The Writers' Museum

Up in Edinburgh recently, I had a walk around the Old Town and, after enjoying the view from Castle Rock and checking out St Giles’ Cathedral, I chanced upon the Writers’ Museum, located in a courtyard just off the Royal Mile.

Well, seeing as I occasionally volunteer at Dr Johnson’s House down in London (and had just chanced upon a pub close to the castle which has a plaque outside saying that Samuel Johnson had dined there with James Boswell in 1770), I had to go in and have a look around. The building itself is called Lady Stair’s House and dates back to 1622 (as can be deduced from that year being carved onto the lintel over the front door) although it’s named after a woman – the widow of the Earl of Stair – who bought it in 1719. Having restored it in the late nineteenth century, Lord Rosebery (briefly Prime Minister in the 1890s; Winston Churchill later quipped that he “outlived his future by ten years and his past by more than twenty”) donated it to the city of Edinburgh for use as a museum in 1907.

 

The museum is a delightful building whose three floors (accessed by two staircases, one a spiral and the other, main one having uneven stairs – an old anti-burglar trick) are devoted to three of Scotland’s most famous writers (two of whom were born in Edinburgh): Robert Burns (1759-96), Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).

Burns, now regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, collected old folk songs from across Scotland (something that was being done by various writers across Europe at the time) as well as writing his own material, which includes ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘Address to a Haggis’ (as recited after the haggis is piped in at a Burns Night dinner) and that poem in which he says that the “best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men” do something in the Scots dialect that I can’t pronounce although I do know that it translates as ‘often go wrong’. The artefacts of his in the museum include a cast of his skull (made when his widow, who outlived him by 38 years, was laid to rest alongside him) and a sword-stick – a slim sword concealed in a walking-stick, which he had because he worked as an exciseman as well as being a writer.

I’d already seen the Scott Monument on Princes Street, a large Gothic tower that I was not surprised to learn is the largest monument to a writer anywhere in the world (it is not far from Waverley Station, Edinburgh’s mainline railway station which I suspect is the only train station in the world that’s named after a novel). The museum has Scott-related items of a more personal nature, such as his childhood rocking-horse (with one foot-hold higher than the other, for he suffered from polio as a child) and a lock of his hair. I’ve often thought that Scott – who met Burns when he was 15 – is one of those writers I should read more of – I’ve only read two of his books; Ivanhoe many years ago, after watching a TV adaptation of it, while a couple of years back I made heavy work of Waverley. Scott, I was intrigued to learn, was made a baronet not for his writing but for finding the Scottish crown jewels (which hadn’t been used since the seventeenth century and were thought to have been lost), and he was also the man who co-ordinated George IV’s visit to Edinbugh in 1822, a spectacular affair that did much to establish tartan as a potent symbol of Scottish identity (it had previously been banned in the wake of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745) and only took three weeks to plan.

The part dedicated to Stevenson is in the basement. This contains a wooden cupboard, once owned by Stevenson’s father, that was made by no less a person than William Brodie, better known as Deacon Brodie, a notorious eighteenth-century public figure in Edinburgh; a respectable cabinet-maker, locksmith and city councillor by day (he had the title ‘deacon’ not out of anything to do with religion but because he was head of a trade guild), he was also a thief and a burglar (many of his victims being people who he had made locks for!) by night. The pub named after him on the Royal Mile, not far from where he was hanged in 1788, plays on this dichotomy by showing both sides of his personality on either side of the sign. Amost a century later,  Deacon Brodie would serve as the main inspiration for Stevenson’s novella Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. There’s also some interesting information about Treasure Island (he came up with the map first, and worked the story around that). Although his literary reputation did for a time suffer at the hand of those snobs of the Bloomsbury Set, Stevenson’s legacy has been enormous – just think of how many stories derive from those two that I’ve mentioned! As for me, I’ve always meant to read some of his travel writing but, as with more Scott, it’s just something I don’t seem to have got around to.

There were some pictures of other Scottish writers on the walls; I was pleased to find a photograph of John Buchan, although the most impressive picture was the tapestry depiction of Burns, Scott and Stevenson.

Finally, there’s currently an exhibition at the Writers’ Museum devoted to a modern Scottish writer – Ian Rankin, for 2017 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Rebus books, the Edinburgh detective having made his first appearance in 1987’s Knots and Crosses. Rankin wrote that novel after having the idea of updating Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde into then-modern Edinburgh, which is why the reader is for a time led to suspect that the troubled detective is also the villain of the piece (and he could easily have been, for at the time Rankin had no plans to bring him back for more). I like the Rebus novels, to the extent that I made a point of seeking out the Oxford Bar when I was in Edinburgh last year, so I loved that there was an exhibition devoted to them at the museum.

All in all, well worth a visit.

Getting my name in print

The other day I got an email advising me of the fact that a couple of articles that I wrote for the excellent Londonist website have made it into print form by way of a new book that they have out.

Well, naturally we had to buy the book. Londonist Mapped is now on display in our lounge; a hardback with 96 pages, it’s a really cool book adorned with lots of lovely and fantastically-detailed hand-drawn maps that accompany some of Londonist’s best articles. On that particular subject, I’m pleased to say that my article about how London’s docks got their names has become ‘A Brief Guide to London’s Docks’ on page 16, accompanied by a map drawn by London-based artists Luke Agbainmoni, while a couple of entries from my one about how London’s castles and palaces got their names have made it into ‘Stately Homes of Southwest London’ on page 64.

It really is a superb book for anyone interested in London … but I say it who shouldn’t, of course!

The Capital Ring: summing-up

So what to do after finishing the Capital Ring? Write about it, of course – for The Archer, our local volunteer-run newspaper here in East Finchley for which I have been writing for the past half-a-dozen years. Appropriate, really, for I only found out about the Capital Ring by virtue of living in East Finchley which is on the route. My write-up, which made it onto the back page, can be found here:

http://www.the-archer.co.uk/archive/2017/2017May12.pdf

London's unusual church names

Ever wondered about where some of London’s more unusual church names come from? You know, the ones that refer to wardrobes, garlic or being without. I’ve been looking into this very thing for Londonist as part of their ongoing ‘etymology’ series, and this particular episode involved visits to several of the most beautiful buildings on London to find out more. 

It is in such oases of peace and quiet in a busy city that London’s history comes to life; many have associations with famous historical people and many of them are the works of Sir Christopher Wren who rebuilt so many churches (in addition to St Paul’s Cathedral) after the Great Fire. 

Some even commemorate famous former parishoners, such as St Clement Danes which has a statue of Samuel Johnson at the back, facing towards Fleet Street! 

These days, some of them even have cafés, and not just in the crypts either – the one at St Mary Aldermary, for example, is in the church itself which must make said Wren church a strong contender for ‘best café interior in London’.

Here’s the link:

http://londonist.com/london/history/how-london-s-weirdest-churches-got-their-names

Of London's Christmas traditions, with references to Samuels Pepys and Johnson

Looking into the stories behind London’s various Christmas traditions has been a fun thing to do for my latest Londonist piece. I must say that my favourite bit is the one about the ‘Boy Bishop’ of St Paul’s, probably because I used to be a chorister myself and am therefore favourably inclined to the idea that, in times past, one of them briefly got to be a mock-bishop. This would seem to be an ecclesiastical variant of the ‘Lord of Misrule’ tradition (whereby the social order was briefly inverted) which was prevalent in the Middle Ages but which dates back to Roman times. Anyway, it is one of several aspects of a London Christmas, modern as well as historic, which made it into my seasonal article which also looks at (among other things) the meat auction at Smithfield, the lack of public transport on Christmas Day (something about which many Londoners are oddly accepting) and the question of which was the first London department store to have a Santa’s Grotto. The result can be found via this link:

http://londonist.com/london/christmas-in-london/what-are-london-s-christmas-traditions

My source for the ‘Boy Bishop’ story was a book called London Lore: The Legends and Traditions of the World’s Most Vibrant City by Steve Roud – a really good compendium of London’s folklore, of which there is a lot (including various ghost stories, local customs, etc). Definitely recommended reading for anyone with an interest in London’s rich and varied history.

Sticking with Christmas, though, there are of course some things that don’t change much over the years and even the centuries. For evidence of this, we can look at the experiences of Samuel Pepys on Christmas Day, 1661; he had an argument with a close family member and witnessed someone dealing with a drunken guest, both of which are things that many would readily identify as festive occurrences in our own time. After going to church, Pepys had dinner followed by an argument with his wife (“taking occasion, from some fault in the meat, to complain of my maid’s Sluttery”), causing the diarist to go “up to my Chamber in a discontent”. Later on, Mr and Mrs Pepys popped in on a neighbour, Sir William Penn (the admiral and father of the man who founded Pennsylvania). Unfortunately, another guest, a Captain Cock, “came to us half-drunck and began to talk; but Sir W. Pen, knowing his humour and that there was no end of his talking, drinks four great glasses of wine to him one after another, healths to the King &c., and by that means made him drunk, and so he went away; and so we sat down to supper and were merry; and so after supper home to bed.”

I have also recently been drawn to the writings of Samuel Johnson, in particular his essays which were for the most part published under three short-lived periodicals – The Rambler (1750-52), The Adventurer (1753-54) and The Idler (1758-60). There are some true literary gems to be found here, and it surprised me to learn that a few are dated Christmas Day, meaning (presumably) that the great man could sometimes be found writing over the festive period as opposed to going out and indulging in some seasonal perpotation (a word that is in his Dictionary and means, and I quote, “the act of drinking largely”).

One such essay, from The Adventurer (25^th December 1753), concerns the folly of wanting too many things. Taking the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates as his starting-point, Johnson ponders “the great business of life to create wants as fast as they are satisfied”. He observes that “there is no man, who does not … suffer himself to feel pain for the want of that, of which, when it is gained, he can have no enjoyment.” A couple of paragraphs later, he writes: “What we believe ourselves to want, torments us not in proportion to its real value, but according to the estimation by which we have rated it in our own minds.” Some seasonal food for thought there!

The history of a modern travel route

Good news! My latest piece for the Times Literary Supplement – reviewing Gillian Tindall’s The Tunnel Through Time, a book which reveals the history of those parts of London that are on the new Crossrail route – is in the latest edition; it can be found on page 32.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/tunnel-vision-3/

London's market names

A few years ago, I used to help out occasionally on a stall at Broadway Market – the one where Dad sold the finest Cheshire cheese (made, of course, in Cheshire) to discerning consumers of traditional English cheeses. Days at the market involved early starts, much cheese-related talk, generous discounts at the stalls of fellow-traders and a slow journey back to North London afterwards if Arsenal happened to be playing at home on that particular Saturday.

Those days came to mind recently, along with thoughts of early-morning visits to Billingsgate and Smithfield, when I was working on my latest piece for Londonist – another instalment of its popular etymology series, this one on how London’s various markets got their names. Here’s the link:

http://londonist.com/2016/10/how-london-s-markets-got-their-names

As usual with tales of etymology, stories abound as origins can be found in the most unlikely places; here, we have appearances by the illegitimate son of James II and a naval hero associated with Horatio Hornblower, some Canadian content and a mythical pre-Roman British king. Plus some fantastic market photos taken by Allison!

Who haunts London?

London, it is said, is one of the most haunted cities in the world; hardly surprising, when you think about it, given its very long history (it is, after all, some 1,966 years since the Romans founded what was then called Londinium). Lists of haunted buildings in London are many, but we do not see very often is a list of who the ghosts are. Or rather, were – for the ones who are apparently doing the haunting were alive once.

What with one thing or another, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about ghosts recently (more on that in a later blog-post) and this has in turn impacted on my writing. Who are London’s ghosts? There are people, or rather the spirits of dead people, from all levels of London society: Royalty, criminals, bankers, bishops, actors and nurses have all been seen somewhere. Some of them are even in more than one place! More information about some of the best-known ones can be found on my latest article for Londonist, accessible via this link:

http://londonist.com/2016/10/who-exactly-are-the-ghosts-of-london

Fire!

350 years ago today, the Great Fire of London began. It started in a baker’s on Pudding Lane, and over the next four days it engulfed some four-fifths of the City of London. Some 13,200 homes, 89 churches and old St Paul’s Cathedral were destroyed.

To get an idea of what it must have been like, there can be no better eyewitness than Samuel Pepys. He wrote at length on this in his diary, describing – as he watched the blaze from “a little alehouse on the Bankside” – “a most horrid and malicious bloody flame, not like the flame of an ordinary fire … we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire … an arch of above a mile long” (eyewitnesses of the Blitz have described that blaze in a similar way). Interestingly, he also described how it was he who convinced the King (Charles II) of the seriousness of the blaze, and he who conveyed the King’s orders to the Lord Mayor (who, to be frank, wasn’t really up to the job).

As an historian, I’ve long been intrigued by a few snippets of information about the Great Fire. One such is the role played by the King’s brother, the Duke of York (the future James II) – his role has, I feel, been downplayed in favour of his (much more popular) brother, but his leadership during the Great Fire was exemplary. It was he who was in charge of pulling down houses to create firebreaks and thus prevent the fire from spreading, and it was also he who ensured the rescue of those who, by virtue of their being foreign, Catholic or both, were threatened by the angry lynch-mobs that were after convenient scapegoats (James himself did not convert to his mother’s religion until 1668 or 1669, although he kept it a secret until the 1670s).

One surprising aspect of both of the things the Duke did during the Great Fire has always been a little surprising; no-one appears to have been killed in the (frankly dangerous) job of demolishing the houses – this would have involved using ‘fire-hooks’ to quite literally pull buildings down, as well as controlled demolitions using gunpowder – and very few died at the hands of the mobs.

In fact, according to the records few people appear to have died in the Great Fire, long seen as a destroyer of property rather than people (in contrast to the Great Plague which preceded it). The official records say that just six people died. Can this really be true? I wanted to look into this further, and my findings have been published on Londonist:

http://londonist.com/2016/08/is-it-true-that-only-six-people-died-in-the-great-fire

During my research, I managed to find a few more interesting pieces on information about this most momentous of events:

  

1)      The fire started at a bakery on Pudding Lane – famously, the site is as far from the Monument as the Monument is tall (202 feet). Everyone – and this includes the Worshipful Company of Bakers, who put a plaque on the building that stands on the site of the bakery – seems to think that the baker, Thomas Farriner (or Farynor, Faryner, etc) was the King’s baker which leads one to think he was baking bread for Charles II. Not so – he actually had a contract to supply hardtack (ship’s biscuit) for the Navy.

2)      It didn’t bring about an end to the Great Plague; this had largely subsided by the time the fire broke out (it had been at its height during the previous year) and there were a few (but not many) instances of plague-related deaths after the Great Fire.

3)      Old St Paul’s – that Medieval Gothic structure that was destroyed in the Great Fire – may well have been threatened with demolition in any case. It had been in decline for years – the spire had been destroyed after being struck by lightning in 1561 and there had been some restoration work done by Inigo Jones before the Civil War. After the Restoration, Christopher Wren was put in charge of restoring the cathedral and advised that it should be demolished – advice that was opposed by both the clergy and the people of London. At the time when the Great Fire broke out, the old cathedral was surrounded by wooden scaffolding – which, along with all of the books and pamplets that were stored in the crypt, greatly assisted the blaze. I can think of two models of the old cathedral that exist for those who want an idea of what it looked like – one is in St Paul’s (appropriately enough) while the other is in the Museum of London.

4)      Charles II was particularly concerned about the actions of the mobs that went on the rampage looking for scapegoats afterwards; remembering that London had backed Parliament during the Civil War, he was afraid that this would lead to a popular uprising against him. The need for a scapegoat would lead to one execution at Tyburn (that of a French watchmaker whose confession was dubious to say the least) and a plaque on the Monument that blamed the Great Fire on “the Popish faction” (ie. Catholics). This was removed during the reign of James II, put back after the Glorious Revolution and later removed for good when Catholics were given the vote in 1830.

5)      Some of the plans for rebuilding London were truly radical and would have resulted in a City of piazzas and wide avenues; in the event, much of the old street plan was retained – albeit with wider streets, better access to the River and a rule stating that new buildings had to be made from brick and stone (not wood).

6)      And finally, something about cheese. Pepys famously recorded burying “my parmazan cheese as well as my wine and other things” in a pit in his garden so that he wouldn’t lose them in the flames – not as crazy as it seemed, for Parmigiano-Reggiano was a highly valuable commodity in the seventeenth century, especially given the cost that would have been involved in transporting it from Italy. In the event, Pepys’s house – he lived on Seething Lane, not far from the Tower, at the time – wasn’t burned down, but he never did record in his diary whether he was able to recover his cheese and wine.

There are numerous ways in which the Great Fire is being commemorated (lots of London’s museums have special exhibitions going on), of which my favourite is the  large wooden sculpture of the City on the Thames which is to be set alight on Sunday afternoon. 

The Docks

What with one thing and another, I’ve found myself exploring some of London’s docks of late. Last year, my ongoing Capital Ring saga took me along the Royal Albert Dock. Earlier this year, more walking – for Londonist, this time – saw me visit Limehouse (it’s at the end of the Regent’s Canal) and what remains of the East India Dock (it’s near the mouth of the River Lea); I liked the nature reserve there so much that I went there for another look, and did a write-up about it for the Wildlife Articles website. I’ve even been to Rotherhithe for a walk around, but that’s a story for another time (believe it or not, it concerns a film adaptation of a Daphne du Maurier novel which also took me to a field outside Rickmansworth).

I’ve also been working on a number of articles relating to the etymology (name origins) of various things in London in recent months – sporting venues, castles and palace – and for my next subject, I thought: why not the docks? The stories behind the names are, as these things tend to be, varied – there are saints, royals and places in London as well as locations around the world. The finished article can be seen here:

http://londonist.com/2016/08/how-london-s-docks-got-their-names

Football and nostalgia

This Saturday, it will be fifty years since England won the World Cup. Funny really; that final took place just over twelve years before I was born but I can tell you more about it than a lot of games that I’ve actually seen. Odd, too, that so much attention is being devoted to looking fifty years back into the past at a time when our present-day national side has been doing so monumentally badly. But maybe that’s the point; if dwelling on the present – or rather, the recent past given that that infamous defeat at the hands of Iceland was over a month ago – is just depressing, why not opt for wallowing in history, or rather history as remembered in the warm fuzzy glow of nostalgia?

Why do we English (and I include myself in this, for the only England football shirt I own is a replica of the red, heavy cotton one as worn for that game) look back so fondly to 1966? Simple – it is the only time our national side won, well, anything of note, and football fans are a notoriously nostalgic lot. It’s ubiquitous at club level; every club has its own specific time-period that its supporters fondly look back upon – there’s a whole sub-culture that includes but is by no means limited to retro shirts, long-retired pros revered by grown men who saw them play years ago and various publications (of which more shortly). Internationally I suppose that it is the same with other countries. I have, for example, met Hungarians, some of them my own age, who’ve been more than happy to remind me about what happened when Puskas and co. turned up at Wembley in ’53.

With unusually good timing, I have recently been reading a book called 4-2 by the film critic David Thomson; published in 1996, it is to all intents and purposes a blow-by-blow account of that famous final, interspersed with various diversion which touch on snippets of autobiography and the exploration of themes such as the nature of football fandom, the tradition of the English as ‘good losers’ and the contrast between living in a (football-induced) dream and getting on with life – shades, perhaps, of Fever Pitch here which is somewhat appropriate as it came out at the height of the mid-Nineties football literature boom. It’s an engrossing read, a pretty good football book (albeit one with the odd diversion onto certain American sports which perhaps should have been edited out) which I am surprised I’ve only just encountered, with the best part (in my opinion) being the seven-page chapter on Geoff Hurst’s second goal – you know the one I mean, don’t you?

4-2 was originally published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of that World Cup win, meaning that it first hit the bookshops just before the 1996 European Championship started. There was plenty of nostalgia about 1966 back then, and there is now a growing sense of football-related nostalgia about Euro 96, twenty years on. What with England having only ever won one major international football tournament, failed campaigns – not the bad ones like Euro 2016 and the World Cup two years ago, but the ones where England were genuinely in with a shout of getting to the final – are also being celebrated (which, I suppose, is why Pete Davies’s excellent book All Played Out, published shortly after the 1990 World Cup, got made into the documentary film One Night in Turin six years ago).

Earlier this year, a book called When Football Came Home by Michael Gibbons was published; it tells the story (with the benefit of twenty years-worth of hindsight) of Euro 96 from an English viewpoint. It’s a fascinating read even for those of us who think we remember it all (we don’t; memory can sometimes play strange tricks, especially where football is concerned) although the title, a play on the chant from the Baddiel & Skinner song, is hardly original (the legendary Des Lynam used it for a BBC doco on the tournament several months after it took place).

Gibbons resolutely refuses to buy into the rose-tinted view that England were brilliant – they weren’t; a few sublime moments (the bits everyone remembers) obscured what was basically an OK side that had been unlucky not to qualify for the 1994 World Cup but which, come 1996, had the benefit of home advantage. The high point of England’s Euro 96 campaign, the 4-1 win over the Dutch – a match that was analysed in some detail in Jonathan Wilson’s superb book The Anatomy of England six years ago – is summarised thus: “In football the result is sacrosanct, and can drench any performance with a tin of industrial gloss. The received wisdom that has developed since the 4-1 – that England battered the Netherlands in open play – is spurious … the Netherlands had enjoyed more shots, more corners and more possession than their opponents … England didn’t outplay the Dutch, but they did outscore them.” Overall, Gibbons has done a great job in a book which doesn’t flinch from portraying the tournament as the mediocre, poorly-attended (Wembley aside) affair that it really was; even the ugly side of Euro 96, such as the accompanying violence and the ever-odious behaviour of Piers Morgan, gets an airing here.

As if there wasn’t enough footballing nostalgia in the air already, I have contributed something to it myself – although my latest published article is not about 1966 or even 1996, and it doesn’t concern England. There is a link with the 1966 World Cup, but only in passing – Eusebio, the highest scorer in that tournament, features in this story. It is the story of how the unfancied Toronto Metros-Croatia managed, against the odds, to win the North American Soccer League forty years ago this summer. My interest in football on the other side of the Atlantic was aroused when I found out that Toronto has its own MLS team, and I was intrigued to find that Toronto’s footballing history goes back way before Toronto FC joined said league in 2007. My retelling of the story of Toronto’s forgotten footballing triumph – and it’s a fascinating underdog story involving an ageing star, a player walk-out and a training-ground bust-up among other things – can be read in the latest edition of the retro football magazine Backpass. No prizes for guessing what the main focus is in the rest of the magazine...

Of palaces and castles

What with being the capital city, London has a lot of palaces and castles but there is more to them than present-day Royal residences (although admittedly that does factor in quite a bit); there are also long-gone medieval fortifications and Tudor palaces, a Georgian folly and even a pub (of London’s many pubs and former pubs with the word ‘castle’ in their names, one made it onto the list). But how did they get their names? I looked into this for Londonist, and found that the answers are varied; as well as English place-names, London’s various castles and palaces owe their names to a Danish princess, French and Scottish nobility, an Indian fortress, the Latin language, a rebel leader and even one of the Disciples. Here’s the link:

http://londonist.com/2016/07/how-london-s-castles-and-palaces-got-their-names

How did London's squares get their names?

Well, how did they? London has had squares since the mid-17^th century, when a piazza was laid out in Covent Garden in imitation of the Italians. Grand garden squares and public squares followed over the next few centuries, and the name origins of them include aristocratic families, a Latin phrase, a hunting-call, the word for a castrated horse and a famous naval battle! This I (now) know because I’ve written a piece on the name origins of London’s squares for Londonist. The article, which includes a fantastic photograph of Trafalgar Square taken by Allison (I can take the credit for the ones of Bloomsbury Square, Golden Square, Paternoster Square and Soho Square), can be found via the following link:

http://londonist.com/2016/07/how-london-s-squares-got-their-names

What impact will Brexit have on the European Health Insurance Card?

As someone who likes to travel around Europe, I have long been familiar with making sure that my European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) hasn’t expired before I leave. This is the card (which replaced the old E111 form in 2004) which ensures that British citizens are entitled to the same basic state-funded healthcare as the residents of the European country which they are visiting (providing, of course, that that country is also a member of the European Economic Area – for this is an EEA thing rather than an EU thing – or Switzerland).

The outcome of last week’s referendum has thrown up a lot of uncertainty, and while health insurance when travelling abroad might not be the highest of priorities it is worth considering the impact that ‘Brexit’ will have on this. The good news, for now at any rate, is that British citizens’ EHIC cover will remain valid until Britain actually leaves the EU – so if you’re going to Europe in the near future, you still need to check that you’ve got a valid card.

I’ve written a piece on the impact that Britain’s exit from the EU will have on EHIC which has appeared on the EHIC Application UK website – to read it, please click on the link below:

https://www.europeanhealthinsurancecard.org.uk/what-impact-will-brexit-have-on-the-european-health-insurance-card/

Pierogis, and other aspects of Polish London

During my travels through Eastern Europe ten years ago, I found myself having a fairly random conversation with some fellow-backpackers in a hostel kitchen in Warsaw. We were sampling a bottle of the local vodka which someone had bought in a nearby shop, and when the subject of food came up one of the Americans said she was excited to be in Poland because she really wanted to see if Polish pierogis were as good as the ones back home. My reply, something along the lines of ‘what are pierogis?’, met with disbelief from the (mainly) North American contingent who were most surprised to meet someone who had never heard of them!

Back then, of course, Polish cuisine in Britain was little known outside the Polish community, but a decade later things have changed to the point where you can get pierogis in supermarkets and at street-food stalls as well as in Polish shops and restaurants.

My first article for the London foodie magazine Jellied Eel is about how pierogis are making themselves known in the capital – it has origins in a piece I wrote for The Archer last year about a lady in East Finchley who provided home-made pierogis for a local Polish deli (she now supplies them to the ever-superb Tony’s Continental).

Also of a Polish theme is my latest piece for Londonist, ‘Where To Find Bits of Poland In London’, which explores London’s historical links with Poland – including the wartime Free Poles, Chopin and the story behind how Poland Street got its name.

Psychogeography, traffic lights and sweat

An auspicious week – my review of three books about London cycle couriers can be seen in the travel section (page 28) of the latest edition of the Times Literary Supplement.

Here’s the link:

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/you-wear-the-city/

Walking in Mill Hill

My latest ‘walking’ assignment for Londonist is all about Mill Hill – a circular walk beginning and ending at the Tube station at Mill Hill East and taking in part of the old railway route that used to run to Edgware (something I’ve looked into before on this blog) and then climbing up to Mill Hill Village, with views of the surrounding area. You can see Wembley Stadium and the church atop Harrow on the Hill from there, and I was pleasantly surprised to note the top of the Shard poking above the ridge to the south-east that I took to be Hampstead Heath. I rather liked this walk, especially as it took me onto almost-home territory; I grew up in nearby Edgware and spent many an hour in the pub that’s mentioned in the article, although it’s gone through at least one refit since those days!

The walk can be found on the following link:

http://www.londonist.com/2016/03/weekend-walk-mill-hill-circular

A walk along the Regent's Canal

Fancy a walk in London this weekend? I’ve been looking into walks in the London area, and I came up with this gem along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal – six miles from Camden to Limehouse. The write-up for this walk, which takes in Camden Market, Granary Square, Islington, Broadway Market (if it’s Saturday) and Victoria Park (plus, if you’re lucky, the superb floating bookshop Word on the Water which I encountered last year on the Capital Ring) can be found on Londonist…

http://www.londonist.com/2016/03/weekend-walk-regent-s-canal-towpath-from-camden-to-limehouse

The Date Walk

My latest published piece – another London walking route – is the Date Walk, which takes you along the Thames from Borough Market to the South Bank. There are plenty of pubs en route, along with a few escape routes that can be taken if the date isn’t going so well! All credit for devising the walk must go to Allison on this one!

A walk through the Royal Parks

Walking is a favourite pastime of mine, and I’m always keen to look for new walking routes in the London area. For some time, I have been wondering about how I could possibly replicate the Parisian ‘line of history’ walk in a London setting. After some consideration, I hit upon the notion of a walk through Central London’s four Royal Parks, from Kensington Palace to Whitehall. My write-up of this can be found on Londonist – so if you’re in London and fancy going for a walk containing plenty of places of historical interest, why not give this one a go?