Imperatrix Newhamensis

Alas, I am a bit vague on who paste is (which probably means we once went to ATP together), but otherwise these are great this year! I don't want to change the world, I'm just looking for a new Newham...

I finished my 101 Things in 1001 Days challenge on Monday! The last fortnight has involved quite a bit of scurrying to get things done, and we celebrated the last day of it with a bonfire (where I did not symbolically burn the list). Herewith, a long list of all the things I did and didn't do.

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Once upon a time when we all still went out and did things, I made myself this 101 things list. The deadline is approaching - 19th July! There's still quite a lot of it to do and some challenges may be impossible now, but fortunately I knocked off a few earlier this year:

25. Learn the magic loop method.

I have been knitting a lot of socks recently. Would you like a sock? I could knit you one! (Unless I run out of yarn, the horror.) They are enjoyably quick after the long slog of knitting a jumper for most of last year, and I have just about got the knack of knitting them on one circular needle. My sock-knitting book informs me that I must employ the magic loop method for this, so I guess I have learned it! It wasn't as magical as I was hoping, tbh.

34. Take driving lessons.

Currently on hold, but that's OK - I've been trying to learn to drive since I was 20! I never got very far with my youthful driving lessons, partly because I kept abandoning them to move to Denmark, and partly because I was not much cop and not particularly bothered about ever getting as far as my test. Then I moved to London and decided that cars were pointless, the end. However, a few things that have happened in my world recently have made me consider that it might be good to at least know how to drive, just in case of emergencies; and it might also be cool to acquire at least one adult life skill. So I am taking lessons again, getting up at 6.30 for a few hours of driving round and round the block in Cheam, and I am actually making some progress! Driving is kind of scary and awful, and I really don't want a car; but managing to drive all the way to Croydon and back without injury is a pretty astonishing thing.

38. Find a new drum teacher and take lessons.

I have found a new drum teacher! He is very very Northern and I have to try very hard not to put on a weird Yorkshire accent when speaking to him! We had a few lessons in a practice studio near work, but now we're doing them online, which makes me think he is always in the corner of the room judging me. Unlike driving lessons I think I am getting worse, but at least I'm motivated to practise now.

55. Meet up with four UK friends who live outside London.

I was hoping to use this challenge to catch up with some long-lost friends from school and university times, but it turns out that scheduling things with people in different cities with whom you're only sporadically in touch is not that easy. But I have met the brief: I visited Victoria in Oxford, Rachel in Nottingham, André and Kim in their little village in Kent, and Susan and Ian in High Wycombe. It turns out I don't like High Wycombe at all! But that might just be because I went there on a Sunday via rail replacement bus, and got lost in a park.

68. Go to Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Done! Kevan and I went a couple of months ago. It has a pleasingly odd selection of antiquities and art all shoved into a tiny little house, and some VERY snotty volunteer guides.

50 things done! 51 more to go! Er well, let's see how that goes...

(I'm not sure whether anyone actually read my previous 101 things update, which was full of feats of derring-do, so I will shamelessly link to it again!)

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I need cheering up today, so let me tell you about a few more things I have done! Though I've only crossed off about 39 things from the original list, and I have less than a year to get through the rest because I am a terrible failure of a human being tra la, ANYWAY!

19. Cycle to Croydon. DONE

I haven't been cycling much since I moved out of London, because the cars move faster and there are no cycle lanes, and I have no particular places I want to go to nearby. But Croydon Best Friend only lives a few miles away; it can take up to an hour to catch two buses to her house, so I gave cycling a go. It was all right! I got lost twice, had to cross two scary enormous roads and limp up several hills (I only do flat surfaces as a rule), but I did get to South Croydon marginally quicker and much pinker of face than I would have done by bus. A few weeks later, I went to see my friend Ant's wife performing her Edinburgh preview stand-up show, and it was all about cycling in Croydon! Relatable content!

28. Make something out of wood. DONE

This year was my third Glastonbury festival, and I have now figured out exactly how to enjoy it; get up relatively early and wander off by myself during the day, go and see bands with my Goth Glastonbury crew in the evening, go back to camp at the first twinges of sleepiness rather than trying to walk through the late night drunken enormo-crowds while deliriously tired, eat as many apples and peanut butter bagels as possible, and go to the craft workshops. I did a willow-weaving workshop which was quite satisfying, and a spoon-carving workshop for the purposes of this challenge. We sat around in a circle whittling away at our spoons for a couple of hours while our earnest hippy teacher told us about living in a van and how he liked to give trees a hug because they were lonely, and it was all very enjoyable until I suddenly realised that our session was almost over and everyone else had made a spoon, while I still just had a pointy block of wood. Here is what I took away after begging the teacher to try and turn it into a spoon in two minutes.

51. Give up sugar for a week. DONE

This wasn't too hard, apart from a work meeting featuring pain au chocolat. I discovered that peanut butter on cream crackers is a tolerable substitute for biscuits.

76. Go to Dungeness. DONE

I've been meaning to do this for a long time, probably since I was in my teens and my penfriend sent me a tape of Derek Jarman's 'Blue' and told me about his garden. It always seemed impossible to get to by public transport though, involving too many logistical steps and somehow having to catch a steam train. However! After not really thinking about Derek Jarman for many years, I bought 'Modern Nature' from Waterstones on a whim and discovered that I love him; his diaries are such an odd mixture of earnest gardening, fretful film-making, gossiping about famous people, being delightfully rude all the time, and being horribly ill and very stoic about it. The best bits are how silly he and his partner HB are together - this interview brings me great joy every time I read it, which is quite often.

Anyway, the man in Waterstones who sold me the book told me that I could now get a bus from Rye to Dungeness, which sounded much easier than a steam train, although considerably less cool. So last weekend Kevan and I went to Rye and spent a couple of days camping a couple of miles out of town, and on Saturday we caught the bus to Dungeness and spent a few hours walking around the shingle, looking at the oystercatchers and the sea kale and the abandoned boats, checking out the lighthouses and the power stations, and finally walking past Derek Jarman's cottage at a respectful distance and having a look at his garden. It was everything I hoped it would be.





96. Drink the following: bubble tea; dandelion and burdock; a lager shandy, Vimto. DONE

Bubble tea: a hit! I liked this much more than I'd expected and will have it again.
Dandelion and burdock, Vimto: not bad, but probably something that one should acquire a taste for in one's childhood to enjoy properly. My palate is bland and middle-class, so I still prefer Ribena.
Lager shandy: one pint is quite a nice soothing drink, but two pints is way too much sugar and made me feel a bit giddy. I will approach again with caution.

We'll be walking from Southgate to Arnos Grove this Sunday (7th July). Meet at Southgate station from 2pm for a prompt departure by 2.30!

You're also welcome to join us for lunch at 1pm at the nearby Lebanese restaurant Warda. Please let me know if you want to come, so we can save you a space.

I only have one new thing to tick off my 101 things list, but it's a biggie - I have played 101 different games! Aptly enough, I finished the challenge on Kevan's birthday. When I wrote the list it always seemed quite likely that I'd manage this one, given we have a large library of board games at home and friends who sometimes come to stay with an entire crate of their games; but then the Ludoquist cafe opened in Croydon and became our favourite social space, and they kindly bought a lot more games so we didn't have to. Also, Croydon God-daughter has become quite an able games player, so now it's a thing we can sometimes do with her. I'm not sure that I'm actually particularly interested in games per se, and my poor memory for the rules means I'll never be very skilled at them, but I like that they're a good way of spending time with other people. And sometimes they're quite funny.

Here's the entire list of games, seeing as I bothered to log them as I went along. This will not be of any interest to more than two of you, but perhaps you can spot which ones were not endorsed by Kevan... There are way too many games named after a Japanese word here - I have very little idea which one is which!

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The next Tube Walk will be on Sunday 14th April - this Sunday! We'll be walking from South Quay to Crossharbour and meeting EARLY at 1pm. Hope to see you there!

I did some more of the things on my 101 things list! I'm about halfway through the allotted time and have only managed 32 things, so it’s going to be a busy summer. Original (and increasingly implausible) list here.

13. Find where the local library is and join it.

I am now a card-carrying member of Sutton library and can borrow up to 20 books at once! I haven't, though, cos I'm never at home when the library's open. The one near work is quite good as London libraries go, though, except when you have to pick your way through a rhyme time session to check out books on their annoying self-service machine.

20. Watch five films at the David Lean cinema:

Done! I think I’ve actually watched seven now - it suddenly became a habit this winter to check the listings and book a ticket for anything interesting. It’s really nice that there’s a place to see good films for under a tenner that's a bus ride from home. I’ve got used to its odd quirks - that I’m usually one of the youngest people there, that you have to buy tickets weeks in advance as there’s a hardcore crew of regulars who book up any good film as soon as it's announced, that I usually get stuck in the seat right against the wall and can’t leave at the end of the film till the oldsters have all shuffled out, and that we always have to watch a tedious short film made by the students at the BRIT school before we’re allowed to enjoy ourselves. (And once, an excruciating unexpected Q&A with one of the teenage filmmakers - everyone was very polite…) I’m being mean, I’m glad it has a loyal audience that keeps it going, and in the last six weeks or so I saw ‘The Favourite’, ‘Sullivan’s Travels’, 'Stan & Ollie' and ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me?’ which were all excellent.

21. Crochet a toy.

Done! I went to an amigurumi class at Tea and Crafting in Covent Garden (which is very good if you ever fancy a one-off craft class in something or other; though not cheap, and up a steep flight of stairs). I made this rabbit! It was a struggle!


63. Go on the underground train at the Post Office Museum.

Done! I went with Kevan on my birthday. It was good fun squeezing into the little train and trundling through a few of the tunnels of the Post Office underground railway, and pretty cool to think about it running all the way from Paddington to Whitechapel. The rest of the museum was all right but not nerdy enough for my tastes, so a bit of a swizz for £17; I didn’t find out much that I hadn’t already learned from the Danish post museum in Copenhagen for free. I did enjoy watching a film made by the GPO film unit called ‘The Fairy of the Phone’, where the eponymous hero taught the etiquette of answering the phone to a mad professor, a child eating sweets, and Mr Parsnip.

98. Do a thing with my dad.

Done! I took him to a classical concert at the Royal Festival Hall as a Christmas present, and we watched a Romanian pianist called Radu Lupu, who is apparently one of the best in the world. I don’t remember much else except that I spent most of the time being furious with the woman in front of me for recording the whole thing on her phone, but it was a nice evening and Dad seemed to enjoy it.

45. Go to the Eritrean restaurant near Clapham Junction. FAIL - it's closed down! Probably my fault for never going...