I was trying to sneak this in before the end of February so as to have posted something in February, but I failed. I’ll have to make do with having started it last month, even if I only managed to finish it this month. I was going to blame my lack of updates on a quiet month, but in actual fact there have been a few things I’ve mean to post about and just never got around to. In fact I’m still a blog post missing from Christmas: I had started writing something about Chrismas in Windows Live Writer — the offline editor I sometimes use when writing on the train — but that seems to have gone missing so I’ll have to start again. I think I’ll make an effort to write a load of stuff this week. But enough of excuses, let’s write something worthwhile!
I was glad of a few days with nothing planned this weekend. The last few weeks have been a bit non-stop. Early in the year I bought a whole new load of camera kit but hadn’t had much chance to take it out for fun and play with it through January so, on Valentine’s day, I packed up my backpack and headed off to shoot the silent disco in The Scoop at More London. I was expecting it to be a reasonably busy event with plenty going on to photograph. Unfortunatly that wasn’t the case.
My trains arrive into London Waterloo which is just a few minutes walk away from the London Eye and South Bank. Once on the South Bank you can walk along the Thames path right down to Greenwich (in fact the path runs 184 miles from near the river’s source, according to the National Trail website). So I decided to walk from the station to City Hall, quite a nice walk I’ve done plenty of times before with a full kit bag. What I failed to factor into my journey was how much heavier my new kit is when compared to my old kit, and how out of practice I am at walking with it after winter (in fact quite probably how out of practice I am at walking at all since I started using my bike for local journeys just under a year ago).
Once I reached The Scoop I was disapointed that there weren’t many people there, and it wasn’t much of a sight. I couldn’t even easily get close to the edge of The Scoop because they had security barriers around it. There were pretty friendly looking staff around (one of the young ladies gave me quite a smile as I walked past, actually) and I’m sure, had I asked, they would have been quite accomodating, but I wasn’t really in the mood having walked all that way, so I just stomped past, around the other side of City Hall and flopped onto the stone seating / steps for a rest and to decide what to do. For some reason I chose to walk a bit further.
I wandered across Tower Bridge, in front of the Tower of London and along some of the roads in the City. I didn’t take any pictures. I had half an idea to walk to St Paul’s, but didn’t make it that far. I came back down to the north side of the Thames by St Magnus the Martyr (who were ringing their bells at the time) and walked back up to Tower Bridge. By this time I was starting to hurt; my feet and legs were the worst. I crossed back over the river with the intention of seeing if things had hotted up at the disco, but they hadn’t so I decided to head home.
By this time my shoes were feeling really quite uncomfortable and I was limping slightly. It felt like my sock had shifted slightly aroud in my shoe and the feeling of it moving against my foot was starting to annoy me, so I stopped to sort it out. Unfortunatly it wasn’t my sock, it was the skin on the ball of my foot which had blistered very badly. I hobbled on to London Bridge tube and back to Waterloo where, thankfully, it wasn’t much of a wait for the train.
I continued to suffer for it the next few days. While my feet felt a little better after a good night’s sleep my legs decided to start aching more. I think perhaps I was a bit ambitious (albeit not intentionally) on my first outing of the summer, but at least I know now how much practice I need to get in before we really hit the summer events season…
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