This is the first of three classic phone boxes from the 1966 Doctor Who serial ‘The War Machines’. This was the first serial that was set entirely on contemporary Earth (and in Doctor Who, particularly in the classic series, ‘contemporary Earth’ means ‘contemporary London’). As such, there are lots of scenes shot outdoors on London streets, meaning it was inevitable that we would bump into the odd non-police telephone box along the way.
The first example in the serial, however, was not found on the streets – it appears in studio footage (filmed either at Ealing Studios or Riverside Studios according to Doctor Who Locations) and was thus presumably a prop.
When the characters first emerge from the swinging ‘Inferno’ nightclub, their attention is caught by some strange happenings at the entrance of a nearby warehouse. My attention, meanwhile, was caught by the phone box that appears tucked under the arch next to the warehouse. How very handy for the warehouse employees!
Some very suspicious-looking characters next to this phone box!One of the suspicious-looking men uses the phone box at one point.It’s very efficient use of the space under this arch.
Next week we’ll have a look at one of the ‘real’ phone boxes that features in the location filming for this story.
A new series today where I share some of my blurriest – and yet nicest in some ways – gig photos! Back in the old days when we could still go to gigs and shows, I would always take pictures as a memento, even at times when I wasn’t blogging. Gigs always feel like a one-off special moment that you can never have again, and so I always try to capture the magic. I’m not a great photographer and so am rarely successful, but my attempts usually end up fairly colourful.
I don’t even remember who the couple in the photo were; I would have to check the programme. One of my main memories of the show is that the costumes appeared so much more sparkly in real life than they do on TV, but again this aspect doesn’t show up in any of my photos or videos – cameras don’t do sparkle.
It’s great to be back logging 2019 pizzas… in 2021 😒
Those of you who’ve been paying attention will notice that I have skipped over #23 and #24. This was because they were both café pizzas that I forgot to take pictures of. I hoped to be able to return to said cafés and order the pizzas again in order to rectify this (despite one of the cafés being in London and the fact that I don’t remember its name… I’m ever optimistic!) but then PANDEMIC, and I’ve no idea when I’m going to be able to eat out in cafés again or even if the cafés in question have survived this horrible period, so it’s time I moved on. After all, I’ve got two whole new food series to post about for 2020 and 2021, and it’d be nice if I could be up to date with those by the end of this year. Maybe one day I’ll be able to log those missing pizzas.
Anyway, here’s a nice takeaway pizza that I discovered in November 2019.
I’m so hungry just looking at this!
Geth’s family were visiting, and we needed a nice easy takeaway meal with lots of options, so we went for Balti Masters, which offers various Indian food, kebabs, pizzas and other things. I had the vegetarian pizza, and it was really filling with a lovely sauce – really good quality, which you don’t always get with multi-food-type takeaway places.
We ended up ordering from there a few times in 2020 too, as it’s a good go-to when Geth fancies an Indian takeaway.
Finally getting round to reviewing a virtual race from last September – one of the highlights of my running season in 2020!
I keep referring to this race officially – in Strava logs and the like – as ‘Virtual Great North Run 2020’, as it keeps things neat. However, I fervently hope that there will only ever be one ‘Virtual Great North Run’, that the race can go back to normal(ish) in 2021, and that appending the ‘2020’ will forever be unnecessary!
A picture from happier times, in South Shields after the Great North Run in 2019.
For most of 2020, despite the fact that in-person races had to cease along with everything else when we went into lockdown in March, I avoided virtual races. Virtual races have been a thing since long before the pandemic – the idea is that you pay the ‘race entry’ fee, run the distance wherever you like, send in your Strava log or similar as proof, and receive a medal in the post for your medal hanger/kitchen drawer/wherever you keep your medals. I’ve never been keen on the idea, because in normal circumstances I don’t see the point. If I’m paying a race entry fee, I want the experience of a real race – the crowds, the adrenaline, the excitement, the music, the fact that I automatically go faster when running with other people, the cheering spectators, the sights along the route, the atmosphere of the finish line… I could go on and on. I really, really miss real races 🙁
For some people, though, virtual races are ideal. There are people who can’t attend races on Sunday mornings due to other commitments, or who don’t like being in crowds – so it’s great that virtual races exist and can cater to these people. I’m just not the target audience, in normal circumstances.
However, we are far from normal circumstances.
The big coronavirus-related anxiety for me over the summer was the question of whether the rescheduled October date for the London Marathon would be going ahead. In a nutshell, as I already blogged lots and lots about this at the time: they took ages to announce; they eventually announced it was going virtual for 2020; I was able to defer my ‘real London Marathon’ place to 2021; I also accepted the invitation to run the virtual race in 2020 as I wanted to do it as a ‘mile(ish) every hour for 24 hours’ challenge. Sorted. I had signed up for my very first virtual race.
There was the option to print out your own race number. Now framed with all my others!
The Great North Run had cancelled their in-person race and announced they were going virtual for 2020 quite some time before the London announcement. When this announcement was first made (in June, I think?), I didn’t expect to do the virtual. Every cancelled race I had originally been signed up for in 2020 had invited me to do a virtual version in exchange for a race entry fee, and I hadn’t taken any of them up on the offer – because, as explained above, I don’t normally see the point in virtual races.
However, after signing up for the Virtual London Marathon, I felt that it would be a good idea to commit myself to a half marathon length run, as it would be good training – even though I knew I would be running the marathon in a different way that wouldn’t require quite as much all-in-one-go endurance. I had kept meaning to run half marathon length runs over the summer, but none of them had ever transpired due to lack of motivation, so I decided to sign up to the Virtual GNR in order to make sure that I actually did it.
The other reason was that the excitement of planning my 24-hour challenge had made me realise how much I was missing races. A virtual race, while still a glorified training run in my world, would at least help to give some structure to my running over the next couple of months.
T-shirts from previous Great North Weekends (2015-2019). I did the 5k the first year we lived in Newcastle, and have done the full GNR every year since.
A few days after signing up, I happened to bump (not literally, I am a good social distancer) into a running friend while out on my Sunday long run, and as a result was invited to join the informal Sunday GNR training runs that were being organised by members of the local social run group. I’d attended a couple of the group’s formal runs around late February, just before everything shut down, but hadn’t realised that there were still some informally-organised socially distanced runs going on. (They’ve had to stop again since the lockdowns have become stricter over the autumn and winter, sadly!)
All set for the Virtual GNR. Club vest and special Lucy Locket Loves GNR leggings on!
I enjoyed the Sunday training runs, which were at a pace that was a bit faster than my usual solo bumbling, but manageable for me, and decided to run the actual race with the group as well. It was a great atmosphere at our ‘starting area’, with perhaps fifteen or twenty people from the group all running in a socially distanced way (this was before even the ‘rule of six’ came in, let alone the return to full lockdown… so much has changed again in the last few months!).
Start line marked in chalk on the pavement!
The group’s starting pace on the day was a little fast for me, it turned out. The first 5k of the race was the fastest I’d run since before parkrun shut down, and the first 10k of the race was a lifetime 10k PB for me of 1:03:30. This is really promising in terms of my aim to manage a sub-hour 10k in 2021… but was absolutely not something I should have been doing in the first half of a half marathon! I was focusing too much on keeping up with the group rather than running at my own pace – and, as I did know the route, I should maybe have told them to go ahead and fallen back to a more comfortable pace for me.
As a result, I burnt out and fell apart a bit in the second half of the race. The rest of the group gradually disappeared, and at about ten or eleven miles in I told group leader Alan (who was lovely and kept waiting for me) that he could go ahead and I’d finish a bit later. The last couple of miles were pretty difficult and slow and I kept taking walk breaks, which I hadn’t needed to do in a half marathon for some time. Geth came to meet me at about twelve and a half miles, and I just about managed to run-walk to the end of the planned route. My official time as measured by the GNR app was 2:25:29 – only a couple of minutes slower than my PB from the Inverness half in the different world that was early March, so I had to take that as a victory given everything that had happened in 2020! I stopped my watch at about 2 hours 29 minutes once it said I’d done the full half marathon distance, and I think I ran over the planned route finishing line at about 2 hours 32 minutes. All of those times were faster than any other half I’ve done apart from Inverness, so in terms of finish time, I can’t complain.
The Virtual GNR t-shirt is one of the nicest yet.
I was a little disappointed with myself about the pacing as I like to finish strong in races, but to some extent it was out of my control. I originally planned to do another half marathon distance run before the end of the year, just to see what I could do when completely in charge of my own pacing, but I ended up needing a couple of months to recover from my 24-hour challenge/Virtual London Marathon. I need to build up again over the first few months of 2021.
Nice heavy medal for the effort too!
Besides, I’ll also be focusing on 10k training for the next couple of months, with the aim of being ready to get that sub-hour result later this year. It doesn’t look likely that I’ll be doing any real races any time soon… but it turns out a virtual race isn’t the end of the world, so I’ve signed up to do a virtual 10k later in January.
In the ’80s, London Zoo had this interactive feature where you could stand on a plinth and represent the ‘human’ alongside the other great apes. I am not sure how long this was in situ, as I have been unable to find any reference to it online. Good thing I have some pictorial evidence! Here I am on the plinth in 1988.
It’s been a tiring week, largely because I’ve spent most of it cleaning.
I’ve always (sort of) tried to keep things clean in the house, but I’ve never really felt able to stay on top of it or have the place looking as nice as I would like. This year, I really want the house to be up to my standards all the time – it makes me depressed when its not – and so I’ve decided to follow the TOMM routine, which is primarily aimed at busy mums but can be used by anyone. After a few weeks of settling into the routine, the idea is that you spend no more than half an hour per day on the housework (which, in the long run, is all I can realistically spare!). This week was my first week doing the routine, and it took me ages most days because there was a lot of stuff that just hadn’t been done in months, but I already know it’s going to be a lot easier next week, as from now on it’s just about maintaining things.
Having a constantly-clean house will also make it much easier to get all my decorating projects done this year!
I’ve had bits and pieces of day job work as well this week, but have made sure to carve out a bit of time for playing videogames. I’ve finally been able to make a start on playing all the other entries from the most recent Adventuron jam, and am going to finish them off tomorrow before the rating period ends. I’m also making good progress in Bravely Second, and should be able to get it finished before the next game in the series comes out next month.
Running has been largely indoors on the treadmill due to the winter weather. I’m crossing everything that it gets milder soon!
At the moment, next week looks fairly quiet, so I hope it stays that way.
I wish I had a house progress photo to share but I’m not quite there yet. Here’s a shot of the mop and bucket instead, which have done good work this week.
This week’s earworm playlists:
Monday
Devo – ‘Whip It’ Duran Duran – ‘Five Years’ Sparks – ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For Both Of Us’ The Weeknd – ‘Blinding Lights’ Duran Duran – ‘Falling Down’ 5 Seconds Of Summer – ‘Youngblood’ Frankie Goes To Hollywood – ‘Relax’
Tuesday
The Midnight – ‘Jason’ The Timelords – ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ The Dream Academy – ‘Life In A Northern Town’ The Police – ‘Don’t Stand So Close To Me’ Haim Saban and Shuki Levy – ‘The Mysterious Cities Of Gold Main Theme’ Nobuo Uematsu – ‘Chaos Shrine’ Duran Duran – ‘Hungry Like The Wolf’
Wednesday
Cast of The Muppet Christmas Carol – ‘Thankful Heart’ Yuka Tsujiyoko – ‘Onset’ Robert Palmer – ‘Addicted To Love’ Fleetwood Mac – ‘Dreams’ Roxy Music – ‘More Than This’ Oasis – ‘Songbird’ Noriyuki Iwadare – ‘It’s Detective Gumshoe, Pal!’
A new subseries of Phone Box Thursday today. This one could go on (intermittently) for some time!
Everyone knows about the famous police-box-shaped TARDIS in Doctor Who, but – as a frequent visitor to 20th century Britain – the Doctor has often encountered the red type of phone box too. I’ll be taking a look at these instances while I wait to be allowed outside again to track down more extant examples…
We start off with the first example of a classic red phone box in the programme, at the end of the 1965 serial ‘The Chase’, when the Doctor’s companions Ian and Barbara return to their home era (well, give or take a couple of years) and home city of London.
The police box is a regular sight in Doctor Who… but what’s that lurking in the background?
Spending the day doing some celebratory sightseeing, they find a police box (not the TARDIS), which is flanked on one side by a couple of red examples. The first red phone boxes (shown in black and white, but let’s ignore that) seen in Doctor Who!
The filming location, on Bayswater Road (coincidentally just around the corner from where I photographed my last twoLondon phone boxes in November 2019!) was very easy to track down, as the Doctor Who community is a world of wonderfully in-depth geekery and so the useful site Doctor Who Locations is a thing that exists. Someone on there has taken a photo showing that both the police box and phone boxes were removed at some point and replaced with a more modern KX+ phone kiosk, presumably in the late 1990s when that design was in use.
Make sure you click on the little clock dropdown in the top left corner on Street View, because the really interesting thing here is the story of the telegraph pole that you can see in the still from the programme. At the start of the 2010s, it still looked exactly as it did in the mid-1960s. However, over the course of the last decade, it has become gradually overgrown with ivy, to the point that by the time of the most recent image from July 2019, it was so completely disguised that you really have to know it was there in order to identify it among the trees! Given that it’s slap bang in the middle of London, I am absolutely flummoxed as to whether this was a deliberate attempt by the council to hide it, or just nature taking its course (and the council just went with it, due to the pole no longer being in use).
Anyway, this is not Telegraph Pole Thursday, so let’s move on.
I noticed when I was doing my rounds of central Edinburgh to photograph phone boxes in January 2016 that many of the red phone boxes were standing next to police boxes (Edinburgh and Glasgow have both largely maintained their collections of police boxes; the large rectangular police boxes that are particular to Edinburgh are so sizeable that most of them were turned into coffee kiosks in the 2000s, and have seemingly been doing a roaring trade ever since). Here’s an example in the Grassmarket. It seems this setup may have been common in London, too, when police boxes were still standing there.
Next time the Doctor visits Earth: we find a few more London examples. Tune in next week! (Presuming I don’t find another box for the main collection in the meantime.)
After my ukulele classes came to an abrupt halt – along with everything else – back in March 2020, I didn’t pick up my ukuleles much. I did have a good strum for a couple of weeks in the summer, as I had a lovely new tenor ukulele that Dad had sent as a surprise, but on the whole I found that I was busy with other things. I really need the motivation of either a regular weekly group or a daily streak in order to keep going with habits – and I don’t have time for yet another daily streak, especially now that I’ve started a cleaning one!
Thankfully, a local organisation has just started a weekly Zoom community band session. It’s free of charge, no experience required, and really relaxed – music groups on Zoom require everyone except the leader to be on mute due to feedback, so I can happily strum away without worrying about anyone else hearing my out-of-practice playing!
Ukulele-ing from the comfort of my own sofa.
Tonight was the second session, and after the first it took me a bit by surprise as there were a lot of new songs and they were a bit tougher for me! It’s great though because it means I’ve got lots to practise before next week, which gives me the motivation I need to have a quick go every now and then. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up a bit better at the next session!
I’m finally catching up with my booze alternative reviews again, as I’ve not done any in a while. Fentimans Ginger Ale was one I tried in November 2019.
Fentimans Ginger Ale.
I like the ginger beer from the same brand, but as I said in my previous review I find it quite hard to drink because it’s very spicy and makes me cough. The ginger ale is much easier to drink, and it’s got a lovely sweet taste, so if given the choice between the two I would probably have the ale.
Strange to go back through my pictures and find one taken in a bar. A different world!
