Lost!

I only started running after I left home - around the time Izzy was born, in 1995, in fact - but I had a contract in London about fourteen years ago during which time I lived with my folks in the week and it was then that I devised a few runs from their house. 

I did one of those, yesterday morning, and I decided to do a different one, today, running down to the Ewell bypass, along to Stoneleigh and then back across to Worcester Park. I only wanted to do five miles so when my Fitbit app told me I'd done four, I decided to cut through a passage under the railway line and take a more direct route home.

It didn't come out quite where I expected but I knew which way I wanted to go, so I struck out in that direction. Except I never came to the road that I was expecting. In fact, it was quite surreal; having lived in this area for so many years, I found myself running through an area that I had no idea existed, although I must have circumnavigated it many times. 

Eventually, when I came to a parade of shops, a pub and primary school that I'd never seen before - apparently just a stone's throw from where I'd grown up - I decided enough was enough and stopped to look at Maps on my phone. I was over a mile away from home! 

In the end then, I ran just under seven miles, which if nothing else, gave me a good appetite for Sunday lunch.

My brother's wife and my niece went back to Spain, today, for half-term, which meant that we had Wol to ourselves in the afternoon and we all went up to Waterloo for a long stroll along the Southbank. When I was working in London I would walk between Waterloo and Southwark Bridge every day so I'm very familiar with that area. Going beyond the bridge though was largely unexplored territory for me, though, and I'd never been to Winchester Palace, which is nearly nine hundred years old. (And here are Wol, Dan and Abi taking varying degrees of interest in the ruins,)