Not quite Narnia

Discovering a new street in the neighbourhood

(Credit: Lode Van de Velde)

The walk from the flat above the pie and mash shop on Bethnal Green Road to the Houses of Parliament took exactly one hour. This meant that if I left home at 8 a.m. (9 a.m. during recess, m’lud) then I could tell the time simply by the various way stations I passed: Liverpool Street station at 8.15, Mansion House at 8.30, Temple at 8.45 and the leaning tower of fig trees that is Portcullis House at 9 a.m.

That is one of the principal benefits of a regular walking route — no checking Google Maps for reassurance or padding of schedules to account for signal failures at Camden Town. The only possible delay is little old ladies hogging the pavement, for whom I practised my Richard-Ashcroft-in-the-video-for-Bitter-Sweet-Symphony, in which The Verve frontman walks along a busy pavement in Hoxton, violently oblivious to his fellow pedestrians.

The principal drawback of regular routes, of course, is that they quickly grow tedious. The pedestrian crossings that take forever to turn green, the patch of pavement that turns slippery in winter, the memory-sapping sameness of it all. Moreover, what sort of sicko wants to know exactly what time it is on their commute? The answer is always going to be: “too early”.

You could liven things up a little. Jump a left instead of heading straight on, go crazy and cross the road one intersection earlier than planned. But commutes are for operating on autopilot, finding the quickest, simplest route and postponing the choices to later in the day. As president, Barack Obama elected only to wear blue or grey suits to eliminate decision fatigue. I was working for a backbench MP, so a similar line of work required similar focus.

A beautiful day in the neighbourhood

In contrast, the late-afternoon, early-evening, local neighbourhood stroll is all about small experiments. Unfortunately, there are only so many side streets, back alleys and possibly-private-but-screw-it-let’s-risk-it car parks to traverse. The scenery becomes wallpaper, flattened by routine and familiarity. And then, this week, in an area I have known for some time, I stumbled upon a new route.

Behind a fancy school where the students sport little caps, there was a street I had wrongly written off as a dead-end. Instead, it turned into a new path and a new flight of stairs down to the main road. Not quite Narnia, granted, more like discovering an unwatched episode of an old television show you used to like.

[Note: this once happened to me. Many years ago, due to some DVD navigation errors, I managed to skip half a dozen episodes of Mad Men and so was quite confused when *spoiler alert* Peggy had a baby. When did she get pregnant? By whom? Gosh, the 1960s were a confusing time.]

Gimme, gimme, gimme

Humans like novelty and familiarity. The O.G. of YouTube content creation, Tom Scott, recently observed:

The audience would like four albums which are really identical to the one album they really like of yours, but are also new and novel and exciting at the same time.