in my childhood, there are very few corners of the town which do not haunt me with memories of being humiliated or physically assaulted. The neighbouring town is a little better as it has been do smashed around by developers in the past thirty years and continues to be altered that there are few structures left from my memory to remind me of what happened: the library where I was punched has been levelled, the swimming pool where I was held under the water is now replaced by a car park and where the other pool, the one at which my trainers were stolen, used to stand is now a landscaped bank of grass and flowers.
I had never visited my new district ever before, so I can walk through it with no ghosts tugging at my peace of mind. Like much of London, though the area is generally wealthy, there are pockets where ordinary people live and abruptly you can turn a corner and see a very different society from the street you just left. It reminds me of London Below in 'Neverwhere' (television series 1996; cassette/CD 1996; novels 1996 & 2006; graphic novel 2005) which I have just recently re-watched on DVD. It is more like 'London Beside'. The same applies to the architecture. I am fortunate on my walk to pass large Victorian town houses, 1930s blocks of flats and semi-detached villas, 1950s bungalows, 1960s blocks of flats, 1990s fake versions of the Victorian houses and terraced houses that could have come from any period in the past century. I suppose this is better than a route that took me alongside a dual carriage way for kilometres. There are small shops and pubs on the way, some with a very old-fashioned approach - one chemist advertises that it develops films and one post office closes on Wednesday afternoons.
Walking I see the same people, some occasionally, some almost daily. Many, of course are oblivious to me, tied up in the sounds and images emerging from whatever device they are grasping. Conversely, I am watched eagle-eyed by parents. This is the fate of any man walking within 500 metres of a school. Everyone no matter how smart or shabby looking is perceived as a potential paedophile. It is very unpleasant, but something that seems unavoidable these days. I try to skirt going too close to any school, nursery, playgroup or even college, fearful that some mother is going to thrust an assault alarm at me and have me dragged off for lynching because I simply look 'odd'. I am jumping ahead of myself as before the parents, thrusting us off the pavement with vast pushchairs, there are the sports fanatics, filling up the park with styles that look like they belong in the Eighties as they run and exercise. There are also the dog walkers, even more demanding than pushchair pushers as their dogs scurry in multiple directions threatening to snare your knees in their leashes and it is always your fault. From this you can tell the prosperity of the area. The poorer the area, the earlier in the morning people head to work, something you can witness if you take a tube train from Mile End at 06.00. There are the cyclists, looking like left over domestiques from the Tour de France, in top team kits, with more equipment than I have in my car. It is only at 07.30 that the locals begin to head to work, appearing like the Eloi in 'The Time Machine' (1960) in this case as if summoned by some silent signal. Literally five minutes can be the difference between an empty street and it being filled with apparently sightless zombies, only zombies who march and brook no-one else in their path.
Apparently a quarter of adults walk for less than two hours per week; I do four to six hours; the recommended is one hour thirty minutes. I now walk 6.5Km per day, averaging about 6kph. As occasionally I drive and sometimes I go out at the weekends too, I cover 25-38Km per week. However, having my health reviewed by my doctor recently, this was deemed to be 'inactive'. Thus, though I feel healthier from walking apparently it is far from being enough actually to make me healthy. I have noticed that the stress brought about by idiots driving has been reduced. However, I would contest the suggestion made in the reports that came out in May, that walking benefits your mental health. The time you are left to ponder life and to think that I am in a job that I can only afford two suits and I live as a sub-tenant with an immigrant family, is not cheering. In addition, living in such a prosperous area I see so much arrogant behaviour even of people walking and cycling, let alone the car drivers who regularly try to kill me on the Zebra crossings. I often arrive at work or back home thoroughly dispirited by seeing how unpleasant people are and knowing that I will never own a house again, not even one of the small, mid-20th century terraced places. Perhaps I need to put my brain into an ipod or a smartphone to avoid such daily mental challenges.
I did aspire, briefly, to be a flâneur. This term these days usually means someone who is pretty much a layabout going back to its 16th century routes. However in the 19th century in France it took on a more proactive sense of being someone who strolled in order to explore his/her urban environment. The ideal flâneur was seen as an individualist, not willing to fit into the category of the 'badaud', i.e. someone who simply gazed without thought at what they were passing, perhaps like the modern 'rubber-necker'. The flâneur seems to be having a bit of revival, perhaps not in South-West London but in West London by Will Self, author, raconteur and now professor, who is apparently renowned for his peripatetic lectures, i.e. lectures while walking, an approach in theory dating back to Aristotle (384-332BCE), though that view may stem from a mistranslation. Self's approach in turn seems to have been highlighted by his book 'Walking to Hollywood' (2010) stemming from his obsessive compulsive disorder and obsessions going back to the early 2000s of walking great distances out from London. Like myself, he did not find the walks curative or beneficial for his mental health. From what I have heard from an old friend of this blog, his colleague, John Francis, seems to be developing the flâneur concept in terms of lecturing and in exploring the urban environment, perhaps, it has been suggested, stemming from his background in film studies. This sense of people walking through London and other urban locations equipped unlike any flâneur of the past to challenge, check and capture the scene is an exciting one. However, I imagine like running and cycling it will be taken and made into a colourful pose activity with expensive clothing that you simply must buy in order to be into it properly.
The flâneur, even on a daily walk, is exploring the town/city, being alert to its history and its changes even day-on-day let alone over the seasons, years and centuries. It is seen as then leading on into street photography, not only witnessing the urban scene but capturing it. Wikipedia refers to Susan Sontag in this respect, but I would go back to Robert Doisneau, who has brought street scenes of his Paris in that era to many people in succeeding decades. Thus, I equipped myself with small camera and dreamt of having the tools to look at the spaces I walked through an augmented reality application on a smartphone, even adding to the elements available online from my walk. Yet, it has failed. Even when I got passed the blood-filled blisters, I found that I simply moved like the blind zombies, in fact not even marching at their pace. I move furtively, seeking to avoid being close enough to a school to be shouted at for being a potential molester, dodging the cyclists on the pavement (despite the minimal traffic on the roads I walk beside), heads down, the world blotted out by the iPlayer. Getting to work is a physical and mental survival course. I am not excited by the day-to-day changes and I am depressed by the streets that show me everything I can never have and more.
My walking saves me some money in petrol and that saves the planet some milligrams of pollution. I guess the stress is not as bad as when I drove and perhaps my chances of being injured or killed have fallen now I am on suburban pavements rather than the M25. However, it has shown me that not everyone can be a flâneur. You need to be rich enough and have sufficient prospects not to be overwhelmed by the weight of other people's opportunities. You certainly need an arrogance to face down the arrogance of those unhappy at you being in the space they want to move into. It probably helps if you are a woman so that you are not considered a potential burglar, rapist or paedophile at every step. So I guess the flâneuse it possible in this world. Perhaps then you can get some benefit from walking through a city. For me, there are no mental benefits, bar the fact that I am not pursued by the ghosts of my hometown bullies. Even the doctor's system claims that there is no physical benefit and that walking 25Km is insufficient to render me anything more than 'inactive'.
