Adventures with Kake

On Monday I went to Wimbledon — not to watch tennis, but to take photos for RGL. I discovered what I think may be London's steepest lime-and-soda price gradient while I was there; £2.70/pint at the Brewery Tap and 50p/pint at the Rose and Crown 115 metres down the road. Then I went to choir.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I mostly did work.

On Thursday I went to L'Autre Pied for lunch with ewan. Unsurprisingly, given it has a Michelin star, the food was pretty good. (I took some photos of the food and would appreciate comments on whether I've over-processed them...)

After that, I did the Tube Walks I missed out on the weekend previously. I was also going to go along Oxford Street and take the photos I've been putting off for months (mainly because they're inside buildings), but it was so hot I couldn't face it. I retreated to the Coach and Horses, which has aircon and reasonably-priced lime-and-soda.

The reason I didn't just go straight home was that later on I was going to the first meeting of the Reading Matters/Savidge Reads book group, on the top floor of Waterstone's on Piccadilly. We're going to be meeting on the first Thursday of every month, and take it in turns to pick which book to read. Kim of Reading Matters wrote up tonight's meeting here.

On Friday I tried to work, but it was kinda hot again, so I pathetically knocked off early and drank gin.

On Saturday I braved the lack of Jubilee Line, and headed east to Leytonstone to have a bit of a sing of the third paragraph of Cornelius Cardew's Great Learning, an avant-garde piece for voices and instruments based on Ezra Pound's translations of Confucius' work of the same name. There were only six of us, but it was actually quite fun.

We're performing it this Saturday, 11 July, at various venues around Leytonstone including the old Woolworths and the Green Man roundabout. Come along if you like — there's lots of other Leytonstone Festival stuff going on during the day, and I will doubtless find myself in a pub at some point.

On Sunday I fixed stuff on the Discworld MUD.

On Monday I visited Upminster, the very end of the District Line! I had lunch at La Grolla, a decent enough Italian restaurant. I also popped into Swan Books, the Essex Yeoman, and the Crumpled Horn; and then I took a photo of the windmill. I'm still not certain what Upminster's hidden gem is; possibly it's Swan Books, which had a book about Romford pubs that I nearly bought for ewan.

The excitement did not end there! I headed back towards East Ham on the District Line, with the intention of trying another of the Indian cafes on the High Street, but realised en route that I could stop off at Barking and go to Chennai, a South Indian cafe/restaurant in the same chain as Lewisham's Madras. I enjoyed the food at Madras when we went there, so was expecting good things from Chennai. The food was just fine here, too, as it turned out, though the staff did seem quite bemused by the presence of an actual customer.

Then I went to choir. It was awesome, as choir always is. We're singing Bach's St Matthew Passion in March next year, apparently. It takes three hours to sing, but this is a nice, sensible, relaxed choir, so we'll be stopping for dinner in the middle. I approve.

On Tuesday I went to the Isle of Dogs! I visited the Pepper Saint Ontiod, in the company of ewan, and then headed around the dock for dinner at Byblos Harbour. On the way back to the Tube station, we popped into the North Pole to satisfy Ewan's curiosity. Or perhaps his completism. Or perhaps just to have some beer!

On Wednesday I took some photos in Hammersmith (and briefly popped into the Ruby Grande to shelter from the rain) before heading over to Richard's place to spend many hours playing Rock Band.

On Thursday I took advantage of being in West London, and went to London.pm sushi at Makoto, then headed down to Brentford to take a couple more photos and drink beer at the Magpie and Crown and O'Brien's. Finally I headed up to Northfields to meet aca and many others for tasty South Indian/Sri Lankan food at Papaya.

On Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I did loads of bugfixing and stuff on the Discworld MUD. This might be considered slightly overdoing it — but on the Friday I moved from the Ramtops domain to the Guilds domain (where I will be working on witch stuff), and it was all very very exciting, and very hard to stop doing stuff. (superpitching — this is the geeky thing I mentioned.)

On Monday I went to Fulham to take some RGL photos. I also had a very nice vegan lunch at 222 Restaurant. Then I got the Tube all the way over to East Ham, where I had dinner at Chennai Dosa before heading on to choir in Leytonstone.

On Tuesday I went out for dinner with lozette, bellaphon, and MsMarmiteLover to Ganapati in Peckham. It was even better than the last time I went there.

On Wednesday I went down the Northern Line to take some more RGL photos. I went down to Tooting and had lunch at Sree Krishna, then worked my way back northwards, popping into the Jackdaw & Rook and the Nightingale on the way. Then I got a bus from Elephant and Castle over to Surrey Quays, and met claudacity, bob, flick, and drplokta at Whelan's for a drink before dinner at Royal Palace. Royal Palace is the place I went to a few weeks ago that has a Chinese-only menu; luckily, claudacity can read Chinese, so we managed to order a vast and delicious spread of dishes, all of which we polished off happily.

On Thursday I went to Camden for london.pm dim sum at Yum Cha. I then dragged Richard around on a mini pub crawl before getting the Tube down to London Bridge to meet bob and the other usual suspects for Mongolian food at the Horseshoe Inn.

On Friday and Saturday I did loads of work to make up for all the fun I had earlier in the week.

On Sunday I joined in the Discworld MUD Bugfix Sunday.

On Monday I went to choir and sang music by Elgar and Freddie Mercury. I went there via East Ham this time, since I've given myself a project of trying out all the small Indian restaurants along the High Street. I started with Hyderabadi Spice, where I had a very good biryani. (Haven't written the review yet since I need to go back and clear up some confusion over their billing practices.)

On Tuesday I was inspired by a Shaun Hill recipe to make seared scallops with lentil sauce. I used leftovers from the dhal I made last Tuesday to make the sauce. It worked pretty well; I hadn't been sure it was possible to sear frozen scallops without overcooking them, but they turned out fine.

On Wednesday I went for an epic two-hour dim sum lunch at Dragon Castle with amuchmoreexotic, thekumquat, and the quatlet. Then amuchmoreexotic and I headed south down the Northern Line to take some RGL photos and visit some pubs in Clapham. We then met up with ewan and mjg59 for drinks at the Tooting Tram & Social followed by curry at Radha Krishna Bhavan.

On Thursday I looked at the Tooting Tram & Social website to see which other pubs in their chain (Antic) we didn't have yet on RGL, and realised there was one near Liverpool Street, which is a short bus ride from me and technically on the way to the pub I was meant to be going to later. So I summoned some london.pm people and went and checked it out. It was subterranean, and rather noisy despite being deserted apart from us and the staff. Turn the bloody music down a bit! Then I went on to the Pakenham Arms to meet the lovely (and post-exam) superpitching. Other friends turned up too!

On Friday I mostly sat around going "ow, my womb". doop persuaded me to order a takeaway from Everest Inn in the evening.

On Saturday I worked, and on Sunday I rested.

By the way, you are allowed to comment on these posts if you like... even if it's just to say "hello!"

On Monday I didn't go to choir because it was a Bank Holiday and the Jubilee Line was closed for engineering works, and I was tired anyway.

On Tuesday I was meant to go out for fun, but I was still tired so I went to bed early and watched House.

On Wednesday I went for dim sum at Joy King Lau with Sarah and Lex, then wandered around taking photos for RGL before meeting people for curry at Gaylord. I tried to pop in to the Crown again on the way home, but it was closed again.

On Thursday I made congee for the first time ever, using the century eggs I bought from See Woo on Wednesday. It was really tasty.

On Friday I made aubergine and prawns in XO sauce, and pork and tofu in black bean sauce. Both were pretty tasty. I think I might have to start ordering XO sauce dishes in restaurants... though they do tend to be a bit expensive, since the sauce itself is expensive.

On Saturday I did some work and then finished knitting a scarf that I was making for my sister.

On Sunday I ventured to Southall with doop, ewan and said sister, to go on a pretty enjoyable food walk. We had lunch at Mirch Masala and did a bit of grocery shopping. When we got home I made pani puri and they were ace.

Anyone out there an expert on Thai food? A friend of mine visited Esarn Kheaw in Shepherd's Bush, and wrote it up for RGL. However, both of us are baffled by one of the components of the beef satay he tried there; as well as the expected peanut sauce, he also got something he describes as "like a blob of peanut butter you were meant to eat it with".

Any ideas what this might have been? I haven't got a photo, sorry.

On Monday I made cauliflower-leek soup.

On Tuesday bob got back from Eastercon with a pile of new books, so we did a massive declutter of old CDs, videos, and out-of-date computer books. Then we celebrated with a takeaway from Cafe Nawaz, which was pretty decent for what it was, and well-priced too.

On Wednesday I fixed some bugs on the Discworld MUD (and also did a wee bit of new development, which I can't tell you about until it goes in-game).

On Thursday I made some roasted carrot pate and read my freshly-arrived copy of 42 Magazine. I was planning to make baba ganoush as well, but my aubergine exploded in the oven.

On Friday I made teh interwebs crave fried egg sandwiches.

On Saturday I attempted to watch The Wire with uon but got bored halfway through the first episode due to being unable to understand what was going on. He appears to be hooked, though.

On Sunday I fixed some more Discworld MUD bugs and wrote some new NPCs for Ohulan Cutash. If you're a Discworld fan, or indeed a MMORPG fan, you really should check this out. It's been around since 1992, and has been properly maintained as well as expanded over the years since then. It also has a very good proportion of active female developers, which I believe a lot of people are touting as one of Dreamwidth's plus points.

Here are some things I did last week. I don't normally lead such a decadent lifestyle; I'd given myself a week off work because I'd been working too hard and I needed one. (Links lead to my writeups and photos elsewhere.)

On Monday, I had lunch at Sedap, a new and pretty good Malaysian restaurant on Old Street. Then I wandered westwards (via a half in the Trader on Whitecross Street) to take some photos and check out some reported closures for RGL, ending up at the Queen's Head and Artichoke near Regent's Park, where I tried (and quite liked) the pork belly skewers (photo) from their tapas menu. Then I walked back along Drummond Street, buying some almond burfi at the Ambala Sweet Centre on the way, to meet some friends at the Bree Louise, where we sampled the milds they had on gravity and ate heretical pies (photo).

On Tuesday, I met a friend for lunch at Inn Noodle in Bayswater, which claims to be the UK's first pork-free Shanghainese restaurant; the dim sum were a little disappointing, though. Then I wandered around the area doing some more RGL research and photography, popping in to the Prince Bonaparte for a sit-down in the middle. Finally I got the Tube over to Hammersmith for dinner with bob at Tosa, a Japanese restaurant on King Street specialising in tasty grilled things on skewers. I took a lot of photos, and made a photoset of them on Flickr.

On Wednesday I went out for dinner with uon to Royal Palace (photo), an unassuming-looking Chinese restaurant near our house which turns out to have a secret Chinese menu with Sichuan and Northern Chinese specialities on it. I don't read Chinese, but the waitress helped me pick out a few dishes. I'll be going back next week to try a few more before I write the RGL review; I think she gave us the "safe" options, which is not a good basis for a review.

On Thursday I went to the bleak industrial wasteland of Park Royal with hoshuteki, and had lunch at Omnia, a small deli-cafe attached to a Middle Eastern bakery and wholesale business on a one-bus road lined with small-scale factories. Then we got the Tube back into town and had some wine and a few bar snacks at Terroirs, a surprisingly decent wine bar just off the Strand. I was very pleased with the boquerones (photo), less so with the duck scratchings (photo).

On Friday, I did my tax return!

On Saturday, I went out for dinner with secretlondon, lozette, and uon to Kyrgyz Kazakh House, a Central Asian restaurant concealed within a hotel on Camberwell Road. The food was OK, but it was the decor that truly amazed us (photo).

On Sunday, I rose from the dead rested.

(Let me know if this post is interesting, and I might do another one next week!)

Note: This was originally posted on LiveJournal on 13 March 2009, then copied here and backdated. Old comments are there; please feel free to add new ones here.

Page 26 column C (Brookshill) to page 26 column A and beyond (Northwood Hills Station, eventually).

As mentioned, I put the A-Z walks on hold over the winter, since I'd reached a fairly rural area and I wanted to wait until the days were a bit longer so I could enjoy them properly. Anyway, I now declare it officially Spring in England, since I did the first A-Z walk of the year yesterday.

The previous walk ended at a bus stop on Brookshill, a little south of Harrow Weald Common, so that's where this one started, with a pleasant stroll across some farmland and down to the Uxbridge Road. Top marks to the landowners here — they'd put helpful signs wherever the route of the public footpath might have been in doubt.

An uneventful distance west along the Uxbridge Road next, with a stopoff to photograph Hatch End Station, and another to sample a half of beer in the Moon and Sixpence, and then a cutoff north onto a section of the London Loop, where I managed to fall over in the mud; luckily, after I'd got through Pinner Wood, I found a kind homeowner who let me borrow his garden hose to sluice myself off a bit.

I squelched my way down Pinner Hill and onto Joel Street, where I sneaked into the William Jolle, hiding my still-muddy bits, to meet amuchmoreexotic and mjg59. While we were enjoying the decent enough range of beers, I spotted a huge chunk of mud that I'd overlooked, so popped into the ladies' to wash my trousers off properly and dry them under the hand drier. There are now three Northwood Hills residents who've seen me in my knickers.

We followed this with a good dinner at Yummy Tai Chi, and a couple more pints (with accompanying Bollywood videos) at the Northwood Hills, and then headed back home on the Metropolitan Line.

At time of writing, Google is refusing to update its cache of the KML file showing the full route so far, but here's one showing yesterday's route alone, and here's the Flickr photoset.

Next up: I've officially finished the second row of the A-Z map now, but in order to keep a continuous line (and sample a couple of Good Beer Guide pubs) I'll be walking from Northwood Hills Station to Harefield.

Note: This was originally posted on LiveJournal on 23 March 2008, then copied here and backdated. Old comments are there; please feel free to add new ones here.

Page 26 column K (Chingford Station) to page 37 column K (Chigwell Station).

So after an enormous break of over three months, I resumed the A-Z walks on Monday 17 March 2008. (One major reason for the hiatus was that I'd been doing a different kind of exploring — visiting a particular area and wandering around circularly rather than linearly. I did e.g. Brockley, Sydenham, and Ilford.) caramel_betty happened to have some leave days that needed taking, so he joined me on this one. This wasn't a "real" A-Z walk, but rather a "fill in" one to get me from the eastern edge of the top row to the eastern edge of the next row down.

We started out eastwards from Chingford Station, making a brief diversion to have a look at Queen Elizabeth's hunting lodge. This diversion set the tone for the rest of the first half of the walk; mud, mud, and more mud. We squelched our way along the edge of Chingford Plain, circled around where we thought the lodge was, then headed back roughly the way we'd come, separated from the lodge by a tall fence which resisted all attempts at peeking through. We eventually identified the lodge with the help of a sign; it turned out to be smaller and rather less impressive than one might expect, and completely dwarfed by the Harvester (?) pub next door.

What should have happened next was a nice stroll through some woodland to the Warren Wood pub. It seemed quite easy, especially as there's yet another section of the London Loop which should have led us right to it. Unfortunately we managed to end up heading in completely the wrong direction, and after a good deal more mud ended up pretty much due south of where we'd entered the woods, instead of due east. Personally, I blame the fact that it was too overcast to see the sun, and there were no satellite dishes handy, so I had no idea where south was. I promise to buy a compass at some point.

Anyway; we eventually stumbled on a landmark in the form of a lovely, lovely road sign. I looked it up on the map, cursed silently, apologised to caramel_betty, and led the way onwards to Buckhurst Hill, where my intention was to have a pint and some lunch in the Three Colts. It was, of course, closed. Plus it was about to rain.

Interweb-on-mobile-phone was employed, and we decided on a plan B of Rocky's, which sounded kind of awful but would at least provide shelter from the rain, and it was just down the road. Upon arrival, we learned that Rocky's had been renamed to the Players Lounge. This disturbed me somewhat, as it honestly did sound and look like it was some kind of swingers' club. Now I have nothing against swingers, but I did worry that it might be, well, rude to walk into a swingers' club with unbrushed hair, scruffy clothes, and mud up to one's armpits. Thankfully I was completely imagining everything. It was a perfectly fine place to drink, with surprisingly good service, and they even had Hoegaarden. (I do have a strong suspicion that it's the kind of place that's utterly, utterly grim in the evenings, mind.)

Rain evaded, Hoegaarden quaffed, and lunch eaten, we headed out again with renewed energy. Skipping blithely across the M11 (and past a minor car smash), we peeled off north onto Roding Lane. This proved to be a mistake, as the pavement ran out very quickly, meaning we had to walk on the road. As previously documented, I know how to walk safely on roads, but that doesn't mean I like it — and checking the map later revealed that had we continued along Chigwell Rise we could have rejoined the London Loop and walked along an actual footpath. Oh well.

At the end of Roding Lane we passed Chigwell School, noting in passing that while in my day kids used to hang around the edges of the school grounds to smoke a sneaky cigarette and actually have conversations, these days they seem more interested in sending text messages and ignoring everyone around them. So exactly like grown-ups in pubs, then.

Just past the school was Ye Olde Kings Head, an enormous Chef and Brewer pub where we had a couple of pints of Bombardier. This is the point at which my earlier warning to caramel_betty began to become true — after a certain point, every A-Z walk turns into a pub crawl. The Kings Head was followed by the King William IV (Timothy Taylor Landlord and a couple of decent enough pizzas), and then, for some reason, the King Edward VII in Stratford. I have no idea which of us decided that we should go drinking in Stratford, but it was an excellent decision. Despite a bit of wobbling on my part when we failed to immediately discover the pub, and memories of mstevens' stories of Stratford muggings began to resurface, the King Eddie turned out to be a hidden gem, a saving grace, an excellent way to round off the day. A pint of Nelson's Trafalgar, a pleasant and spacious seating area, and some interesting music just on the right side of "too loud" — and a food menu that looked plenty interesting enough to merit a return visit at some point.

See also: Google map of our route (no Flickr photoset as I only took photos of pubs, and you can see them by following the RGL links).

Next up: Chigwell Station westwards, probably ending up at Highams Park Station.