Fleapit revisited:The Bikeriders.

"I get ahead on my motorbike, I get ahead on my motorbike, I feel so quick in my leather boots, I feel so quick in my leather boots. My mood is black when my jacket's on, my mood is black when my jacket's on" - The Living End, The Jesus And Mary Chain

You ever started something that got a bit out of hand? Have you, for instance, started a little club that grew bigger than you expected, ended up almost like a business or mini-empire, full of the beefs and power struggles that come with that territory? If you have then Johnny Davis will know how you feel. Not that he'd be able to express it verbally. He's not the most articulate of men.

Jeff Nichols' new film The Bikeriders tells the story of not just Johnny (Tom Hardy) but also of married couple Benny (Austin Butler) and Kathy (Jodie Comer, like Hardy a Brit in a very American movie). After watching Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, Johnny decided to start a motorcycle club, The Vandals, and invites his biker friends from Chicago to join him.

There's Zipco (Michael Shannon) who hates 'pinkos', there's Cal (Boyd Holbrook, Steve Murphy from Narcos), there's Funny Sonny (Norman Reedus) who's come all the way from California to ride with them, there's Cockroach (Emory Cohen) who has earned his nickname due to his fondness for eating bugs, and there's Brucie (Damon Herriman) who, despite looking a bit like Conan O'Brien, ends up being Johnny's deputy.

Then there's Benny - and Benny's the real deal. A man of few words and a man who, it seems, fears nothing and nobody. The others, even Johnny, want to be like Benny but Benny wants to be with Kathy. When he first meets her, she's married, but he hangs around outside her house until her then partner freaks out and walks out on her (not quite sure what sort of message that is, that stalking works?) and within five weeks Benny and Kathy are married.

The trouble is Benny appears to be just in love with his motorbike, the Vandals, and even Johnny as he is with Kathy. Even when he finds himself on the end of a severe beating his main concern is that he may no longer be able to ride his bike. Kathy, for her part, mostly joins in with a biker culture that had, initially, horrified her.

The main interests of the Vandals, biking aside, appear to be playing pool, drinking, smoking, and fighting. Usually with fists and knives though a bit of kicking and biting are used to spice things up. The story is told via two interviews with Kathy conducted by the photo journalist Danny Lyon (Mike Faist) whose 1968 photo book Bikeriders the film is based on.

One in 1965, when Lyon was embedded with the Vandals (or, in real life, the Outlaws) and one in 1973 when he returns to find out what became of Benny, Kathy, and Johnny since he left them. Kathy's textbook feisty, full of homespun wisdom, loyal to Benny, and yet comes to want him to leave the Vandals and for them to have a quieter, and safer, life.

Soon, being in a biker gang starts to look like being in the Mafia (the film reminded me of Goodfellas on more than a couple of occasions) and those who were once so desperate to escape the straight life and the rigid mores of conventional society find themselves setting ever stricter rules and enforcing them ever more violently.

As new members are allowed in to the Vandals, the violence gets more serious, pot smoking - and more serious drug use - is added to the drinking culture, women are objectified and far worse, and the petty crimes that were always part of the culture (health and safety, it seems, was not a concern for the biker gangs, I don't think there's a crash helmet in the film though there's a hell of a lot of denim) are replaced by considerably more worrying transgressions.

It'd hard to really identify with, or even care about, Benny and Johnny despite great performances from Butler and Hardy so the viewer will probably find themselves siding with Comer's Kathy. So while it's rarely a hugely emotional watch it is, as the film develops, an engaging and entertaining one. There's a fantastic soundtrack (Muddy Waters, Them, The Staple Singers, The Animals, Bo Diddley, Cream, Magic Sam, The Stooges, The Sonics, The Shangri-Las, Dale Hawkins, and Gary U.S. Bonds), it's brilliantly acted and shot, there's a cameo appearance from the great Will Oldham, and some of the violence, for a 15 certificate at least, made me wince.

Which is probably how it should be. Violence shouldn't be enjoyable to watch. I've only ridden motorbikes a handful of times. I quite enjoyed it but I didn't fall in love with motorbiking and I certainly don't think I'd be able to fall in love with biker culture. I try to steer clear of knife fights. Watching a film about it is more than enough for me. Especially a film like The Bikeriders. 

Eternal Recurrence of the Intergalactic Jesus.

Is Jesus a particle or a wave?

Do computers have souls?

Would you baptise an alien?

What if crisps are sentient?

 

All of these questions popped up during yesterday evening's fascinating and bonkers (if somewhat niche and highly speculative) Skeptics in the Pub - Online talk. The curiously titled God and ETI (Extraterrestrial Intelligence):The Future of Human Religion with Dr Aaron Adair. The doc seems an interesting character and he seems to live a charmed life. Him and his wife, Janice, are currently working on a book about Godzilla and he's a research affiliate in physics education research at MIT (he lives in the Boston area) as well as authoring a couple of books with Jonathan MS Pearce, The Star of Bethlehem:A Skeptical View and Aliens and Religions:When Two Worlds Collide.

It was the latter book that formed the basis of yesterday's talk. The idea that in the not too distant future we may very well know for certain that we are not alone in the universe. An episode of Star Trek sets the date:- 5th April 2063 - incidentally a day on which a very close friend of mine will turn 88. What a gift for her.

Predictions of alien contact predate Star Trek by quite some way. The Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270BC) posited theories about the infinity of worlds that may be out there and the chances that at least one, or several, of them would host some form of life. A few hundred years later, the Syrian satirist and rhetorician Lucian of Samosata (c.125-180AD) anticipated modern science fiction by writing about voyages to the moon and to Venus as well as scores of aliens fighting intergalactic wars (specifically a war between the sun and the moon). The alien cabbage men and the giant spiders were both apparently lethal foes. 

Thanks to Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) we're finally catching up with the ancients when it comes to all things extraterrestrial. Copernicus, of course, is famous for his theory of heliocentrism, The belief that the Earth and and all the other planets revolve around the sun. As opposed to the prevailing belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe.

The first of the English speaking Copernicans was Thomas Digges (c.1546-1595) who took the idea a little bit further and had the sun not just as the centre of our own solar system but as the centre of an infinite universe. It was a neat idea but it was, as we now know, wrong. The sun is just one of billions of stars, each the centre of their own solar system. 

This means that Earth is not special. There are billions, far too many to count, of stars out there which means, according to Dr Aaron Adair, we are just average. That, I'd contend, depends on absolute proof that life on other planets does actually exist. It it doesn't, I'd say that makes us quite special. Well, some of us!

But why would God create such a vast universe and then only create life on one relatively small planet (the third rock from the sun)? Dr Adair asked us to imagine three competing scenarios:-

(i) imagine a universe where every planet, every solar body, is teeming with life

(ii) imagine one where Earth is the only planet able to host life (aka the Goldilocks principle)

(iii) imagine something in the middle where life is rare but occasionally crops up

All (and none) of these theories are consistent with theistic ideas. But if there are aliens then where are they? Are they too lazy, or unable, to come and visit us? Are they hiding (either for their own safety or for more nefarious reasons)? Are they just extremely rare? Or are they very very very (millions of light years) away? Perhaps they're on their way but they won't get here until all of humanity has perished.

Do all civilisations have a built in self-destruct mechanism and automatically destroy themselves (perhaps with nuclear weapons or with climate change) before contact can be made? Would that be the sort of thing a universal God would factor in and programme?

What would these theoretical aliens be like? Not so much what would they look like (there's been more than enough debate about that - from little green men to the greys du jour) but would they have their own religious traditions? If science is able to prove we are not alone in the universe how would that affect religious practice on our planet?

Dr Adair focused primarily on Christianity (though he did touch briefly on Islam) and how aliens don't appear in the Bible (though, I believe every story in the Bible takes place within a few thousand miles of what's called the Holy Land, God - it seems - wasn't keen on the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, China, or Oceania). In fact there is no concept whatsoever of 'outer space' in the Bible.

Read literally, as some pretend to do - although that's not actually possible because so many stories contradict each other, the Earth in the Bible is a flat Earth and the stars are mere decorations attached to the dome that acts as a roof to the entire planet/entire universe. Beyond that there are no other stars or planets, just a 'heaven'. Or, for some, a 'hell'. Which means that, according to the Bible, aliens are an impossibility. There's simply nowhere for them to come from.

The God of the Bible, it seems, only loves earthlings (and, often it seems, only specific groups among them). If God created ALL THINGS then why is this tiny floating speck we live on so important to him or her (or they, get with the times)?

Or has God created alien Jesuses and if so how many? There would surely be trillions of intergalactic Jesuses out there? It's the biggest question, apparently, in astrotheology, a field I didn't even know existed twenty-four hours ago. Could there be amphibious Jesuses, reptilian Jesuses, Jesuses in forms that are beyond even our wildest imagings? A liquid Jesus? A gas Jesus? MC 900 Ft Jesus?

Some parts of the universe are accelerating away from us faster than the speed of light which means the universe is growing faster than we can explore it. That means that more and more planets keep appearing, meaning (possibly) more and more civilisations (or at least forms of life) could be appearing, meaning - if you're willing to join Dr Adair on his rollercoaster ride through astrotheology - that more and more Jesuses will be appearing. Appearing quicker than we can even count them.

In pre-modern Christian anti-alienism (and yes, that was the rather brilliant subtitle of the section of the talk), the plurality of worlds was considered a heresy by various popes as well as the Dominican friar and philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and, much further back, the Berber theologian Augustine of Hippo.

Mainly because the Bible, and the concept of Creationism, posits that only one world was created. God didn't build other worlds, just our one. The belief in atomism (the idea that everything is created by atoms, pretty much randomly, smashing into each other) was seen as tantamount to atheism and even the one person who dared to speak out with a different point of view was careful not to go too far.

The German cardinal and philosopher Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) believed that aliens COULD exist - but probably didn't. He went on to have it that if aliens did exist they would be, and could only be, inferior life forms because humans, who were created by God, were so noble and perfect that no other life form could possibly compete with our intelligence. That's the sort of confidence and certainty that idiots have always had throughout time and always will.

Nicholas of Cusa's ideas were conventional enough not to upset the religious authorities. A later Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) from the Kingdom of Naples was a heliocentric, a Copernican, and, for believing in the infinity of worlds and inhabitants of those worlds, was considered a heretic. He was burned alive on a stake, naked - why the hell not, in Rome and his ashes thrown in the Tiber.

Religious leaders, you may have observed, don't take kindly to having their beliefs questioned, tested, or refuted and, throughout history, Christian leaders have killed people for not toeing their line - usually with impunity. Dr Adair spoke about religious texts failing to match with scientific facts (which was perhaps not very necessary for an audience of Skeptics) and how religions fail to deal with the problem of evil (likewise).

If God, or a god, or gods, exist then why was the Holocaust allowed to happen? Why was slavery allowed to happen? Why do small children die of cancer? Why do the Red Hot Chili Peppers sell records and headline festivals? Surely no kind and loving God would allow any of this.

If our God, and our Jesus, allowed these things to happen on our planet then could one of the other trillion Jesuses have overseen even worse suffering in the some of the trillion worlds they operate in? What of the apocalypse? How does that fit when we discover aliens? Do an infinite number of Jesuses have to come back an infinite number of times to defeat an infinite number of Satans? That's not what it says in scripture.

The apocalypse seemed an appropriate place to end a fun, conjectural yet highly academic, talk. There were some digressions into UFO cults, doomsday events that didn't happen (but nevertheless strengthened the belief in those that foretold them), Captain Cook, Futurama, Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still, and the Prince Philip cargo cult in Vanuatu (Melanesia, not Micronesia as the doc had it, I'll let him off that one) and there were a couple of confusing graphs about the "probability density function".

A Q&A took in alien Buddhists, djinns, Ragnarok, CS Lewis, Planet of the Apes, and, of course, AI (the concept of AI creating its own religion, or various AIs creating various religions and then going to war over them) and by the end of it all I was so elated I wanted to read more about it and I was so bewildered that I was almost wishing one of England's boring Euro 2024 games was on TV so I could get to sleep.

Thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online, thanks to Gerard Sorko for hosting (all the way from Cologne), and thanks to Dr Aaron Adair for making me think, in some depth, about a subject that had never really crossed my mind before. If aliens do make contact I hope they're nice, I hope they're friendly (maybe even a bit sexy), and I hope they're all atheists. One God is too many. Trillions sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Their Lives Changed Forever:D-Day:The Unheard Tapes.

"I remember the people of Normandy. Their country was ravaged, their lives changed forever. I remember the dead enemy soldiers who had once been alive and young and as fearful as we. My thoughts were of all the troops who had died that we were leaving behind. Suddenly I felt I was all alone. We came with so many and we were leaving with so few" - Tom Porcella

When Tom Porcella went to fight in Normandy on D-Day he went with sixteen of his buddies. He was the only one of the seventeen to return. He'd experienced a world of fear, uncertainty, exhaustion, blood, blown up houses, destroyed villages, obliterated cities, people being shot in the head, beaches strewn with human corpses, and death upon death upon death.

A hell on Earth in which over one hundred thousand people were killed. D-Day:The Unheard Tapes (BBC2/iPlayer) tells Porcella's, and others', stories over three hour long episodes and though it took me a while to be moved by the story (not because I'm Rishi Sunak and don't care about D-Day, but because it's actually quite dry and matter of fact in places) by the end I couldn't stop the tears from coming.

The juxtaposition of the extreme inhumanity (a dead human body used as a trash can) with the extreme humanity (the love and respect between colleagues, the cheering crowds of civilians in Normandy) was what finally set me off and, as one soldier says towards the end, the sheer waste of human life. Damage that lasted, and continues to last, for generations. Damage some would blithely return to.

D-Day:The Unheard Tapes uses young actors to lip-synch the real worlds of actual real soldiers that served in Normandy. British soldiers from Liverpool and London (some as young as seventeen, some with pregnant wives back home), American GIs, and even former Wehrmacht members as well as French civilians and members of the resistance. Alongside them, providing exposition, there are military historians and journalists and, of course, there are dramatic reconstructions too.

We hear how the five beaches of Normandy were divided up between the allies, identified, and named (Utah and Omaha for the US forces, Juno for the Canadians, Gold and Sword for the Brits) and we get lots of logistical details regarding campaigns to control and liberate Caen and Cherbourg. Escoville, Lion-sur-mer, and the Benouville (now Pegasus) bridge feature heavily.

Nothing on the scale of D-Day/the Normandy landings/Operation Neptune had ever been attempted before in human history and those planning it knew how dangerous it was. The allies expected, and the young soldiers were told, that about 30% of those involved were expected to lose their lives. Not far short of a kamikaze mission. Made worse by the officer class's almost complete indifference to the death and suffering.

Black American soldiers had it even worse as they were given the most dangerous, and most demeaning, jobs and still suffered segregation even as they fought for the same country, and the same freedoms, as their white countrymen and their European comrades.

The gliders arrived in France first and, soon, the ships followed it. Some of the men describe the experience as exciting, exhilarating, technicolour, and even psychedelic but it wasn't long before many of them were dying in each other's arms. One solider put in years of training only to die within thirty seconds of going into combat. He never got to see his then unborn son.

At Omaha, the German soldiers (not all of them Nazis but all of them fighting for the Nazis) picked off US soldiers at will - as if playing a computer game. It was kill or be killed and the makers of the programme don't shy away from horrific descriptions of the grisly ends some met. An infantryman whose head is no longer attached to his body is just the first of many to undergo that grim experience.

Elsewhere, we hear of Nazis cutting dead soldiers penises and testicles off and forcing them into their dead mouths. The dreadful behaviour that one human can enact upon another can surely only come about when they've been conditioned to dehumanise others. That's why we should never do that and that's why D-Day:The Unheard Tapes is worth watching. As a reminder.

I was moved, negatively, by the sheer horror but I was also moved, positively, by the fact that fascism was ultimately defeated and I hope it stays that way. With the rise of Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National in France, the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany, and Nigel Farage and Richard Tice's grifting Reform UK party in the UK we can't take freedom from fascism for granted. We should stop it now - peacefully - before our children have to fight, and die, for future freedoms once again. 

Read It In Books:Teeth.

I've not seen John Patrick Higgins' new teeth. He lives in Northern Ireland and I live in London so we don't catch up as much as I'd like. I have, however, read his book Teeth - which is all about those new teeth and how he came to get them - and I found it a very agreeablee read.

Like him, I've been put through the wringer a bit when it comes to dental work. Most obviously the time I fell off a pushbike and the nut that holds the handlebars in place smashed into my face cutting both my front teeth in half, damaging a few others, and leaving me with twenty-two stitches in my chin and upper lip. The dental work to repair this lasted for years and wasn't helped when my dentist was sent to prison for murdering another dentist (if I remember rightly, both dentists had fallen in love with the same third dentist and it their rivalry had escalated pretty drastically).

Which was a shame as I quite liked that dentist (obviously I didn't know about the murdering although perhaps John did as in his book he says that dentists make good murderers) John's dental experiences have been quite different to mine. I'm not sure if any event, falling off a bike or otherwise, resulted in John's bad teeth but, by his own admission, he'd had bad teeth for a long time and, unlike many people - specifically many British people - Americans wouldn't stand for it, he decided to not only do something about it but write a book that chronicled, humorously and sometimes a little lugubriously, this process.

The humour comes easily and it comes early, and it continues right through to the end. As I suspected it would. John describes himself as having a "gob full of broken biscuits" and remembers feeling pleased when Covid meant he got to wear a mask to cover them up while also coming up with some very funny lines. Not least when he mentions his "brittle breadstick legs" and describes a feeling of sinking with "the sadness of a dropped accordion".

Later he'll talk about being "as erotic as hairy porridge" and his teeth, or teeth in general, are variously described as pearlies, neolithic stones (possibly covered in lichen), wet autumn leaves and loose chippings, hollowed out cakes in the rain, an abandoned quarry, half-chewed corn niblets, long vacated shells of withered bivalves, and a gruesome mixed grill in a greasy spoon. Not, generally, the kind of descriptions that Colgate would use for their advertising.

It's not all laughs though. Wearing a gumshield to bed sounds uncomfortable and inconvenient and catching MRSA and spending months in hospital (a story I knew about) sounds far more depressing (or, perhaps, character building) if not quite as bad as the story of St Appollonia of Alexandria, the patron saint of dentists, who died jumping into a fire after being tortured and having her teeth pulled out by pincers. It's one of the little educational morsels I picked up reading this book. See also the widespread belief that George Washington had wooden teeth.

It's always an education, as much as a laugh, with John. Of course he manages to remind us just how much he hates football - only once though (and I was watching football when I read that bit for what it's worth) - and more movingly he touches on living with low level depression, breaking his knee (very painful sounding, I had gout in BOTH of my knees once and that hurt enough) and then, of course, there's all that dental work. Not just the work but the sometimes awkward, sometimes warm, interactions with his dentist and various other members of the medical and administrative staff - and a few random strangers to boot.

 References (which I've come to expect, and enjoy, when reading John's writing) come thick and fast and they're, often, just the sort of ones I'd hope for. David Sylvian, Theatre of Blood, Valerie and her Week of Wonders, Dr Who, Spandau Ballet, Woody Woodpecker, Reece Shearsmith, Chuck D, Peters and Lee, Van Gogh, Hammer House of Horror, Nick Rhodes, Nosferatu, Les Dawson, Italo Calvino, Quentin Crisp, Richard Kiel, Stephen "Tin Tin" Duffy, Ken Dodd, and even Max Headroom! Even lovely Rylan! It's a great big patchwork world of things I love and things I remember but haven't thought about for a long time. A bit like one of my dreams. It all goes together to make a very easy, very enjoyable read. Surely a lot easier and enjoyable to read this book than to suffer the experiences that resulted in it being written

Thanks to Darren for this generous gift and thanks to John for writing it, and undergoing all the dental pain and expense in the first place. I recommend everyone gets their teeth into this book and I look forward to, hopefully, catching up with John and his new gnashers very soon.

Riding The Roding.

"Ey ey ba day ba wadladie day, ay um ba day, ba day ba wadladie day, ey ey ba day ba wadladie day, ay um ba da, ay um ba da da da da wadladie day" - On A Ragga Tip, SL2.

 

Is the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, a huge fan of breakbeat hardcore? Did he spend the early nineties in warehouse raves around the capital's outer boroughs? Did he own 12" copies of The Bouncer's Kicks Like A Mule and Urban Hype's A Trip To Trumpton?

These aren't the questions I expected to be asking myself following yesterday's long awaited first London by Foot walk of 2024 but these are the questions that must be asked. A visit to The Papermakers Arms in Ilford (cheesy stadium house blasting out - as I'll come to later) and a Super Loop bus with the number SL2 have left me with no option.

Rather fantastically, Matt 'Slipmatt' Nelson (the S in SL2, the L is John 'Lime' Fernandez) was born in Loughton which is a few miles north up the Roding and yesterday's walk, as you can tell from its title - Riding the Roding, was all about the Roding. At least it was when we finally got to it.

The day, for me, had started early. I was up before 6am and out of the flat not long after 8. Much earlier than I needed to be. I took the P4 bus to Lewisham (the Overground was out of service in my area) and the DLR to West India Quay, change for Poplar, and change again for Beckton.

The stretch between Poplar and Beckton is serious fun. The train jerks about like a dodgem car, goes up and down like a rollercoaster, and you can sit at the front and pretend you're driving it. There's lots to see too (unlike on the underground). I saw the Brutalist Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, the meander of the river Lee, London City Airport, the docks, the Tate & Lyle sugar refinery (an old friend), and the ArcelorMittal Orbit in the Olympic Park.

On arriving in Beckton I had about an hour to kill. So I had a look around the giant Asda, visited a local park, saw a lot of squirrels, and thought, for some reason, about the Australian soft rock duo Savage Garden. I wasn't, of course, allowed to forget that the Euros were on and near the Asda I came across an advert for a well known gambling company featuring the smiling faces of John Stones, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Declan Rice. The way the team have played so far there's not that much to smile about. Except, I suppose, the actual results!

Pam and first time LbF walker Rodney arrived first and Mo and Katie weren't far behind (Mo remarking on the number Taylor Swift fans in London for her - Taylor's, not Mo's - remarkable eight night residency at Wembley Stadium) and that was the gang for the day - or at least most of it.

The first stretch was unremarkable as we wandered past THE LONDON INDUSTRIAL PARK and a vape shop called ROCK VAPER SCISSORS (I'd have plumped for Planet of the Vapes) and crossed the A13 (the "trunk road to the sea" as any Billy Bragg fan should know) and on the edge of East Ham's Central Park. East Ham notables including such names as Idris Elba, Vera Lynn, Kano, Noele Gordon, Jimmy Bullard, and Elizabeth Fry. The park was hosting a funfair but none of us were tempted. Instead we stopped, as planned, for brunch at the Parkside Cafe.

What a find. Proper old school greasy spoon, cheap and cheerful with massive portions (I had cheese omelette, chips, and beans with bread and butter and a can of Cherry Coke - in a new style of can) and plenty of tables. We all had a good chinwag and once we'd been fed and watered, a few of us remarked we needed a lie down more than we needed a walk.

But it was a walk we were having - like it or not. As we'd just left Beckton it was time for some Beckton spiel. It's named, rather unexcitingly, after Simon Adams Beck who was the governor of the Gas Light and Coke Company when work began on building Beckton Gas Works in 1868. Once known as the largest gasworks in the whole wide world, it's no longer there (it closed in 1976) but the ruins of it became, at one point, a popular spot for films and music videos.

The ruins of the gas works featured in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, the Pet Shop Boys It Couldn't Happen Here, and even stood in for Vietnam in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket. Pop videos filmed there include Oasis D'You Know What I Mean?, Marcella Detroit's I Believe, and, best of all, Loop's Arc-Lite.

If you thinking having a massive gas works is a rather lame claim to fame for a place then Beckton can trump that. It is also famous for the Beckton Sewage Treatment Plant. That was probaly glamorous compared to the alley, dubbed by Mo as a "stabby alley", that we followed from the end of Flanders Road until we reached a bridge over the very busy A406/North Circular.

The bridge even had a little chicane on it which tickled me as it's not something you usually see. Once over the North Circular we were on the edge of Barking and in the second London borough of the day (Barking & Dagenham, we'd done Newham and we'd end up in Redbridge). A path took us briefly to the side of the Roding and then back to the side of the North Circular past a few hotels.

There was an ibis and an ibis budget (the budget was less than half the price of the other - which was massively overpriced - and it's hard to imagine how different they'd be) as well as a Premier Inn. Outside one of the hotels a group were sat drinking cans of Kronenbourg. I'm not knocking them. I spend my weekends walking down stabby alleys!

I felt the path should have kept us to the side of the Roding but it didn't. At least not yet. On the upside if we hadn't been on the side of the busy road we wouldn't have seen the SL2 bus and the start (and end) of this blog would have been very different indeed.

Eventually we picked up the actual riverside path but it wasn't long before it started to get quite overgrown - and then very overgrown. Nettles and brambles taller than us and, just to add some extra jeopardy, the occasional rat (mostly alive but one dead one) appearing. Not everyone's keen on rats.

Despite how overgrown the path was (does anyone go on walks round that way?) it remained passable and for some it was even home. We saw a homeless guy's tent and another poor guy who didn't even have a tent and was sleeping in a sleeping bag on a rat infested path during a sunny Saturday afternoon. As my friend Shep once said, it's a very sorry story if a country can't treat its neediest people better than this.

Past memorial benches, pallets, industrial units, pallets, the odd glimpse of the Roding itself, some surprisingly pretty flowers, and more pallets we took a twisty path that occasionally promised to become less overgrown but never really did. At one point we had to clamber over a small concrete wall and at another we had to duck our heads as we walked on wooden boards underneath a bridge.

It was probably the closest we got to the Roding, the only time any of us were in danger of falling in. The Roding is not a spectacular river, at least not here, and it's not a particularly long one either. A Thames tributary it flows 31 miles from Molehill Green in Essex (near Stansted Airport) to Barking Creek and really that's all there is to say about it. It's a better river to walk along than to talk about.

Not long after we'd passed under the railway bridge the path was due to fork and we needed to take the left. It wasn't a fork as such, more a ninety degree left turn, so I went ahead and investigated before confirming to the others we were on the right track (my navigational skills weren't letting me down even if sometimes I started to fear they were) and then leading them all out to a residential area and in to the green and expansive Little Ilford Park.

After the stingers and rats it was nice to be in a manicured park. People were playing football or just catching some sun and we continued through the park until we reached the intriguingly named Sally Murray Close before taking Grantham Road to the A118/Romford Road. Which we took back across the North Circular into the thriving metropolis that is Ilford. A place I'd visited, I think, once before - when I was drunk and late at night. A very long time ago.

Memories of Ilford are both distant and a little blurred. We made our way, as I'd planned, to The Papermaker's Arm which, quite remarkably, has a 4.7/5 review on Google. It's not that it's a bad pub. It's just probably not to everyone's tastes. There was nobody in there except us and the staff. One screen was showing the football (Georgia and Czechia playing out a 1-1 draw in the Euros), another cricket (India beating Bangladesh in the T20 World Cup, very popular with the staff), and another screen showing a rugby match. I'm not sure which one.

The volume wasn't turned up on any of the screens and instead they were blasting out some of the cheesiest, yet surprisingly banging, stadium house you could imagine. With weird samples of Queen's We Will Rock You, 50 Cent's P.I.M.P., and virtually the entire theme tune of Pirates of the Caribbean (Hans Zimmer I think). 

It wasn't something anyone would choose to listen to but Mo seemed to be enjoying it, her shoulders were properly dancing. Rock fan Rodney less so. He had a lie down. There was a pool table with nobody playing and about two other people came in the whole time we were in there (we were, quite remarkably, running early so it was inevitable a 'two pint mistake' took place). My only conclusion was that the pub's owners had gone on holiday and left their kids in charge. It was as if they'd made Home Alone 5:Lost In Ilford.

We left the pub, said goodbye to Mo (who'd already walked further than she'd planned), saw some graffiti telling us to VOTE FIONA with a hammer and sickle (I looked up the candidates for both Ilford South and Ilford North and none of them are called Fiona) and turned into the Roding Valley Way. But not, of course, without a little bit of Ilford spiel.

Ilford, meaning "ford over the Hyle" -Hyle beig an old Celtic name for the Roding which means 'trickling stream', is where the only complete mammoth skull ever discovered in the UK was found (in 1864) but now you have to visit the Natural History Museum to see it. Maggie Smith was born in Ilford and it's also where a certain John Logie Baird worked on what would become his most famous invention. That's the television as I'm sure you already know.

The Roding Valley Way was a proper, and pretty, path and it wasn't overgrown. To the right of us the Roding gently meandered (there was also a golf course - standard) and to the left, behind a fence, the enormous City of London Cemetery and Crematorium which holds the ashes of England's World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore and the soft tissue of John Merrick (better known, sadly, as The Elephant Man). Even one of our own group has relations laid to rest there.

The Roding Valley Way brought us to a field with a couple of horses in it. Rodney fed one of the horses an apple which it ate like a human would eat a Tic-Tac. The horse looked a bit disappointed there was only one apple. We admired its fringe before following another path into the incredibly beautiful Wanstead Park. The sun was properly out and it was starting to get very hot. Pam was applying the factor fifty and Rodney was finding shade.

Wanstead Park is more like a common than a park. Forested areas, long grass, and lots of water features. There's a Heronry Pond, a Perch Pond, a Shoulder of Mutton Pond, and another pond simply called The Basin - and, of course, the Roding flows through it. There's a second golf course to the north of it (Wanstead - the other one belonged to Ilford) and the Reptiles Etc; roadshow had rocked up and kids, small and big, were enjoying time with bearded dragons and owls.

An unexpected boost for the walk. Deciding against an ice cream, we had a look at the 'temple' and slowly made our way across the park, through a thoroughly pleasant - and very possibly quite moneyed - area into Wanstead proper and its Art Deco tube station designed by, as Pam and I guessed, Charles Holden. He surely has to be the theme of a future walk.

Wanstead is a place I didn't know at all (even if part of it looked strangely familiar) and it impressed me. It's obviously quite a middle class place (there's a branch of Jojo Maman Bebe and even their local Wetherspoons - boringly called The George - looked decent enough) but a nice middle class place. That did mean the drinks we had in The Bull pub weren't cheap but it was a nice pub so we only had a brief grumble.

A huge beer garden with a TV screen showing Portugal beat Turkey in Dortmund to secure their place in the last sixteen) and lots of happy and fresh faced punters. Inside there were impressive prints of the likes of Frida Kahlo, Nina Simone, Ray Charles, and, er, Snoopy going to a fancy dress party as David Bowie. Well, why not?

It was the sort of beer garden you could easily waste an entire afternoon and evening in but we did need to eat (and that's the rules anyway) so we soon found our way to the nearby India Garden. I've often remarked on how Indian restaurants never have outdoor eating areas and I genuinely don't think I'd ever seen one before arriving at the India Garden to see people sat outside eating, drinking, and looking for all the world as if they were enjoying a very lovely holiday.

No seats left outside but they found Pam, Rodney, and myself a seat (Katie had left after the pub) and soon the poppadoms and Cobras were out. Main courses followed quickly. I had a garlic chilli paneer concoction that was just the right level of spicy but bloated, still, by my massive brunch - and probably the beer, I struggled to finish it. What I did have tasted pretty good and the complimentary Baileys (of which all three of us partook) was a nice touch too.

Of course it was time for Wanstead spiel (which nearly didn't happen as I lost my sheet of A4 in the loo, Rodney bravely retrieved it). Wanstead Park is administered as part of Epping Forest (bloody hell, Epping Forest is huge) and was formerly a deer park. The name Wanstead has a Saxon origin but the meaning is unclear. It's of astronomical significance because James Newton, once rector of Wanstead, observed the five then known satellites of Saturn from here inspiring both Halley and Newton in their later work.

Wanstead notables include Winston Churchill (who was the MP for the area from 1924 to 1945), William Penn (the founder of Pennsylvania), Tom Watt (Lofty from Eastenders), Harry Roberts (an infamous, and celebrated (by some) cop killer), as well as the Brutalist architect Rodney Gordon whose famous creations include Trinity Square in Gateshead (if you've seen Get Carter you'll know it) and Portsmouth's now demolished Tricorn Centre. Nothing in Wanstead though. It's not a brutal sort of place.

We managed to resist Wetherspoons and the three of us jumped on the Central Line together. Rodney and I chatted amiably with some Foo Fighters fans who'd just seen them play at West Ham's stadium (I couldn't resist boasting that not only had I seen Dave Grohl play in Nirvana but I'd seeing him play in Scream - supporting Conflict at Camden's Electric Ballroom). We changed again at Canary Wharf only to be reminded that the Overground south wasn't running.

Back on the Jubilee Line, I made my way to London Bridge. Missed my train by one minute to so had a quick pint in The Shipwrights Arms and got a later one. On the train home I noticed the guy in front of me, wearing a Scotland football top, was holding a signed Bluebells LP. I love The Bluebells so I simply had to engage him in conversation and it turned out he'd just seen them at The Lexington. I wish I'd gone to that but I wouldn't have swapped it for my lovely day out, with lovely people, on the banks of the Roding. A day that made me feel very young at heart indeed.

Thanks to Pam, Rodney, Katie, and Mo for joining me for this fun and surprisingly varied trek along the Roding and thanks to Pam, also, for some of the snaps I've included here. I enjoyed the Roding, and Wanstead particularly, so much that I'm already making plans to return. Perhaps heading up to, or maybe from, Loughton. If I can't walk by then I'll get the SL2 bus and go on a ragga t(r)ip.