Mirrorball Moves:Disco:Soundtrack Of A Revolution.

"D.I.S.C.O, D.I.S.C.O, D.I.S.C.O, D.I.S.C.O, She is disco" D.I.S.C.O. - Ottawan

For many years the word, and the genre, disco was considered a bit uncool. Associated with flairs and medallion men drenched in Old Spice. In recent years, however - recent decades even, disco has been reclaimed and now to say you don't like, or enjoy, disco music would mark you out as some unreconstructed rock bore. Scared to have fun. Scared to let yourself go. Living in fear of the mirrorball.

Disco:Soundtrack Of A Revolution (BBC2/iPlayer) takes us back to the start of disco and then follows the story of the music right through to its demise with a fairly brief coda on its renewal and renaissance. It is, at all times, a thoroughly fantastic watch - and, for me, it's all the better because it delves into the political, sexual, and racial dimensions of the disco scene.

You can't fault the music (Chic, Donna Summer, Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes, The Trammps, The Bee Gees, The Village People, MFSB, Marvin Gaye, Manu Dibango, Gloria Gaynor, Anita Ward, Labelle, KC And The Sunshine Band, Rod Stewart, Cerrone, Sylvester, Elton John, The Hues Corporation, George McCrae, Love Unlimited Orchestra, and Popcorn by Hot Butter. If not D.I.S.C.O by Ottawan) and you can't fault the huge number of talking heads either.

There's David Morales, George McCrae, Anita Ward, Francois Kevorkian, Nona Hendryx, Candi Staton, Dexter Wansel, Honey Dijon, Thelma Houston, Jocelyn Brown, Kim Petras, Marshall Jefferson, Jamie Principle, Ron Trent, MNEK, Jessie Ware, Jake Shears and Ana Matronic from Scissor Sisters, and Victor Willis who you may know better as the cop from the Village People. More than anyone, there is Nicky Siano who is a walking encyclopaedia of the disco era and seems to have been involved in almost every pivotal event discussed. Yet retains complete enthusiasm at all times.

Backing that lot up there's a host of DJs, clubbers, sound engineers, gay rights activists, music critics, producers, photographers, music journalists, art historians, and media strategists. It's a heady, and compelling, mix and the whole story starts in late sixties America at a time of the civil rights movement, Black Panthers, women's rights activism, flower power, and anti-Vietnam war protests.

It was the dawning of the age of Aquarius and the establishment didn't like it. They didn't like hippies, they didn't like gay people, and they didn't like black people. The law at the time prohibited sodomy, it prohibited cross dressing, and it even prohibited two people of the same sex dancing together. The few gay bars there did exist were illegal and, for the most part, were run by the Mafia who were able to pay the police off.

For the most part, dancing in these bars was banned but one exception was the Stonewall bar in New York's Greenwich Village. There was no DJ but people, gay people, would cut a rug to the jukebox. When, in the summer of 1969, the police decided to raid the bar a riot broke out. People were fighting for their right to party.

The New York of the early seventies was something of a ghost town and was full of huge empty warehouses. You can probably guess what happened. Some of them became social spaces. The most famous of these was the David Mancuso's Loft which opened up, and took the party to the next level, in 1970. Choosing the 14th of February, Valentine's Day, as its opening night, the Loft was Mancuso's home so police couldn't bust it. That did mean, however, that you needed an invite to attend.

The crowd (estimated to be about 75% African-American/Hispanic, 25% white) would dance to what Mancuso called "danceable r&b" and the punch was spiked with LSD (Mancuso is said to have had a "love/love relationship" with acid). An early anthem became Girl You Need A Change Of Mind by ex-Temptations vocalist Eddie Kendricks.

The success, and notoriety, of the Loft saw other clubs open in New York (including Siano's Gallery) and clubs soon came to be seen as safe spaces for the city's marginalised cultures and communities - even if the journey to and from the club was sometimes fraught with the potential of danger. It was a time when gay men were vilified, sacked from their jobs, and even murdered.

When, in 1971, New York City passed a law making it legal for two men to dance together wider society did not, on the whole, approve. Segregation continued, unofficially, in various forms and in New York, as in other big cities across America, white flight took place leaving the city centres to become predominantly black.

The parties continued in Brooklyn and the Bronx in New York but not, just yet, in Manhattan. Change came from a rather surprising angle. In 1973 a beef crisis meant many Manhattan restaurants, and restaurants elsewhere, were struggling to put meat on punter's plates so they put their venues to another use. They pushed the tables and chairs to one side and let the music in, let the dancers in.

MCs started appearing and asking, in now time honoured fashion, the dancers to throw their hands in the air and wave 'em like they just don't care. To begin with the gay community and the black community were mostly separate even as they danced in the same rooms but the song that brought them all together was Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa, a Cameroonian import!

People started to call the music 'discotheque' (after the venues in which it was played) and that was soon shortened to the punchier 'disco'. Once the music had a name a distinct sound developed. A four to the floor beat with the bass drum as the music's heartbeat. Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International label birthed a lot of musicians (including the drummer Earl Young) and The Love I Lost by Harold Melvin And The Blue Notes exemplified the early disco sound.

One DJ, Francis Grasso, started "blending", or "beatmatching", records. We'd call if fading or mixing now and at the time the dancers loved it, they screamed with excitement. It meant the dancing was now non-stop. No awkward pauses waiting for the next tune to be cued up. Elsewhere, records were looped, basslines cranked up, and special effects added to tunes. Love Unlimited Orchestra's Love's Theme reached number one on the Billboard chart without either radio play or record company promotion and that was followed by Rock The Boat by The Hues Corporation and George McCrae's Rock Your Baby.

Disco was rocking and Rock Your Baby reached number one in not just the US but in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, and Sweden. Disco had become a global phenomenon and the commercial era of disco had begun.

Against the backdrop of Watergate and Richard Nixon's resignation (as well as the continuation of the Vietnam war), disco dancers had decided, in the words of Dr Lisa Farrington, that "when life gets hard, you party harder". Life for black women in America was harder than for most others. A government report, the Moynihan report, had decided to blame the problems of black men on black women. On black women being too strong and too matriarchal. Not submissive enough, basically.

Black women answered back with disco music. There was Gloria Gaynor - "the first lady of disco", Anita Ward, Donna Summer (of course), and a revitalised Candi Staton as well as Labelle whose Lady Marmalade became a huge hit. Labelle's outlandish outfits were designed by Larry Legaspi who also designed the schmutter worn by Kiss and Funkadelic at the time.

 

Disco music had given black women an agency they had previously been denied them (with all due R E S P E C T to those inspirational outriders who had gone before them) and when you hear Candi Staton's story behind the writing of Young Hearts Run Free you'll have to agree this agency was long overdue.

Hard times may have meant hard partying but when the Vietnam war finally ended the party didn't stop. It got even bigger. Boomers wanted to celebrate and Donna Summer's Love To Love You Baby gave them something to dance to. A song that gave women, as if it was needed, permission to feel, and express, their sexuality as candidly as men had always been able to.

It wasn't a success until a radio unfriendly sixteen minute version of it was released but then it became huge. Some stations banned it, Reverend Jessie Jackson railed against it, and Time magazine, either favourably or not - I'm not sure, noted that it contained a very specific twenty-two orgasms.

The covers of disco records started to feature more overtly sexualised images of women, and - much less - men, though to look at them now, with the benefit of hindsight, some of them seem exploitative. Many of them look tacky but obviously tastes change and disco, at its peak, wasn't always concerned with being tasteful.

San Francisco was, of course, the gay capital of America. Harvey Milk had become the first openly gay man elected to public office in California and making a name for himself as a performer was Sylvester with his deathless classic You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real). New York wasn't letting San Francisco completely take over though. On 26th April 1977, Studio 54 opened its doors for the first time.

It offered a very strict, depressingly elitist and exlcusionary, door policy that, to me, undid a lot of the good work of the early disco pioneers. It didn't stop the stars coming. We see footage of David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Rod Stewart, and Grace Jones all hanging out there and Andy Warhol, according to various accounts, never missed a night. The FOMO was strong with that one.

Studio 54 made a lot of money and made a lot of headlines but probably more important were the thousands of provincial discos that were opening all across America. Undoubtedly the biggest thing to happen to disco at this time was the release of John Badham's 1977 film Saturday Night Fever. The lead character, Tony Manero - played by John Travolta, was a straight white guy. The gays, the blacks, and the women who had started the disco scene had been, predictably, sidelined.

Still, the film set the world on fire and the soundtrack, by The Bee Gees - resolutely not a disco band before Saturday Night Fever, became one of the best selling soundtracks ever. In fact, only Whitney Houston's Bodyguard soundtrack has ever sold more.

Saturday Night Fever changed what people perceived disco to be and soon people were taking disco dancing lessons so they could (try to) ape Travolta's moves and impress potential partners on the dancefloor. The likes of Rod Stewart (Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?) and The Rolling Stones (Miss You) released 'disco' records and even Frank Sinatra and Dolly Parton got involved. Though their efforts are not well remembered.

But for the originals, for the purists, it was all about Gloria Gaynor's new single. Sorry, Gloria Gaynor's new b-side. The a-side, Substitute, has been largely forgotten but the flip, I Will Survive, is now such a famous anthem that there are probably tribes in the Amazon who know every word of it off by heart. I Will Survive sent the disco heads nuts and stormed to the top of the Billboard charts but it happened at a time when the disco backlash was starting.

Racism, homophobia, and sexism did play a very big part in the backlash but there was also the question of disco saturation (at one point fifty of the top one hundred singles in America were disco tunes, other genres were struggling to get a look in) and some very poor novelty records didn't help disco's reputation - not least among disco fans.

Rick Dees And His Cast Of Idiots' Disco Duck is interesting as a curio but it's hard to imagine the dancers in a New York warehouse losing their shit to it. The same could probably be said of the Sesame Street disco album (featuring Me Lost Me Cookie At The Disco by Cookie Monster) though, to be fair, the big Village People tunes (YMCA, Macho Man, and In The Navy) still drag wedding guests to dancefloors to this day. 

Created by the French producer, the Village People were, as Honey Dijon snipes, disco for "people from Kansas" and the irony is that when they sang "we want you for a new recruit" in In The Navy it was during a time when the navy barred homosexuals from enrolling.

The Village People were a Greenwich Village band but in and around Greenwich Village, New York disco fans were not listening to them much. Outrageously dressed, they were filing in to the Paradise Garage, a venue with no clocks, no mirrors, no windows, and no alcohol license - though lots of LSD, weed, and poppers, to dance to Larry Levan's bass heavy DJ sets. His early anthem was his own mix of Inner Life ft. Jocelyn Brown's Ain't No Mountain High Enough and the music he played, with a nod to the venue in which he played it, became known as garage.

The underground disco/garage scene was going strong but the record label's obsession with repeating big hits was leading to diminishing returns and a lot of chart disco records started to sound familiar, similar, and stale. Disco had become bigger than rock'n'roll and the white straight dudes who weren't happy about this were feeling emboldened to take action.

A Disco Sucks movement began. Steve Dahl, a DJ on WLUP on Chicago, started to blow up disco records on air. It went down well - with some - so he decided to host a disco demolition night at Comiskey Park baseball stadium in Chicago as part of a match between the Chicago White Sox and the Detroit Tigers.

On the 12th July 1979 disco hating punters flowed into the stadium enticed by tickets being sold at a very cheap 99 cents. The White Sox, whose stadium it was, tended to draw a predominantly black crowd but those who bought tickets to the disco demolition night were mostly white - and they were blowing up black people's records - and not just disco ones.

The demolition was followed, unsurprisingly, by a mini-riot. Dahl's disco demolition night didn't cause the demise of disco but it did, in a way, mark the end of the disco era. If not disco itself. A far bigger threat was soon to visit the gay community. A "gay cancer" that we all soon came to know as AIDS, started to kill a lot of gay men. In the early days, an AIDS diagnosis was pretty much a death sentence. On average, you'd have two years left to live. Many of those who died were stalwarts, and major players, in the disco scene.

Homophobia had never completely gone away, it never does, but the rise of AIDS led to a rise of homophobia and newly elected president Ronald Reagan didn't do anything to stem the tide of either AIDS or homophobia. Reagan was not particularly concerned with AIDS and refused to close blood banks leading to infected blood being used for transfusions and further spread of the disease. It was four years after AIDS had been identified before Reagan acknowledged its existence.

These tough years led those that loved disco and the disco lifestyle to retreat into a more underground scene and that scene was based in Chicago where a new music, a new sound, emerged from the ashes of disco. They called it house music and it was the music that the likes of David Mancuso, Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, and Ron Hardy would have played at their clubs.

The likes of Marshall Jefferson and Jamie Principle carried the disco flame into the era of house music. For a while, many house music fans would probably have denied the music they loved owed a debt to disco but time is a great healer and now you can hear disco not just in house, garage, and techno but in hip-hop, post-punk, rock, and almost all other genres of the music. Like Gloria Gaynor, as long as disco knows how to love I'm sure it will survive. 

 

 

Domine Dirige Nos:The Higher The Buildings, The Lower The Morals.

"I don't know what London's coming to. The higher the buildings .... the lower the morals" - Noel Coward

 

The City of London's official motto is Domine Dirige Nos ("lord, guide us") but I think Noel Coward's characteristically pithy put down of the square mile's capitalist ethos is far more fitting, There is, no doubt, lots of interesting architecture and lots of absorbing history in this smallish part of London - but most of the year it's full of business people in suits braying into mobile phones and getting pissed up in Leadenhall Market.

It seemed to me the best time of year to explore the area would be betwixt Christmas and New Year when most, if not all, the offices would be closed down. On the downside, this meant most of the pubs and other infrastructure would be closed down but the City is not the weekend/bank holiday ghost town it once was (in the 90s the area would have been dead) so I felt certain we'd find enough to sate our needs - and so it proved.

It wouldn't be the most challenging walk but it was one I'd been meaning to do for some time so I was pleased that, myself included, nine of us turned up for the day. That's what I'll accept as a "good turnout". After observing Mini Eggs (I loves 'em) making their seasonal debut in the Honor Oak Sainsbury's I took the train to London Bridge, wandered about, observed a self-driving vacuum cleaner, and met with Adam, Ian, Pam, and Mo. Dave Fog was around but, disappointingly, seemed to have bored of waiting for us and headed back home.

Aware that most of your standard greasy spoons are closed at this time of year we headed down to Hays Galleria (Christmas tree still looking resplendent) and sat outside, sort of, at Cinq where some of us were just in time to get a veggie breakfast. I had a cheese and tomato ciabatta with a cappuccino (having already had two croissants at home before leaving, I'd woken very early) and, once Vicky had joined us - and what a font of local knowledge she proved, we headed out to the side of the Thames and met with Tina and Neil (the latter supposedly nursing a hangover but seemingly in good spirits) looking out towards HMS Belfast.

The post-Christmas markets were still doing a roaring trade and this made for slow going as we passed City Hall, the Bridge Theatre, and a statue of various animals on some Heath Robinson style velocipede. There were elephants, giraffes, gorillas, hippos, and chimps and there were excited tourists and their children too. Why? Who knows. But people seemed to be enjoying it.

Across the river there were views to 20 Fenchurch Street (the Walkie Talkie, Rafael Vinoly, 2009), 122 Leadenhall Street (the Cheesegrater, Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, 2014), and 22 Bishopsgate which doesn't seem to have a wry nickname but is the second tallest in London, in the UK, and in the whole of Western Europe. We'd started under the shadow of the tallest - The Shard - strictly speaking in Southwark and not the City - in all categories. Incidentally, as all Europe goes there are five taller buildings than the Shard in Russia and one in Poland. 22 Bishopsgate comes in at 17th overall behind a few more Russian buildings and a couple of Turkish towers.

We continued down to an even more famous, and more enduring, landmark - Tower Bridge. Which we crossed. I've written about Tower Bridge before but it was opened in 1894 and the architect responsible was one Horace Jones whose grave you can find in West Norwood Cemetery.

On the other side you walk between the much older Tower of London (a blog in it's own right, surely) and one of the WeWork offices where Ian, sometimes, works and, sometimes - generously, invites his friends, us, for free drinks. Most convivial in the summer with the views of the Tower, the Bridge, and the river.

Obviously there are so many buildings, and so many stories, in the City that the walk, and this account of it, will be a whistle stop tour but I will pause, as we did, a little longer on some buildings to consider them and one of them is St.Botolph's Aldgate which we reached after walking up the Minories and past Tower Gateway DLR station.

Built in the Georgian style by George Dance the Elder (see also St.Leonards in Shoreditch and St.Matthew's in Bethnal Green) and completed in 1744 it marked the point where we turned briefly down Aldgate High Street and then into Middlesex Street and the Petticoat Lane area. We passed the Bell, the spiritual home of the London Fortean Society and - therefore - a venue frequented by me, and with textile shops flanking us to the right and brutalist architecture to the left one of our walkers pointed out their own flat. We'd already been passed two of the gang's occasional offices. What a personal walk this was becoming.

We observed that Frying Pan Alley was NOT shaped like a frying pan (perhaps they used to sell frying pans there) and we carried on along the pedestrianesed and picturesqure Artillery Passage. This is the sort of area, surely, that Hollywood film makers would want access to when they wish to capture an authentic Victorian vibe.

Strictly speaking, we'd leaked out of the City and into Tower Hamlets but a walk around the perimeter (and I know, I've done a few) always tends to breach those perimeter lines and is all the more enjoyable for doing so. With views up to Hawksmoor's resplendent Christ Church we took a brief detour into Spitalfields market (far more corporate than it used to be but still not without charm) and observed some quality old style shop frontages (who knew shows used to specialise in paper bags and 'strong carrier bags') and some more elephant models. Including some kind of motor trike that may not have had an elephant on it when we arrived but soon had a right Nelly astride it.

Back in the square mile (which is neither square nor a mile in length in any direction - but close enough for that name to have stuck) we emptied out on to Bishopsgate near the Bishopsgate Institute (architect:Charles Harrison Townsend, also responsible for the Whitechapel Art Gallery and my local Horniman Museum), Dirty Dick's once famously filthy pub (somebody mentioned they once had dead cats lying around in there) and what appeared to be, but may not have been, an Aston Martin Formula E racing car.

More tall, glass, some would say faceless, buildings surrounded us as we dipped behind a now unused part of Liverpool Street station and took in some more unusual statues before heading past Finsbury Circus (as ever, nobody was making use of the bowling green) and on to our first stop, we're we'd meet with Mike, at the Barbican. He'd forewarned us that the Horrible Histories crew had taken over the main bar and a chance of seeing them proved more tempting than the possibility of a pint in The Jugged Hare.

Off the pop following a blood test that revealed I have a slightly fatty liver (reversible) and that I am prediabetic (also reversible), I took a 'lemony' lemonade and we all sat for a pleasant hour or so in the foyer of the Barbican bar. A beer would have been nice but I really didn't miss it very much at all and I must stress that I have not been told by any medical personnel whatsoever not to drink alcohol - it is very much my own choice and it almost certainly won't last forever.

On a trip to the toilet I heard the Horrible Histories gang going about their Christmas show. It sounded loud and riotous and I thought how much my god-daughter Evie (a massive fan of HH) would have loved it and also thought that I need to get on with watching the last ever series, and Xmas special, of Ghosts. I will do soon.

I popped outside to take a few snaps of the lake, the towers, and the general architecture I admire so much. If I was rich enough I'd quite like to live in the Barbican. It really is an oasis of calm in the middle of a hectic city. Built by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, it's a residential complex of about 2,000 flats, maisonettes, and even houses. It was once the ward of Cripplegate but that was almost, some of St.Giles-without-Cripplegate church aside, destroyed during World War II.

Between 1965 and 1976 the Barbican rose from Crippelegate's ashes thanks to Chamberlin, Powell and Bon who had built the nearby Golden Lane Estate beforehand. Those who have called the Barbican home include Arthur Scargill, Benazir Bhutto, George Best, and the recently departed Shane MacGowan (friends of mine were raising a Guinness or two to the former Pogues frontman across town in The Toucan that very day) and the three skyscraping towers were, until 2008/9, the tallest residential buildings in the whole of London until the Pan Peninsula on the Isle of Dogs took over.

The towers are named Cromwell (after Oliver), Shakespeare (after William), and Lauderdale (after, er, the Earls of Lauderdale). The Barbican Arts Centre came after the properties and was opened in 1982 but has expanded to include a theatre, a three screen cinema, an art gallery, a concert hall, a library, seven conference rooms, and three bars.

One of which is was time for us to leave - but Vicky had a little surprise for us. She had a key that took us through a private, residential, section of the complex. It was all I could do not to press my lemonade smudged nose up to the huge windows and gawp at the spacious, and well decorated rooms. Property envy I had for sure.

We emptied out on the Beech Street underpass. Nobody seemed interested in checking out a nearby Banksy so we crossed Aldersgate Street and headed down Carthusian Street (past the Sutton Arms, once a regular post-Barbican Art Gallery pint stop for me) and stopped for a while at Charterhouse Square as Vicky told us about the history of the Charterhouse. Of more interest to some was the block of flats to the side of it were the fictional Poirot once lived.

We carried down along the side of the former, and massive, Smithfields market - where the new Museum of London will eventually open - and, after an impromptu tribute to Andrew Weatherall, crossed Farringdon Road and continued along to Holburn - just to the north of Holborn Viaduct.

Along Holborn we took in the Holborn Bars, the red terracotta goliath built by Alfred Waterhouse (Natural History Museum, Strangeways prison) and the Tudor fronted Staple Inn, the last remaining Inns of Chancery) before cutting through into a very quiet Chancery Lane. We were almost on the route of last December's LbF walk but a pint in The Seven Stars, this year, was not on the agenda. Roxy Beaujolais would have to wait. We did, however, pass a statue of a snowman and these snowmen statues, one for each line of the song Twelve Days of Christmas, have brought Tina (and her Facebook page) much festive joy this yule.

On Fleet Street, Tina was to pay it back to us by, like Vicky earlier, producing a magical key. Hers allowed us entry into the private and mystical lands of the Inns of Court. She works there. She'd not nicked a key. Obviously everything we saw is absolutely top secret so I couldn't take photos and I can't tell you about any of it. Though there are some photos and you can see them all below - and read (a bit) about it all.

Behind the big black door, there are churches, chapels, offices, homes, parking spaces (!), gardens, bars, chambers (lots of chambers), fancy trees, statues, and lots and lots of very photogenic fir cones. It's a large space that most Londoners will never ever visit even though anyone walking along the Embankment may look in and wonder what exactly is going on in this obviously ludicrously expensive piece of central London real estate.

Usually, lawyers and librarians going about their daily business but in the lull between Christmas and New Year a group of the capital's curious having a nose around for no other reason than because they can. Thanks Tina and thanks Vicky for bringing something to the walk which I could not have imagined when I planned it all that time ago.

Congratulations, also, to Ian who reached his target of 5,000,000 steps just as we came out of the private section by Two Temple Place. He had to run on the spot a bit to get there but, as you won't be surprised if you know Ian, he had a small bottle of bubbly secreted on his person and that was cracked open to celebrate his achievement. I'd actually aimed for 5,000,000 steps this year but, by the end of November, I'd conceded defeat (November was an awful month for walking - among other things) and am now on a mere 4,577,209. Next year's target:- a rather ambitious 6,000,000.

He was still supping it as we reached St. Paul's Cathedral. The walk pretty much over now we made our way towards Brick Lane for a curry but we still managed to pass a few landmarks in the Bank of England (cue My New House by The Fall), James Stirling's Number One Poultry (now, it seems, a popular suicide spot for depressed bankers), the Royal Exchange, and various imposing skyscrapers - lit up impressively as day turned to night.

We took a pit stop at the Hoop & Grapes pub on Aldgate High Street. Some had a couple of beers but I stuck to the blackcurrant and lemonade as we talked about teenage darts prodigy Luke 'The Nuke' Littler, Basingstoke legend Sir John Staly, the ubiquity of air friers, and just how fucking awful Mrs Brown's Boys is.

Mo had left us just before the pub (to go for a bagel on Brick Lane) and Tina and Neil after Ian reached his step target (to go home and see their cat, Oscar), and now it was time for Ian to head back to the South Coast so Arlow could regale him with his version of Cab It Up! Pam, Adam, Mike, and myself continued on to The Famous Curry Bazaar aka Bengali Kitchen on Brick Lane (it had had good reviews so we ignored the eager touts outside the neighbouring eateries) and took a table by the door.

I had paneer jalfrezi (which wasn't very spicy but had too much onion for me) and shared a garlic naan and a pilau rice with Mike. It was good if hardly earth shattering but as you might expect on Brick Lane it came quick so we were all done by about half-eight. Pam and I walked to Shoreditch High Street tube but it was closed so we walked down Norton Folgate to Liverpool Street. She went in to the station and I got a bus to Elephant & Castle and another one home. I was home, sober - stone cold sober, by about 9.30pm (much earlier than usual) and in bed not long after. It had been a pretty successful day and a pretty laid back one too.

Thanks to Pam, Mo, Adam, Neil, Tina, Vicky, Ian, and Mike for yesterday (and to Pam and Tina for the photos used in this blog - and Mike for the one of Ian celebrating his five million steps) and thanks to everyone who was part of an LbF walk in 2023 (a season that, disappointingly, had less walks than normal). That's Pam, Mo, Katie, Vicky, Roxanne, Clive, Adam, Tina, Neil, Ian, and Mike. Next year we'll start in March in Theydon Bois with a walk (another attempt after last year's spectacular mudbound failure) with a walk through Epping Forest and on to Walthamstow. Though if the weather is particularly inclement it will be replaced by a more suitable walk. Let's wait and see. Hopefully see lots of you there.