There are missed opportunities, and then there are things which never start.

While sitting in hospital I began formulating a vague plan for August. Last summer I flexed my contactless card and visited, by bus, all the bits of my London borough I’ve never seen before. They weren’t all fantastic (one was, as it turns out, mostly an industrial estate), but I managed to get a meal in each one, and at least I could say I had done it.

Pale blue roundel with navy bar across the centre. The letters "DLR" are superimposed in bold white text.
I’ve always liked this colour scheme…

This year, with a freedom pass in my possession, I had more liberty to travel around London. I had one more place in my borough (well, the neighbouring one, but close enough) that I could find a way to. I wanted to go back to W1 and walk around seeing what’s changed since I last worked there. One thing I particularly wanted to do was to visit every station on the DLR network, taking a picture of every roundel to prove that I’d done it.

It’s not even like the opportunity wasn’t there. For the first two weeks of August I had basically nothing to do. I was just kicking around doing very little and, had I thought about it even once, I could have done at least one of these things. Fair enough, I did spend a week in Amsterdam recently – which was something I had planned to do – but it’s not really the same.

The whole idea behind my mini-sojourns is their random nature. I will have a vague idea about where I’m going and a route to get there, and then I’ll just go. Last year I timed every one to coincide with lunch, so I could go to whichever café I saw first and engender the feeling of “having spent some time elsewhere”. I did, however, have nothing else by way of a plan.

Now that I have one week of August left it’s beginning to dawn on me that this won’t be happening. I can go to the place I mentioned by a relatively convoluted route, provided all the services are running, but doing the whole DLR is out of the question. With the resources and energy I have at my disposal I’ll be lucky to manage the Waterloo and City line.

I also have very little money right now, due to nasty surprises that happened in Amsterdam, so maybe spending time on Oxford Street isn’t the best of ideas, especially seeing how there’s a branch of Waterstone’s and an HMV. The place I used to work at is now a McDonald’s, even, so it’s not like the nostalgia factor is there at all. The more I think about it, the more reasons there are to not do any of this stuff. It might be more rewarding to stay on the sofa playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Not to mention the fact that doing anything of the sort requires getting up before midday. I’ve had problems doing that recently.*

Something in me says that the fact I care enough to write about this is an indication of something. It’s not entirely an unforgivable sin to be a little sedentary when one has a degenerative neuromuscular condition and had a heart attack less than two months ago. But I still want to be, at least for a short while, outside – I never really wanted to be in London as a youth; now I can appreciate it, as an adult, I’m finding it difficult to even take my first step.

I am going to have to force myself.

So here I go.

*since the age of about 12 or thereabouts