London’s about to get hotter (Sunday August 3rd, 2003 - 22:42)

category: mmhuh?

The BBC says that we could be seeing (feeling) record high temperatures being broken this week. Previously sitting at 37 degrees, apparently by Wednesday it could be nearing 40. Ouch.

After a good meeting about a new project on Wednesday, I ploughed into programming for the remainder of the week. Really enjoying this little project and can’t wait to see it go live later on in the month.

Saturday morning after Guardian reading and lounging about, Steve and I decided to go for one of those long wanders that doesn’t really have any purpose.

We started off heading towards Wanstead Flats where we found a man sitting beside a pond playing guitar and singing to himself. I took some photos of the Geese flocking about before continuing to walk across large expanses of grass, grass and more grass. Although there wasn’t much to the area, I enjoyed seeing such huge amounts of sky without buildings in the way (I think that may be a sign that I need a weekend outside of London really soon!)

Stumbling across a little patch of water called Aldersbrook, we sat on the ‘beach’ drinking water and contemplating the increasing heat.

Next up we entered the City of London Cemetery. The size of the place is overwhelming and we spent about an hour walking around, looking at the trees and squirrels and grave stones. A section of trees had a sign up saying ‘Woodland Burial’ which sounded most peculiar – how would anyone know you’re in there when they can’t put up any memorials?

We then walked past Manor Park overland station and decided to head towards Ilford stopping in at strange little food and wholesaler shops along the way (10kg of onions for £1.69 – bargain!).

Once in Ilford we did a quick lap of the shopping mall, then a walk further down the high road and with feet growing increasingly sore we headed back to an O’Neills pub we’d seen earlier. After 5 hours of walking I was amazed to not have a hunger and just had a bowl of chips and a refreshing lemonade.

During our 45 minutes of resting we’d noticed that I had been getting burnt on my neck and face so we hopped on a bus for home chancing on seeing a themometer above the Universal Group building claiming 34 degrees. Oops!

Needless to say that today’s been much more relaxed. A trip to the supermarket, a couple of hours lolled out watching Formula 1 (poor Kimi got shunted and hurt his leg but atleast Coulthard put in a stunning performance coming in second and Montoya looks a possibility to take the championship from Michael Schumacher), some emailing and pondering about work, and I made a fresh tomato, cheese, mushroom, peppered ham and mozzarella pizza (okay, so making the dough from a packet is faking it but for a first home pizza attempt I thought it would be a safer option) :