There are vast patches of London which remain secret for years because you spend most of your life travelling along on a thin line between home and work.
Frances and I live on the eastern fringe of 'zone 1' i.e. the central inner London underground zone. We also work in the same zone, Frances in South Kensington and me right off Oxford Street. All the major institutions of state, shopping and culture - Big Ben, the British Museum, Selfridges, the Tate Modern - lie within this central zone which is roughly 34 kilometres in diameter.
That sounds a lot, but to put it into context, this is only the same area covered in Auckland by a circle which starts at the downtown wharves, heads out to Point Chevalier in the west, runs along Mt Albert road in the south, and loops around One Tree Hill up through Remuera to Orakei and back across Tamaki Drive to the ferry terminal.
Anyway, meeting Matt close to his flat near London Bridge, we thought we'd walk along the Thames toward the unfashionable east, and this took us through Rotherhithe, one of those hidden stretches I refer to.
There's no particular reason to go to Rotherhithe. But it's a magical place. An ancient port, it's filled with quiet old dockland warehouses now converted into apartments. The Rotherhithe waterfront looks out onto amazing vistas - the Thames seems particularly wide here - and, almost unique in London, you can see the weather coming. One the day we walked, it was a proper crimson sunset, shaded grey, blue and purple.
And yet, cut off from the main roads and sights, Rotherhithe is somewhat forgotten and forlorn. On a Sunday, it feels even more so, and the only people on the streets seemed to be local dogwalkers.
Beautiful, secret, and slightly desolate: a perfect Sunday afternoon.
London has been experiencing great frosts of late. The temperature seldom falls far below zero, even in winter, but we've just come out of two or three weeks of regular freezes. One day it fell as far as minus six - the coldest I've experienced outside some Alpine ski-fields.
With the great frosts came a succession of perfect blue-sky days, and on Saturday the 3rd, the weekend before we were due to start back at work, Frances and I took a walk in the Mole Valley in the Surrey countryside south west of London.
I have an old book of walks which has inspired many days out and this time it promised a "forgotten and undisturbed corner of countryside and woodland." Packing a few breakfast bars for sustenance, we followed a course through field, farm and forest from Ockley to Wallis Wood, a place so weirdly remote it had no mobile phone signal (yet only thirty minutes or so from London by car).
As it happened, our trusty book contained a few errors, and we were lost in a meadow for half an hour, but, heading in what we guessed was a southerly direction, we eventually found our track again, marked by some letters carved into an old birch tree.
The camera ran out just as we arrived at the old church, hidden in the middle of the forest as if in a fairy tale. The sun turned into late-afternoon sepia. It was like we'd found some corner of Tuscany masquerading as darkest Surrey.
And then...back to work.
We touched down at Heathrow in the last hours of 2008. It was already dark. We were supposed to be going to a New Year's party, but Frances was asleep by the time the taxi hit the motorway. Even the erratic, breakneck drive along the M4 failed to rouse her.The city was more immense and alien than I remembered.
Back at the flat, Matt was ready to make a saffron risotto, but we weren't hungry. When we woke the next morning, Matt was gone and it was 2009.
There are vast patches of London which remain secret for years because you spend most of your life travelling along on a thin line between home and work.
