I have discovered that there is a group with a tangential goal to my own project, that seeks to walk the entire tube network  Not all in one day, I add.  This would seem to fit nicely into an imaginary Venn diagram of things I'm interested in like the tube nework, adventures and walking, and I noticed that they had a walk planned on Sunday 13th January from Cockfosters to Oakwood - both stations as yet uncollected.   It seemed fate wanted me at the top of the Piccadilly. 

So

midnightxpress,  failing_angel and myself meet up with the  tubewalkers a little after 2pm on Sunday in the ticket hall at Cockfosters, slightly unsure of what the procedure is, but at least we get badges. Or at least I got a badge... I pin it to my skirt...

Cockfosters ticket hall, looking down past the barriers to the platform:



Proof that poured concrete can be beautiful.  Love the austere but still human-scaled space, the clean signage and station furniture.  It is unfussy, modernist in style; Le Corbusier described houses as  'machines for living in' and in that sense this is a 'machine to wait in', functional but not oppressive or dispiriting. 

Outside, the grey January day leeches away all colour so that the skewered roundel above the station building and myself provide the only colour.

 

 

We all set off for Trent County Park.  Looking at the local map inside the station, there's vast expanses of green surrounding the station.  Nothing but fields and fields and fields...always surprising that open countryside is so close to the centre of London... 

I once came out here to run a training course in a country park hotel famous for its arboretum of rare trees.  Shame then that like now, the course was in the depth of winter so woodland not really looking at its best. The hotel was hopelessly disorganised and lost £10K worth of our equipment. I paid my way through college by teaching double glazing slaesmen how to use EPOS systems that came packaged in rather nice, and rather expensive pilot's cases, and it was a 15 of these cases that the hotel misplaced.   After considerable panic and staff running about to no effect, my colleague and I discovered the cases hidden in the wine cellar, covered in plaster dust and cobwebs. 

They do serve a good cream tea though, as a year or so ago, I found myself there again, having lunch with this very same colleague, laughing about having to hunting by torchlight in the early hours of the morning, getting filthy dirty,   like the Indiana Jones's of the IT world.  

As we womble through muddy fields, Piccadilly train meander along the skyline. Look; see: if you squint closely, here's a Piccadilly line train spotted ratling along through the rolling sward, all pale from not getting much sun:

 

We head across pasture, hop over streams and through denuded woodland in the general direction of Oakwood. There seems to be a little confusion about where we're going, but mostly it seems to be about taking the indirect route so that we can feel we have actually had a proper walk in the country as the stations are pretty close together  - not quite the spitting distance that was the tubewalk between Charing Cross and Embankment, but neither is it a route march necessitating camping out, carrying rations and refering to OS maps at the far fringes of civilisation.  In fact there seemed to be a fair bit of just standing about in fields to prolong the afternoon's outing, but here we all are striding purposely across open country.  The danger was not getting lost and succumbing to exposure, but more avoiding get hit by the occasional golf ball on skirting the local course; I can't think of a more terrifyingly bourjoise wa to die.

Still, it didn't take very long, before Oakwood could be spotted through the trees.  



Oakwood station itself has another of those odd radar-dish-and-roundel combinations outside.  I am beginning to suspect the the Torchwood Institute may be involved, as they look like they should be beaming signals to somewhere.  That, or Quatermass is up to something.

  
The station building strangely Modernist in the middle of all this green.



We retire to a local pub, decorated with a mural of film stars that was quite staggering in how bad it was, although guessing who was who was entertaining, and lead to considerabe debate.  Quite why David Jason and Ronnie Barker were in there with Robert Mitchum, Judy Garland and Humphrey Bogart was another unsolved puzzle.

Back at Oakwood, we three nip back up to Cockfosters to take more leisurely pictures than we'd had time for earlier, but the light is against us.  I had forgotten to allow for the fact that London is several degrees further east than home, and daylight in Cornwall lasts about twenty minutes longer back in Cornwall than it does in the city at this time of year.  I'd make a rubbish vampire hunter.  All the shots turn out vaguely hallucinagenic, as though filmed through Amber Spyglasses:

 

On the way back down, we cheat and I nip out at Oakwood for a speedy platform picture, and back on the train before the doors can shut again, but I have been through the ticket barrier already that day, so it counts...

Below: Poised for action to throw myself back on the train once the door closing signage starts...