sunny amblings

After two days out in the open, the Marqués de Caranó is a different beast. Uncorked but recapped, half empty but brimming with the magic of oxygen, the wine has recovered all the attributes the marketing specialist had promised on the label. It's richly flavored and full-bodied, with cherry and raspberry fruit flavors combining with gentle spicy notes. For me, flavors are generally described on a sliding scale from yuck to yum, but I agree with the gist of label note. The wine tastes good.

I spent the day out in the sun today, without a plan and for the most part without an idea of what my next step would be. I set out with one goal only, getting a roll or orange recycling bags from the library, and drifted from there. Fulham Road is really nice, full of little shops, restaurants and cafés. I should come here more often. At some point I got to Putney Bridge where the goosenecks of the Thames and relative geography conspired to confuse me. When I run I come from upriver and turn around at the bridge. Today I walked and I approached the bridge from downriver.

In Putney I hopped on the bus to go to Richmond, a lovely place to be out when the sun is out as well, with wide walks on both sides of the Thames, riverside pubs and picnic sites, exuding an inexplicable charm that even I can't resist.

On the bus I rediscovered purpose, lost since I finished my recycling bag mission a good hour earlier. I would go to Ham, I decided, a town near Richmond that's home to the Backhaus, the best German bakery in London, London being defined in this case as everything inside the perimeter of the M25 motorway, no matter what the actual place names are.

Ham is near Richmond was the only thing I knew when I got off the bus, but London is my oyster and with a recently recharged Oyster Card I knew I could get there in a hop. Nearly every bus stop in London displays two big maps: a local area map covering the surrounding half mile at Streetview detail and an octopus tangle of bus lines running from the dozen closest stops.

Getting to Ham was easy, slaloming through green neighborhoods of substantial wealth and along parks and commons. I just sat there; the driver did all the work. Next to Ham Common, I got off. There was no bakery within sight but a small German grocery store with a few remaining baked goods. (It was Saturday afternoon and they were about to close.) I got this and that and went back to the Common for a picnic. It was a quintessentially English experience, never mind the Bionade in my hand.

The Common is triangular but the action happens in a wide linden-lined avenue that runs through it. At one end is a pond with geese and ducks and a little island just for looks. There are willows around it and park benches with plaques dedicated to John, my grandfather who loved to sit here. The linden trees and the pond surround a cricket pitch where a dozen figures clad in white were engaged in Imperial leisure. Around the game, locals had assembled like an audience. They had got drinks from the pubs around the green or brought hampers from home. Groups of friends and solitary revelers were sitting on the grass, eating, drinking, reading, chatting. And thought it looked from a distance as if they were watching the game, they weren't. The game went on in the background, for hours, like cricket games do. Members of the non-watching audience would glance up from their conversations and meals and books every half hour or so, deriving reassurance from the fact that the game was still going on. If cricket is played, life must be good.

It was indeed, and not just in Ham. I walked down the river towards Richmond, passing the locks at Teddington and then the column that marks the point where the Environment Agency hands over responsibility for the Thames to the Port of London Authority. I was now walking along a tidal river. An hour later in Richmond I came across another common, the Richmond Green. The scene at Ham Common was repeated and amplified, so much that I must admit that the previous paragraph was not an accurate description but a collage of both commons, the linden trees taken from Ham and the spectators from Richmond. (Cricket was played on both commons.) The sun was still high up when I got onto a District line train back to West Kensington.