After a fun try out gig at the excellent
Old Rope (if you'd come tonight you could have seen Ed Byrne, Russell Howard, Robin Ince, amongst others, trying out new stuff - all for a fiver. Highly recommended for you Londoners), I decided to walk home.
It was 10.20pm, the club is right behind Oxford Circus tube and I live about five miles away in Shepherd's Bush, but I am getting well into walking and I just wanted to see how long it would take. The night was clear and cool, I thought it would be useful to have some time to internally digest and dissect what I had just done and it would be great exercise. I mean I'd already done an hour in the gym and half an hour of walking, but when you're on a roll! I wasn't on a roll though. Don't worry. I weren't cheating.
I was on the phone to a sleepy friend as I started. "I am going to walk home," I told her, "like you, know, what do you call them? A nomad."
"You're going to walk home like a snowman," she queried.
"No, a nomad," I corrected, though I would quite like to have done it walking in the air and holding the hand of a school boy in a dressing gown. That would probably burn up loads more calories. But if an adult man uses schoolboys that he has taken from their bedrooms as a kind of exercise weight, then society is liable to misunderstand.
I managed the walk without too much difficulty, maintaining a steady 120 steps a minute, and four miles an hour, getting home after just 75 minutes. Probably only about 25 minutes longer than it would have taken on public transport.
Plus I had thought of three or four new possible jokes for the show and taken in the sights of above ground London at night. If you ever want a copy of the Times from the day that has just about ended, then you can pick one up at about 11pm outside Starbucks or M&S in Notting Hill. I didn't want one, but they're just lying out there in bundles.
Passing through Bayswater is also fun at this time, because the only other people walking anywhere are foreign tourists on the way back to their hotels. They have different fashions, hairstyles and languages, which you can laugh at if you are so inclined.
As I approached Shepherd's Bush roundabout a man was cycling along the pavement and putting on a jumper at the same time. It was actually quite impressive. It made me laugh. Maybe I've just got a thing for people cycling unusually on pavements. The little lad was back in Hammersmith Grove earlier. Still funny!
London isn't that big really and we're often in such a hurry to get places, but all that I lost tonight was thirty minutes sitting half watching a TV show that I wouldn't have been interested in. But I saw more interesting things on my travels and had some time to think and observed the people passing by, as I slunk unnoticed on my way.
Like a snowman.
