Simmer on the settee

Well, well, the sun is shining and it's fairly warm in Londres today.  Who saw that coming?  I realise it's June, but one cannot count one's weather chickens in this country.  They kick you in the arse if you try that stuff.

Mrs O and I are finally heading to Seasalter in Kent this weekend for our long-planned gourmet evening on Saturday.  We had initially intended to do this during the winter, but Kent was partially submerged and the trains all drowned or something.  So we postponed until Saturday.

We're heading to The Sportsman, a Michelin-starred restaurant and pub.  The chef there sets great store by sourcing local ingredients.  The area is particularly famed for its lamb.  The junior sheep down there feed on salt marshes.  This imbues their flesh with an especially rich flavour apparently.  They essentially season themselves.  Mrs O is so excited by the idea that's she fallen off the vegetarian wagon for the occasion.  I shall probably opt for a fish.  I couldn't eat a lamb; they have too much joie de vivre.  Whereas your average chubb or whelk looks fairly insouciant about the whole sentience thing, so I don't feel such a heel eating them.

Yum twice.

You know how to whistle, don't you?

As it wasn't freezing cold and/or p1ssing down with rain yesterday, I thought I'd treat the wife to a walk.  It's important to keep the magic alive like this when you've been married since the last hurrah of britpop, as we have.

Sometimes we jolly down to the coast of Essex or Kent on our Sunday constitutionals as Mrs O grew up on the coast and gets the yips if she can't dip her trotters in the briny once a calendar month.  But we decided to give the Thames Estuary a swerve yesterday as when the weather is half decent, the less-agreeable denizens of the capital head off there en masse and make a holy show of themselves and generally despoil the environment.  I know one isn't supposed to kowtow and amend one's plans to accommodate ruffians like this, but to tough it out and go for a stroll down there anyways would have constituted a massive Pyrrhic victory.

So it was then that we stayed in town and walked up the Thames path from Greenwich to town.  Clearly all of this walk was conducted on Her Majesty's highways, so we set off with scant equipment: a pair of flips-flops each, a loaf of bread and a block of Gruyere.  And this proved to be ample.  We are rather unusual in this regard, Mrs O and I, as most walkers tend to pack tonnes of gear before leaving base camp.

I've never understood people's obsession with kit for walking.  I mean, all you've got to do is place one foot in front of the other until you've reached your goal.  I do all my walking in civvies.  The only concession I make to "kit" is that I'll wear trainers if the mileage means the walk might exceed four hours.  Other than this though, specialist equipment brings nothing to the table.

I suppose people buy this stuff in order to protect themselves against mishap somehow, a kind of secular GORE-TEX amulet, if you like.  But most wouldn't recognise this as the reason; they'd probably explain to you at heart-breaking length why you simply must pull on a pair of £400 trousers to walk across wheat field in zone 6 of a Sunday.

Part of the Thames Path in south east London also doubles-up as a cycle path.  Cycling is particularly poorly served by "technology" (by which I mean injection-molded plastics plus marketing).  This is due to its perceived status as a sport.  And sport requires kit.  That's why people (i.e. men) put on lycra onesies and irridescent goggles to ride to Oddbins.  But utility cycling is walking to bike racing's running.  If you're not racing, you don't need a carbon fibre bike.  Honestly...would I lie to you?  I would, but not about this.

equipment overload