It was very cold today and we put off going out until after lunch when the temperature had risen to a balmy 4°C and the sun was shining. Even so, the air was icy and I stuffed my hands down into my pockets between photos.

Wild Kong and Pentonville Road

I took this photo in Pentonville Road, with our old friend Wild Kong in view, to show the pale winter sun.

The Chapel Bar, Penton Street

We went along Penton Street where the Chapel Bar looked rather fine in the sunshine though it was of course closed.

White wreath

We collected a triplet of wreaths, this white one…

Gauze bow

…this unusual gauze arrangement that transforms the door into a pretend Christmas parcel and…

Glimpsed behind bars

..this one like a little Christmas tree. It was in an alcove behind a barred gate. We only noticed it by chance, and photographed it by poking our phones between the bars.

Chapel Market

We turned into Chapel Market which was, as expected, almost deserted. We had come here, hoping to find coffee. According to their website, Costa are open for takeaway today. Are they, though? Well, we will see.

Lost letters

We have already caught some shops with letters missing from their signs. This is the first with the name in cursive but nevertheless with missing letters.

In addition, though, this led to an interesting experiment. I tried photographing it from a different angle and found reflected light interfering.

Light interfering

I then remembered that I had brought the polarising filter with me. So I put it on the phone and…

Using the filter

…turned it while watching the image in the camera’s display. This was the best I could achieve but I think you’ll agree that it’s better than the photo without the filter, depending, of course, on the effect you are trying to achieve.

Wreath at the vegetarian restaurant

This small wreath was our last today.

Climbing plants?

I was rather taken by this façade decorated with a climbing flowering plant. Tigger, of course, pointed out that the flowers were in fact not real but made of plastic. How long did it take them to fix all those flowers to the vine, I wonder?

More missing letters

This shop also has a defective sign with a missing ‘S’. In fact, it looks as if the whole place could do with a little tlc.

This greengrocer’s was open…

The market of course was not present today and we were therefore surprised to find a greengrocer’s shop open.

…and so was this one

This one was open too. There seemed to be a couple of customers but I don’t know how much business they would have done today.

Coffee here sometimes but not today

We usually pick up our coffees here on the way home from shopping on Sunday but it was closed today, as we expected.

Costa also closed

Unfortunately, we also found Costa closed, despite the assertion on the website. No coffee today, then…

Dated 1912

How many times have we walked along Chapel Market? Today, for the first time, and both together, we noticed the date on this building – 1912. How many changes has it seen in the street, in London and in the world?

Upper Street and the Tram Shed

In Upper Street the sun was still picking out certain buildings, leaving others in deep shadow. Here it spotlights the old tram shed.

Starbuck’s was open

Unexpectedly, we found that Starbuck’s in the High Street was open. Starbuck’s is not my favourite coffee shop but it was a case of any port in a storm. We ordered at the counter and were then asked to wait outside in the street for them to bring the coffees to us.

At home we had a special something with our coffee. No, not Portuguese custard tarts, but panettone with hot custard. This provided a pleasant epilogue to our walk.

I started blogging regularly in September 2006, having spent the previous several months, first, wondering what this blogging thing was all about and why anyone would do it, and then, trying out various blogging platforms. I finally plumped for WordPress which by then was, as it still is, the most popular platform.

In those days, most “personal bloggers” (as I call ordinary individuals writing about their chosen topics as opposed to writers of commercial and “professional” blogs) wrote under a synonym. In this, we were wiser than we perhaps knew then, as later generations, who naively splashed their real names and personal information all over social media, were to discover to their cost.

Once I started blogging I quickly discovered the “blogging community”, numbers of personal bloggers like myself, laying their thoughts before the world and one another. In fact, it was the community that found me and I became aware of their attentions through the comments that they left on my blog. I of course returned the favour and the comments section of a blog post often turned into a virtual forum as visitors and blogger exchanged views.

On our blogs we each maintained a blogroll citing all the blogs we followed or found interesting. When we made the acquaintance of a new blogger, we would mine that person’s blogroll for interesting blogs to add to our own list. In that way, we expanded the blogging community to which we belonged.

There were also “blog directories”, websites that collected blogs and ordered them, together with basic information about them, in structured lists. Some included your blog for free while others required a subscription. Searching a directory was usually free. These were useful, especially if, like me, you were interested in blogs in other languages as well as in English. (Three of my favourite blogs were French-language blogs situated in Quebec and Montreal.)

So, where did it all go wrong? The rot set in gradually but the time came when nearly all of the blogs that I knew, in what I have come to see as the halcyon period of personal blogging, had ceased to exist. The natural slow evolutionary process of old blogs dying and new blogs springing up to take their place came to an end: blogs were dying faster than they were being replaced.

In a number of cases, but not all, once productive bloggers diverted into the easier, if more trivial, realms of Facebook and Twitter. It would be easy to say, misquoting the popular song, that “Social media killed the blogging star” – and some commentators have said it – but I suspect that the reasons are more complicated than that. Hypotheses abound: just type “history of blogging” into your search engine to see this.

What prompted me to write this, however, was not the desire to bore you with a history lesson but the fact that I think the pandemic has led to a small but welcome renaissance of personal blogging and that while this is pleasing to see, I am afraid that it will fade away again once the crisis is over. Is there some way to keep what we have gained?

That is not to say that the Web is now awash with personal blogs. It is certainly not. If, like me, you spend time and energy looking for good blogs, you have your work cut out. Those few directories that still exist contain mainly commecial blogs and their personal sections, where they even exist, are full of dead blogs. You can of course search the Web but how? What search string do you use? If you do locate a few personal blogs, 99% of them are dead, last updated years ago.

Don’t people still leave comments on my blog? Yes, sometimes. I am pleased and grateful when they do and I always reply. Other visitors pause long enough to click the “like” button. Whenever somebody leaves a comment on my blog or clicks “like”, I take a look to see whether they too have a blog. If they do and I like it, I add it to my blogroll. By various means, I have managed to garner 20 blogs for my blogroll. This is a “curated” list: I keep up with the blogs on it and if one has not published for a year, I delete it. I keep it in my RSS reader for a while longer, however, in case it wakes up again in which case I restore it to the blogroll.

Why do so few blogs these days have blogrolls? Is it because contemporary bloggers are self-obsessed people with write-only minds? Or is it because, having started only recently, and lacking interaction with other bloggers, the idea of a blogroll has never occurred to them? I am sure that at least some of them know of other blogs that they like and keep up with. So why not let the rest of us in on the secret?

I will therefore end this with a plea to present-day bloggers: if you do not have a blogroll on you blog, will you please consider adding one? All decent blogging platforms provide the blogroll as a built-in function and setting it up is easy. You can rename it whatever you like and it is a way of paying a compliment to blogs you find worthy. And who knows, if you add someone to your blogroll, they may very well add you to theirs! That is a benefit all of us can share.

After lunch we went out for our statutory exercise walk and to fetch our daily coffee. It is a dull and damp day, but warmish at 11°C. Even so, it felt rather depressing.

Bus stop closed

We sometimes use this bus stop in Pentonville Road (when travel is allowed!). It has been closed and a hole dug inside the shelter. This is work to deal with a gas leak. They have tried several times already to deal with it, apparently unsuccessfully. What is annoying is that they close the stop and cause disruption to pedestrians and road traffic and then go away without completing the job.

Jusaka closed

We expected Jusaka to be closed and were not surprised to find that it was. I rather suspect that it will remain closed now until after the New Year. I imagine that trade hasn’t been lively enough lately to justify remaining open. We hope that they can survive the economic downturn.

St John Street dull and damp

We went along St John Street. I waited for a quiet moment to take the photo but the road was actually quite busy, up to pre-Tier 4 levels.

Queueing for the butcher’s

We turned into Chadwell Street and I couldn’t resist taking a photo of the queue at the butcher’s shop. It stretched along the first block of buildings and round the corner into Arlington Way. This is one thing we don’t have to bother with but I hope it isn’t a sign of things to come as shops run low on supplies.

Dead tree

We walked down Arlington Way where we found this tree stump, newly cut. I assume that the tree was diseased and is being removed to prevent the disease spreading. It may be necessary but it always makes me sad. I don’t know how much trees feel or how much they are aware of what’s happening to them and I often wonder about that.

Myddelton Passage

We took a turn along Myddelton Passage beside the Shakespeare’s Head pub (which was closed, of course). We hadn’t visited this quiet backstreet for a while though I did photograph it from the other end on Sunday’s walk. (See Brave new Tier 4 world.)

No leaves but bunches of berries

The vines that straggle over the wall of the pub garden had died back and so had the usually verdant plants poking over the wall of the old New River estate. There were no leaves but there were bunches of small dark blue berries. My botanical ignorance does not allow me to identify the plants.

This brick wall, you may remember, is famous for the badge numbers carved into it by police officers in the mid-19th century. It’s something of a mystery why they would have been lurking here. Various theories have been put forward but none has been confirmed as far as I know.

Police badge numbers

Each one was no doubt carved over a number of visits and they are carefully done, though in different styles. The numbers and letters often resemble those printed in newspapers of the period.

“99 G”

We both liked this one for its well delineated 9s and its elegant ‘G’. Great care has been taken to make neat work of it despite the unevenness of the brick (though that would probably have been smoother and less pitted 170 or so years ago).

Christmas wreath, River Street

Were you expecting some Christmas wreaths? Where we walked today was something of a wreath-desert but we eventually found one, which I think is new to us, in River Street. It is a rather plain one and has been hung from a conveniently placed doorknob.

Decorative window rail

Near the door with the wreath is a window with an ornate rail. Some houses have real balconies, some have pretend balconies (too narrow to go onto) and still others have decorative ironwork like this. A fascinating variety.

Lights in tree and in the room

As we approached Myddelton’s deli, I was rather taken by the lights in this street tree which matched the lights in the first-floor window. It is the only tree in the street with lights which might mean that it is a private venture. Unfortunately, the camera has balanced out the intensity of the lights so that they appear dull in the photo. In reality they are quite bright and stand out even in the daylight.

Christmas wreath, Amwell Street
Photo by Tigger

In case you are hungry for wreaths, here is another one. We only managed two on this trip. (It’s my job to carry the coffee home, so Tigger took this and the following photos.)

Retro items in Pennies
Photo by Tigger

This shop in Amwell Street, called Pennies, sells retro or, according to its website, vintage, items. It always intrigues me though I have never been inside. It is closed now, of course, because of Tier 4, but its window display was quite pretty with coloured lights. Again, though, these don’t show up well in the photo.

House window lights
Photo by Tigger

Our (i.e. Tigger’s) last photo of the walk was this house window which had coloured lights in it which continually changed colour. Very pretty. They are between the curtains and the window and therefore best seen from the street. This is true of numerous houses as though the occupants are wishing passers-by a merry Christmas.

Today is the second day of life in Tier 4. It is also December 21st which, this year, is the date of the winter solstice and from now on the days begin to become longer – a cheering thought!

As I recounted in yesterday’s post, we did not perform our usual shopping run this Sunday. This was for two reasons. Firstly, we had in any case planned to put off this week’s shopping until nearer Christmas to make sure than any fresh food items would last over the Christmas closures. Secondly, we guessed that the shops would be crowded with anxious shoppers. So we left the trolley quietly parked beside the fridge and went out for the walk that I described.

This morning, Tigger decided to make an early run for the shops. Sainsbury’s has asked that we shop singly, not in pairs or family groups, so as to keep numbers in the store to a minimum. Until now we had ignored this advice but today, Tigger took the decision to go alone. Did I feel happy to give the shopping chore a miss? No, actually. In fact, I felt rather depressed by it and waited anxiously for Tigger’s return.

When Tigger came home, it turned out that she had done a good job, buying enough goodies to see us over the Christmas break, and had even picked up coffee from Mercer’s in Chapel Market on the way home – something that is usually my job!

So I think we are now ready for Christmas and can relax, except that Tigger was due to go in to work on Wednesday and Thursday and we are awaiting confirmation that this is still the case as seems likely.

The situation has been rendered still more complicated by France closing its borders to traffic from the UK owing to fears that Britons entering France would bring with them the new strain of Covid 19 which is more infectious than the old one. The shops have warned that this closure could affect our food supply and lead to shortages. During the day we have already been hearing reports of queues at food stores snd customers squabbling over items in short supply.

After Tigger’s foray to the shop this morning (when, perhaps because it was still early, there had been no queues or squabbles), we stayed at home. The weather was wet and miserable and not conducive to leisurely ramblers of the sort we enjoy.

Tomorrow is another day. Let’s hope the weather is more pleasant. If it is, we shall go for a walk and pick up our ritual coffees from Myddelton’s deli.

And – who knows? – we might even photograph a few more wreaths! 🙂