Behind the station another vast expanse of car park that serves the shopping centra and cinema. I used to live in a council high rise here just after I graduated and would walk from Surrey Quays to Greenwich to sign on. My neighbour once offered to give me the bus fare as he thought this trek was due to poverty rather than a willinness to walk that distance, just for the hell of it, to see what's out there. Londoner's just don't seem to walk much and have an exagerrated sense of distance between places.

Other memories of Surrey Quays:

It has a high Bangledeshi community, who make a real effort to live in cross-generational family groups. There seems to be a valuing of the older members of their community, something 'we' all too often fail in. Remember a knock on the door one evening, and found I was being canvassed by the BNP candidate for local elections talking about the erosion of British family values because 'all these interlopers were filling up the council flats with their grannies and kids, 17 to a house, pushing nice white folk out'. I came so very close to pushing him over the balcony, five stories up as a service to humanity - not simply because just standing for the BNP marks him down as a vile cretin, neither because what he was spouting was so blatantly contradictory in that the local Bangladeshi community seemed a living embodiment of the family values he placed so highly, but because of the look on his face when the door opened to reveal a white person, the look of relief to see 'one of his people' there, and that look tried to make me complicit in his racism. How dare he be pleased to see me. He was lucky to escape with nothing worse than a flea in his ear.

And of course, on a much lighter note, the last time I was here after moving out to Forest Hill was to see a late night screening of The Phantom Menace at Surrey Quays UCI cinema. Oh, a long story this is, a tale of walking through Lewisham town centre in head to toe black rubber with a Jedi in a cape with light sabre up his sleeve to the highly vocal marvellment of the crowd outside the pub. Later, actually getting to shout 'follow that cab', only to discover the driver is speeding while speeding leading to a white knuckle ride not always with all four wheels of the car on the ground.

No-one more amazed than ourselves to discover we made it alive to the cinema, only to find residents complaints have meant the cinema have had to cancel the performance, and it being two in the morning there's no transport out of there, and our cabs which as well as being terrifying cost us fifty quid have just screamed off into the night, so I go into 'aggrieved mode' and being dressed as a dominatrix certainly helped in getting the manager to agree to hold a private screening just for our group, at no charge, and including all the free icecream and popcorn we could carry; happy acid-fuelled enjoyment of pod racing of some of our party and hysterical giggling at unintentional hilarity of Qui-Gon Jinn's boots smoking on the funeral pyre, and staggering out into the brilliant dawn at five in the morning quite, quite baffled to be thrown back into the world again after possibly the world's first cinema lock-in.

...that was a good evening...Maria, being American and Good At Complaining, who at this point hadn't known me long, asked Anton whether I could do with help in raising the complaint with management, and Anton telling her to sit back and watch a master at work. Scott piping up 'I've come all the way from Ipswich!

But on to journey's end. We've done eleven stations in under three hours and are flagging. B's cold is plaguing him; drugs and a sit down are required. We are due in Forest Hill, and the siren call of a good curry can be felt. The tube god decides for us and as it's a New Cross Gate train that arrives first, we abandon original plan of going to New Cross and walking over to New Cross Gate. At NCG there is a Forest hill mainline BR train due in a mere four minutes - as it's a half hourly service on a Sunday evening the transport gos are indeed being generous, and the camera battery last outs just long enough to get the one shot.