Last Monday, the first morning in the new house, I didn't sleep that well, so I got up with the workers and went for a walk. Of course, whilst moving, we'd been examining the A-Z quite heavily, and I'd noticed that the new house is on the same double page as Hampstead Heath, and as the forecast was for one of those lovely crisp autumnal days, it seemed a good plan. So after an hour and a half's fairly gentle stroll past Caledonian Road and Tufnell Park, I wandered up Parliament Hill and looked at the layered skyline over the City and West End.
That was going to be my walk, but it was only half past ten, so I headed off, half heading for Primrose Hill, with perhaps the hint of the idea to go down to the Regent's Canal instead. Two and a bit hours later, after glimpsing the Trellick Tower from somewhere in the vicinity of Swiss Cottage (which is one of the scariest bits of road I've come across in London yet) I was near the tower itself. It was somewhere around here I had this (not amazingly original, probably) thought:
London is fractal. You can look at one part of it (say, the area around my house in Islington) at a number of scales and, whilst there are bits that break the overall pattern (scummy housing, say, in a nice part of town, or a small block of shops), generally it's self-similar at differing scales. (I also like the influence on the geography of the city of natural features; the incursion into the north-east of the city where the Lea Valley reservoirs live, industrial areas around the contours railway lines stick to, and so on).
I carried on up to Harlesden, which is a pretty grim industrial area nestling in a knot of railway lines, run through with the more-or-less abandoned Grand Union Canal (Paddington Branch). It was a bit annoying to find that the train back from this five hour walk takes only thirty minutes, but that's pointless walks for you.
Ho hum.
So, I've moved out of Manor Park (or East Ham; people seemed to know about the latter as it's on the tube map, whereas the former's a mainline station) for the less dodgy Barnsbury (part of Islington, and between the Victoria and Piccadilly lines- a whole new world of London Underground to explore; yes, I've changed my preferences on the TFL travel alerts site to reflect the lines I use now).
(Parenthetically, London seems to have contracted a bit. I've changed from a zone 1-3 to 1-2 travelcard, and when I wanted to go down to a shop in Wimbledon last week, it turned out I'd need a zone extension, of all things. Somehow, this feels very odd indeed. Combined with the fact I took a rather gentle walk down to Covent Garden on Sunday, and I can feel the city shrinking. Odd.)
What's better? Well, there's the 'being shitloads closer to Central London' bit, and also closer to friends (so much so I worry a bit I might suffocate some friendships to death; ho hum); Islington is a much nicer area, as I said before (I can now go to pubs down the road). On the other hand, I'm now sharing; the people are nice, but three years of solo living mean I've accumulated a lot of stuff (mainly falling into the three categories media, Lego and computers) which is currently sitting in boxes. I need some sort of storage solution; I'm incredibly tempted by the Muji tube shelves, but maybe I should succumb to the lure of Ikea like everyone else. (Anyone used the Muji ones? Do they work OK?)
There was also the painful week or so when I was mulling whether or not to rearrange my room completely. Now I've done so, it seems a lot better than it did. Flatmates also mean we can share the cost of broadband, so once we hassle the right people, there should be ADSL and wireless goodness at the new place. Woohoo.
Oh, there were the two days of moving boxes in and out of vans, and the three days either side of assembling, dissassembling and fretting, and the worrying about deposits, but let's ignore them now, eh?
You know how some people who have blogs manage it every day, and others go for ages, adding only a little bit? I'm a third type; every now and again I dump about a week's worth of crusty outgoing branejuice to this thing. Here's a bit more.