so far i've done a lot of random walking around kensington, battersea and greenwich...

south kensington, where my hotel is, seems to be predominantly french, but in a strange way - lots of patisseries which just look like banjo's branches from the outside, except that they smell a lot better, the people ducking in and out 'ave verree sterotypical french accents, and the moichandise seems to be the genuine article...

the aim yesterday was basically to poke jetlag in the eye by staying up from 5am when my flight touched down at heathrow until 6pm at least. after getting set up in the hotel, hooking up to the internet from my room briefly, and generally psyching up, i went out to grab a bottle of water and ended up staying out until 5pm. i walked generally south from south kensington... passed a big hospital in a scary-looking building that was far too old for its purpose based on my limited experience - i don't think i've ever seen a hospital building more than maybe seventy years old before. really gave me the feeling that there'd be guys with leeches and trepanning kit wandering the corridors. i guess old hospitals are well-haunted. i kept walking generally south...

the pedestrian crossings are great here - you can vague out slightly more because they've taken care to mark most (but not all) crossings with 'look left' or 'look right', which has saved me a few times - the road designers have a nasty habit of putting traffic islands halfway across a two-lane street which is all one-way; that never happens in australia, and i think we can all agree it's objectively the wrong thing to do. where the road designers haven't marked "look left" or "look right", it's a sign that even the experts haven't got a clue what's happening at this intersection, and it'd probably be best to sit down, have a sandwich and study the local traffic sequence for half an hour or so before moving on. all that stuff is true for the roads around south kensington, anyway.

one thing that keeps on surprising me is the way a single building design is reused, often all the way down an entire street. i read somewhere today that this is because of "leasehold" - basically, the idea that a landlord can allow people to build and yet stipulate the style or layout of any building the tenant erects on the spot, if i haven't got the wrong end of the stick. anyway, i took a few jet-lagged photos of these repeating houses. maybe it's got something to do with the fire too?

by chance, i passed a couple of buildings with blue oval "historical significance" plaques. the first one was for someone sartorius, who was a painter of some kind, no biggie, but the second told me "a. a. milne lived here". it seemed to be a private house, so i exercised some restraint by just taking the one picture then scaling the outside of the property to find something i could tear off for souvenir purposes.

big brother u.k. is on as i'm typing this. it's just as boring as australian big brother, despite the fact that apparently there've been violent confrontations and arrests during this series.

i'm pretty spaced out at the moment - went to sleep around 7:30pm last night, woke up around 3am, read and watched copa libertadore football until 5am, then went back to sleep until oabout 8am. i thought that was enough, but tonight, at 9:25, i've hit the wall again pretty hard.

oh yeah, street numbers - they're wrong here too. on queen's gate, where the regency is, street numbers are in sequence up one side of the road then down the other side, which is wrong wrong wrong. what makes it really disturbing is that in other places they take the standard approach of one-side-odd, one-side-even alternation.

but i like what they're doing with the floor numbering (at least in my representative sample of three stores around knightsbridge)... ground floor is 0, next up is 1, etc., and the basement is -1, subbasement is -2, etc.

that reminds me... for a hotel with a nominal single room nightly rate of 130 pounds (according to the sign at reception, which should be taken with a grain of salt considering that i'm booked in at 92), the regency doesn't do a lot to earn its money. don't get me wrong, there's nothing specific that they're lacking, but at that price-point, if i were paying i'd expect some eager assistance, maybe some apology action when the toilet in the room your given isn't capable of flushing, a bit of detailed guidance from the concierge when asking about good nearby places to buy menswear, suggestions of alternatives when it turns out that the laundry service can't get the job done by when i need it done... that sort of thing. But they’ve got a PC (“polite customer”) award every week, so I’m not gonna complain in case I get the free extra night’s stay next time I’m in town.

Anyway, back to yesterday’s walk. Eventually I made it to the Thames at Battersea bridge. The thames is pretty much the same colour as the Yarra, but judjing by the exposed gravel beachlets and flat bottom boats half beached, it’s got much more tidal action going on. I crossed over to the south bank and had a bit of a think about what to do next – further south didn’t look very interesting compared to all the luverly stuff in Kensington, so I decided to head east up the river. Maybe a couple of hundred metres east was battersea park, running alongside the river for about a kilometre and about five hundred metres inshore. Battersea park’s nice and green, and the gravel path along the river was wide and looked suspiciously as though somebody’d seen me coming and raked it. Anyway, after 24 hours of the inside of a 747-400, a nice bit of brown river on the left with grey-yellow gravel in front of me and a good swathe of green on the right was always going to look dreamy. So I crunched along, passing a Friday mid-morning jogger at ground level going in the other direction every three minutes, and jet airliners at about 10,000 feet also going in the other direction, but spaced out by only a minute or so. i could look forward and up 45 degrees and see a plane heading straight towards me, then spin around 180 degrees and there was a plane that had just passed me on the same flight path a minute or so ago, also at 45 degrees elevation. I’m looking forward to seeing heathrow pumping out take-offs at that rate when I fly back. Geek.

There was a Japanese Buddhist temple-type-thing halfway along the battersea park path which had four statues, each an aspect of buddha, each facing a different direction, in a different posture and with different hand positions, but there wasn’t a tourist-friendly explanation, so I assumed the posture of the buddha facing away from the thames meant “I wonder what’s going on over the other side”, and the one facing towards it meant “barges barges barges barges I wish a dredger’d go past for once”.

There was a mysterious hole in the thames wall on the far bank around now, which I assumed had something to do with the sewer system – looking at my map, I can’t see any canals that it could be a covered outlet for. I’ll find out one day.

Once I ran out of park, I noticed an awesome looking tower on the north bank which looked a lot like a shot tower crossed with one of age of empires’ archery tower defence thingies. I had a momentary fantasy of climbing the tower to get what seemed like it would be a great view of the area, which was only slightly quelled by a nagging voice saying “Andrew, there are no windows in the tower… Andrew… if it’s not on your guide map, they won’t let you in… Andrew, you’re too much of a tired bastard to climb a tower today”. I crossed the thames again to get closer, but the best I could manage was fifty metres. Got a nice shot of it, though. Started off east again, and there was battersea power station just lurking there across the river like something out of a batman/dickens hybrid.

It started to rain… I kept walking east, past estate-type buildings from the 60’s or so that seemed a little out of place considering they were on prime waterfront real-estate. Maybe river-frontage doesn’t mean so much in a city where being near the river was a good way to get cholera.

A k or so down the road I got to st george’s square, left the river and went inland. The buildings along st george’s square were very much cut from the same cloth as the queen’s gate buildings, right down to the white columns out front onto which the street numbers were painted in big black serif numerals. Side note: it’s hard to find public toilets in London – the tube stations aren’t any help, surprisingly, so pubs have been my best bet so far. Anyway, by now I’d had the idea of a trip to Greenwich and the prime meridian marker at the royal observatory – my serotonin-deficient logic was basically “it’s causing me all this jet-lag trouble, maybe I’ll drop by and pay my respects… and deliver a sharp kick in the ‘nads while I’m at it”. I caught the tube to victoria station – it’s big, right, so it’ll have public toilets? Well, didn’t turn out that way. After a while, I went the pub option, electing not to by a beer at whatever insane price they were charging (7 pounds 50 rings a bell, but surely that can’t be right?), then just chose a random direction and walked off. I passed through a weird little fruit and veg street market, then down a long street of four storey indentikit buildings containing indentikit hotels that looked like they were struggling to keep up with the quality of their building’s frontage. Eventually, it turned out I’d walked by chance back to Pimlico station. In the interests of actually ticking something off my to-do list, I decided to cut to the chase and make my way out to Greenwich. Tube to Tower Hill, Docklands Light Railway down past canary wharf, over the isle of dogs (where the great eastern was built), to Greenwich.

After some disturbingly strident signs more or less telling me that i must be insane or highly adept in several martial arts to consider bringing pick-pocketable items to this part of town, and a swing by the cutty sark which didn’t involve my pace slowing at all, I headed south towards (I thought) the observatory. Thus began my hour-long trip through Greenwich university and the current home of the Trinity College of Music. I ended up just following some guy into a building and almost got involved in opera auditions. I kept on going south and ended up in a huge courtyard that looked kinda like the palace at Versailles without the garden. I stood in the courtyard getting mildly rained on, listening to a tenor being accompanied on piano. Now that I’d walked into a building I had no right to be in and not suffered any consequences, things went much more smoothly – if something looked interesting, I just went and looked inside. I found a big empty building being renovated, and then a big empty building with a ridiculously ornate ceiling – the painted hall of the maritime hospital, which was (I think I read) originally meant to be for naval inmates but the painting was deemed too rich. Next was a chapel with geometric hand-formed plaster patterns on the ceiling, which I liked much more. There was an isometric drawing of the plan for the building with cutaways which I really liked, but my photo didn’t turn out. Next I got stuck in Greenwich university and associated carparks for about 20 minutes. Then I arrived in the park containing the observatory. There was a boating pond and acres of green rolling hills. I headed for the big central spine of the park. Halfway there a cheeky squirrel distracted me. It wasn’t scared, so I took some photos. I got to the observatory and took the standard photo of the prime meridian. I didn’t feel different standing on either side of it. There was a guy in costume running a tour. The museum was really detailed and interesting, but most people weren’t into the level of detail, it seemed to me. The octagonal room was meant to be a highlight, as one of the few Chris Wren interiors extant. Didn’t do as much for me as the chronometers downstairs that were developed to win the prize for calculating the longitude. By now it was 4pm; I’d decided to head back before 5 as the impact of London peak hour tube madness on my sleep-deprived nerves was unpredictable. Plus, I’d done 7kms since I left home at 10am, and that felt like enough.

I got the DLR back up to canary wharf, around which most of the shiny curvy glass office buildings cluster. From there it was a quick walk to the canary wharf tube station, which is a curvy concrete and stainless steel marvel/nightmare. On a rainy summer’s day with no cares in the world other than jetlag, it alternated between the two. On a grey winter day, heading home at 6pm, it’s dark, it’s below zero, you’ve been working 10 hours, I think it’d be enough to make you top yourself. 7 stops or so along the jubilee line, deafened by the tube noise and watching people, then off at Westminster, up a level in the tube, then a few more stops west on the district line to south Kensington and home.

And that was my day. more later!