The Friends of Kennington Park organised a Lockdown Competition. It was an invitation to share favourite things about Kennington Park during Lockdown. There were three categories: 1 drawing / painting / cartoon. 2 photo / video. 3 poem / song / story. There were four prizes in each category, first, second and third and a children’s prize for under fourteen year olds.

The winners have now been announced. There are posters of their work on the hoarding which hides the construction on the new Northern Line extension part of which is accessed through a building in the corner of the park. I walk past it whenever I go to St Agnes. Among the posters is one of the winning painting of the children’s prize in the first category. It is by Josiah Onojobi whose mother told the organisers,

“Kennington Park is a lovely place for making friends. While Josiah and his friends were practising their music in the park, people walking by would show appreciation. One of those was a neighbour we had never met, who lives just two minutes from us. After meeting in the park, we joined him for lunch and tea, and he showed our sons his beautiful paintings and gave one to Josiah – a painting of Kennington Park. Josiah set about creating his own version – this drawing – which he in turn gave to our neighbour.”

I am really pleased Josiah’s painting won. The painting you will find on this website under ‘Paintings’. Josiah painted it, but it is mine because Josiah gave it to me. I am the neighbour.

When will the time come when elderly pedestrians are the ‘people of the moment’. Cyclists, at this moment, are in – chiefly young cyclists. Those responsible for traffic in London clearly dislike cars, other than as a source of income from the congestion charge. Road blocks have been put up all around me. They are at the end of Alberta Street and of Penton Place as well as three of the streets on the way to St Agnes.

Cyclists are allowed to go through the road blocks but not cars. And there is a cycle highway in both directions on Kennington Park Road. I’d probably be in favour if I could still ride a bicycle but for me to do that would be a danger to the general public and myself.

However all these changes in favour of cyclists do not stop some of them riding on the pavement – my pavement, which is there especially  for mothers and fathers with prams (or whatever prams are called these days) and elderly pedestrians like me.

I remonstrated with two cyclists on the pavement the other day. They were riding towards me and there beside us, on the road, was the cycle highway. I said, quite loudly, only so that they could hear me of course, and pointing to the cycle highway beside me, “There’s a lane for you there!” The cyclist in front turned his head back and shouted, “Racist!” I had only noticed they were riding on the pavement.

Perhaps I’m simply driven by self interest. But not entirely. My old friend Angela, who has died long since, gave up her favourite walk along the Embankment because she was once bumped into by a cyclist riding on the pavement and so became fearful of walking there. I hope it’s in her memory and for others like her, as well as for my own sake, that I speak up.

 And not everyone operates out of self interest. I’ve met two young people recently, quite separately, who have had their covid jabs, against their personal preference, so that if, by chance, they did get the virus seriously they wouldn’t take up a hospital bed that would otherwise be used by someone with cancer or whatever else. I liked that a lot.

I suspect covid has given many of us a greater awareness of being responsible for, or being part of, others. There does seem to me to be more of ‘we’ rather than ‘me’ about and I enjoy that too.

 I do like it that ‘We’ (in this case I’m a New Zealander) won the cricket and that ‘We’ (now I’m British) beat Germany at Wembley. ‘We’ did it! And if you have any notion at all of my relationship with cricket and football you are right to wonder. And yet ‘I’, as part of that ‘We’, did. And it feels good.

PS A friend commenting on my last week’s bus journey to and from Streatham emailed, ‘Did you leave your rose tinted spectacles behind in the pub?’ I still think the same houses looked wonderful on the way out and drab on the way back. Different angles on the same reality I think. So I suppose I must face the fact that I choose my ‘We’ to be with the footballers and their win and not with those in the stadium who booed during the playing of the German National Anthem. I do pick and choose. Oh dear! I’ll have to think about that.

Today I did it. I went to the end of the line on the 133 bus to Streatham Station. I went with a neighbour, a friend, from further down Kennington Park Road, and we sat upstairs in the front seats of the red, double decker, London bus, masks on, set for an outing.

It was a fascinating journey especially architecturally and it included going past some wonderful churches. There was St Mark’s Kennington at the Oval, a ‘Commissioners Church’,  1824. It is very familiar to me because the Saturday farmers market is in its grounds. Later, on the Brixton Road, Corpus Christi Brixton, 1887 high Victorian and looking as if it’s on a hill but it isn’t.

Others included St Leonard’s, Streatham a little part of it from the fourteenth century. Streatham, St Leonard’s Church is also the name of the bus stop. We had lunch at an English pub in Streatham. The staff were lovely, Brazilian.

On the way to Streatham the architecture, seen from the front of the top deck of the bus, seemed rather grand, Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian. Lots of decoration, unnecessary domes and turrets which made me smile. There seemed to be comparatively few post war buildings.

 
On the way back, on exactly the same route, still upstairs though on a 159, the same buildings seen from a different angle didn’t look grand at all. And I didn’t really notice the churches.  Many buildings looked rather drab and uncared for. It can’t just have been the pub lunch. I only had one pint with the Brazilian starter and a caprese salad.

  
It was all totally enjoyable and, on the bus journey there and back, it did remind me how important it is to look at things from different angles. I will do it again and, no doubt, see the same buildings differently.

BEING THERE
A friend’s grandson and his girlfriend went to Portugal for the final of the UEFA Champions League match between Chelsea and Manchester City. Thousands of fans with tickets and without went to Portugal for the match. The young couple, ardent Chelsea supporters, went to Lisbon and watched the match on television in a bar. The match was in the northern city of Porto. The young man said that what mattered was to ‘be there’ even when the ‘There’ wasn’t even in the same town. ‘There’ for them was Portugal where the two English teams battled it out. Thank goodness, for their sake, Chelsea won.

I know very little if anything about football. I can understand something of the importance of ‘being there’. It’s why live streaming of Church Services isn’t good enough for me. I need to be there. But usually inside not outside the church.

THE END OF THE LINE
I have not reached the end of the line by a long shot. But I am determined to, next week. I had coffee with a friend recently and she told me of something that has become rather a hobby. After a day out with her young grandson (a different friend, a different grandson from the above) she was ready to go home. He said, ‘No Granny, I want to go to the end of the line.’ It was the London Underground, the tube line he was talking about. And they did. 

Now from time to time she goes, with a friend, on a bus, in the front seat, upstairs, to the end of the line. Then perhaps to a pleasant pub for a pint or lunch or to visit a park and then home again. I’ve always known the view from the upper deck of a London bus is wonderful. The number 3 from Kennington goes past Lambeth Palace and over Lambeth Bridge before going past the Houses of Parliament. The number 159 from the same stop goes over Westminster Bridge past Big Ben up Whitehall and ends up at Marble Arch. I’ve often recommended the journey to overseas visitors but I’ve never before thought of going to the end of the line. Now I will.

SNEER AND SMEAR
A New Zealand friend has a blog which I read from time to time. It’s amusing with his particular take on life, his medical ups and downs, his visits to restaurants, his encounters with people and, sometimes, his view of people in the public eye, politicians and other public figures.

Then it is, all too often, a matter of ‘sneer and smear’. The only person who seems to escape is President Biden. I suspect that the reluctance of many good men and women to go into  public life and service is because of this tendency to sneer and smear. Others in public life don’t have a choice. 

When I express irritation at something in my friend’s blog my family, rightly I suspect, are irritated with me and say, ‘Then why read it?’ But sometimes the blog is interesting, and, after all, you don’t know you’re going to be irritated by what you read until you’ve read it.

  
I’m told that the negative side of the brain is more developed than the positive. If that is the case it seems to me all the more reason for working on developing the positive.

I’m afraid I was really angry and I ran out of the house into the part of my garden along Braganza Street and I shouted, very loudly, “I’m going to f…ing kill you!” I had already, twice, tried to shoo away the grey squirrels that were nibbling the new leaf shoots on the camellia and the new growth on the climbing roses on the high wall between my garden and the street. The shooing had been in more polite terms and clearly ineffective.

These squirrels are not of the Squirrel Nutkin variety. They are nasty destructive creatures – tree rats. I suspect they are simply sharpening their teeth on the new growth. They are not eating it. They destroyed the tulips. The evidence of their destructive work they leave behind. The garden is littered with severed pieces of my climbing roses. The squirrels probably spread disease as well. This year they are worse than ever and I have not yet found an effective method of dealing with them permanently.

When I went back inside my elder daughter, who was visiting, appeared concerned. She pointed out that if I was to take that line of action again I was to shout, “Squirrels, I’m going to etc.” Somehow, it seemed to me, that doesn’t have quite the same force.

She said that anyone walking along the pavement on the other side of the garden wall, hearing my shout, could well assume that murder was about to be done and call the police.

Context is critical.