Recent trip to to London for a few days gave me the chance to add a massive number of stations to the list of 'done'...

St Pauls, Southwark, Baker Street, King's Cross, Hammersmith (District & Hammersmith & City), Goldhawk Road, Shepherds Bush, Latimer Road, Ladbroke Grove, Westbourne Park, Royal Oak, Acton Town, Turnham Green, Chiswick Park, Gunnersbury, Park Royal, Clapham Common, Balham all fell to the rampaging will to collect! Photographic proofs to follow.

Now only 248 to go!  In London again next week for Thanksgiving, so hope to hit a few more...and to visit some of the ones that still wear their 19thC facades, must get to work on pvc Victorian outfit, hooped skirts being oh so practical for getting through the ticket barriers...

...a day for travel to visit cherished friend meant passing through King's Cross. Coming home, full of flapjacks, the usual issue of how to get the shot that proves the visit arose.

In not normally a shy person (no giggling, now) and London is full of tourists taking snaps, but somehow asking a stranger to take a picture of oneself doing something daft and un-touristy feels stupid, and I can't seem to explain myself this evening with anything approaching grace. Asking strangers also means worrying about two things - firstly, will they just bugger off with one's camera and secondly, as this is nominally an art project, I'm often at the mercy of the photography skills of random personage.

You can stand about looking like a vain fool as you try to take a photo of yourself that's not blurred and has the necessary signage.



I failed...got bored with increasingly crappy pics...

Luckily, I accosted a chap who despite bemusment was more than willing to help, and took great pains to get both me and the signage in. Very gentlemanly type, who then dashed off to get his train. I'm thinking I might get little cards printed to explain what I'm up to that I can hand to the people I bother for aid.



Headed off down the Piccadily line to scrounge curry and rice. All in all, a good day.

A plan emerges. There are slides posing as art rather than just carnival silliness over at the Tate. Plan is to met up early and go whizzy whizz as much as possible. We decide that walking to the Tate from St Pauls will both collect St Pauls and allow us to play at Cybermen along St Paul's Vista. Sadly this second objective scotched by the inconsiderate building of a bridge, so scenes like this:


are gone forever. But then, after the recent reboot to the series, Cybermen aren't Cybermen anymore. If they ain't from Mondas they just don't count, she says, nailing her nerd colours to the mast. Dejected I hum the Tomb of the Cybermen theme as we cross the bridge..."brr buh buh brr, buuuh buh buuh", lovely creepy brass.

Sigh...



( a digression into lost memories )
At the Tate there is text to explain the art of going down the slides:

"For Carsten Höller, the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a ‘voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don’t have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the ‘inner spectacle’ experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend."

In other words, it's fun to slide down the tude yelling 'wheeee', but you also feel a little queasy. T'was also a little bumpy, and I feared actually puking on the biggest one, but comforted myself with the thought that being in head-to-toe pvc and rubber at least I was easily wipe-clean.

After some too-ing and froo-ing, our party then headed to Baker Street via the Jubliee line at Southwark in the gathering gloom:



to be proper tourists and visit the surprisingly entertaining Sherlock Holmes Museum . Much giggling and trying on of hats.

( Baker Street )

It was decided to devote a day to collecting stations. From this decision several conflicting plans emerged; to leave things to chance and draw stations names from a bag, to chose a section of the line and hit it station by station to grab as many places as possible in the shortest time, to travel out to the furthest reaches of the District Line and explore a little of Epping Forest.

Plan B wins, after considerable debate. Hammersmith and City Line gets the guerilla treatment as I want to get my nails done at Shepherd's Bush anyway...

Another bloody ugly expanse of grim industrial concrete spread of leisure park. No sign of a Royal Park, unless the Queen likes to hang out at one of those free standing Pizza Huts that seem to come in clip-together kit form and spring up overnight. I image a vast forest expanse used for royal hunting parks, like the New Forest. Anything natural here long since paved over and tarmaced.

Could be anywhere in Britain, out-of-town shopping complex with emotionless Vue cinema, which is our destination to see The Prestige.

However, the station itself another one of those thirties brick built glories with charming signage and glass fronted layers. The only thing of beauty around here.

Walking between lines at Green Park, not as I first thought,  Oxford Circus. Blue and white tiled walls...

Lovely 'time tunnel effect', especially as bundled up in extra-long Dr Who scarf...