In my 20s, I spent my working hours at different gigs—running my editorial studio Wonder Shuttle, doing Prologue, writing at Medium, and a bunch of other cool projects. I had found or created a lot of opportunities, and I gave in to my ambition to pursue all of them. I was running on excitement and […] The post One step at a time appeared first on Herbert Lui.

One Stop Beyond: Stoneleigh In this series I'm taking the train one stop beyond the Greater London boundary, getting off and seeing what's there. Today that means Stoneleigh, one stop beyond Worcester Park on the line between Wimbledon and Epsom. For positioning purposes it's wedged between the boroughs of Kingston and Sutton in a protuberance of Surrey, so close to town that it's the only zone 5 rail station beyond the Greater London boundary. In a familiar story it really was all fields 100 years ago, then trains stopped and suddenly wham, suburbia erupted in seven years flat. an austere concrete link but was replaced last year by an accessible lift-enabled span much to the delight of elderly locals attempting to go shopping. What's missing is a screen displaying when the next train goes, so you only find out it's cancelled after you've schlepped down to the platform and discovered you face a half hour wait, and I may be speaking from experience here. Shops line both sides of Stoneleigh Broadway, a broad boulevard with ample parking and two long redbrick parades of the kind they always built in the 30s. We may be only quarter of a mile from cosmopolitan London but the selection of shops is quintessentially Surrey, from a large dry cleaners to an independent travel agent with a traditional butcher in the middle. The newsagents still doubles up as a stationers so has a wall of writing implements at the far end. There's no gym but one unit does art classes, one sells cub and scout uniforms and another's a dance school. Eating options are a tad timewarped with an Oriental Takeaway, a chippie called the Pisces Fish Kitchen, a bistro that stretches to tapas On Selected Nights Only and just the one pub in a rustic gabled mansion called The Station. If you enjoyed shopping in the 1990s you'd feel right at home here. Radio 2 while I was doing my research and mentioned retrieving her EastEnders costumes from a small museum in Stoneleigh, which I then totally had to visit. Hopefully a board on the high street would have nudged me had I not been listening - "You ain't seen London till you've been to the Cockney Museum". Let's be fair, it's large yellow lockup with plexiglass windows, plasterboard walls and a doorbell to press. But inside is an Aladdin's Cave of throwback treasures collected by the Pearly King of Peckham, George Major, who made it his lockdown project to display his extensive collection of memorabilia here in Stoneleigh. Sometimes he's here to guide you round but I was told he was out so got to explore by myself, for a good 45 minutes. Poverty Street, is the least successful. George has plastered the walls with photos of old London and the poorer folk who inhabited it, but then decided to display them in near darkness lit only by flickering lanterns. "Probably best to illuminate them with your phone," I was told, but accepted the offer of a poundshop torch instead and squinted my way round. The photos are fascinating and George's captions perhaps more so... No Health And Safety In Them Days, Do You Remember Liptons Tea And Grocery Shops, Note That Everyone Wore A Hat, We Led The World In Them Days. Market Square, not least because it's properly illuminated. George used to be a costermonger so the display includes a big barrow piled with fake fruit, and also the original frontage of a former Manze's pie shop (Meat Pies 1d, Fruit Pies 1d, Eel Pies 2d). The museum's teensy cafe can serve up proper pie & mash and apple pie & custard, but I understand you have to book ahead. King and Queen Square where pearly heritage comes to the fore and this was the best bit of the lot. 27 button-splattered costumes are on display, each with George's notes on who wore them where and the adversities they overcame. Pearly royalty grew up all over the capital from Shepherds Bush to Dagenham and Wood Green to Walworth, many of whom appear in the multitude of photographs or on the screen in the little cinema. The Pearly Queen of Hampstead was the smartest, apparently, and Bill from West Ham the poorest. website due to the rising price of electricity. Best bring a torch. Four other places to see in Stoneleigh Nonsuch Park: This open space was the location of Henry VIII's finest palace, previously blogged, of which nothing remains because a subsequent owner had it demolished to pay off gambling debts. One of the last leftovers was Queen Elizabeth's Elm, a hollow tree of great girth which grew in front of the kitchen court and under which it's said the Tudor Queen stood to shoot at deer. Alas it was burnt down in 1902 because vandalism is nothing new, and I looked in vain by the footpath in the dog-free field for a trace of the slight mound archaeologists claim to have found in 1995. The source of the Beverley Brook: This nine mile river flows into the Thames at Putney but rises here at the top end of Cuddington Recreation Ground, marginally inside London. A thin treelined strip snakes downslope fed from a brick culvert, although at present it's a stagnant milky trickle which takes several metres before it de-opaques. Step within the leafy curtain and you can follow the ditch unseen by neighbouring dog-walkers, meeting instead fallen branches, crisp packets and the odd disturbed squirrel. 68 Stoneleigh Park Road: This was the childhood home of the playwright John Osborne, the Angry Young Man who wrote Look Back In Anger and other kitchen sink dramas. His family moved here in 1936 when he was five, just round the corner from Station Approach, growing up in what he'd later describe as a 'cultural desert' he couldn't wait to escape from. Ewell Court: This large Victorian house with a Jacobean core was bought by the council in the 1930s and has since been used as a clinic, decontamination unit, care home, library and wedding venue. A nasty arson attack in 2013 has required considerable renovation but the lakeside setting attracts many locally, as do the tearoom and ice cream parlour. Note to the cafe, you cannot erect a sign saying 'Secret Garden This Way' and expect to be taken seriously. I particularly liked the Fernery/Grotto under the arch out back, originally part of an Edwardian conservatory and whose many rocky crannies are actually made of Pulhamite. And yes technically this is in Ewell, just off the river Hogsmill, but it's closer to Stoneleigh station than to Ewell West so I'm counting it as one stop beyond.

When you know why you’re doing what you want to do, you do it better.  You can prioritize clearly, adapt when you need, and endure the inevitable setbacks. More importantly, you’ll know when you’re heading in the right direction. This sense of clarity doesn’t just magically happen to you. Fortunately, it’s pretty straightforward to get […] The post “Why is this important to me?” appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Broadband update Abbreviated version: Hurrah, my broadband finally started working again yesterday afternoon. I had eleven days without. What happened: A couple of Saturdays ago a fibre optic cabre somewhere in Mile End failed. Before dawn on Monday Openreach sent an engineer round who confirmed someone needed to come back in daylight. On Tuesday someone came back in daylight, opened up a manhole and found flooding down there. Faffing around in the water proved ineffective so Openreach realised they'd need to source hydraulic pumps. Several attempts were pencilled in but the issue was not solved, hence the protracted delay. How I found this out: On Tuesday I finally managed to speak to a human on a BT helpline. I think they could hear the surprise in my voice. They did some digging into my broadbandlessness and confirmed it was infrastructural damage so an Openreach issue, not a BT problem. They didn't know when pumps might tame the flooding allowing the cable to be repaired, but it was reassuring to know this was a real problem and they were trying to solve it. I will eventually receive some daily compensation. How it ended: Yesterday I spotted an Openreach engineer fiddling with a cabinet beside an open manhole at the end of Fairfield Road. This looks hopeful, I thought, but when I got home I still had no broadband. I checked online and they were hoping for a fix by 10am this morning. But a few minutes later the red ring on my BT Hub turned blue and I had broadband again. Oh the relief of being able to do everything online again. How Joni Mitchell summed it up: Don't it always seem to go, you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Flickr update fewest views. I hope to update this list several times during the day. 1) Dover to Deal (25 photos, 0 views): Uploaded yesterday, four days after I wrote about my clifftop walk. Please have a look :) 2) Redditch (20 photos, 75 views): Nobody gave a damn about this West Midlands new town last year. 3) Cheltenham & Gloucester (25 photos, 79 views): The lovely spa and cathedral towns, not the building society. 4) Slough (30 photos, 98 views): I should have guessed my Slough collection (Mars, Herschel, Thunderbirds) would underperform. 5) Welwyn Hatfield (26 photos, 107 views): Perhaps it's new towns that don't generally attract attention. 6) Wensum bridges (12 photos, 113 views): Bridges in Norwich proved a bit niche last year. 7) Ironbridge (30 photos, 128 views): What's wrong with you? Ironbridge and Coalbrookdale are fabulous. 8) Prime Meridian (40 photos, 146 views): From the Thames to the Humber (skipping from Stratford to Cleethorpes). 9) Poole (40 photos, 148 views): Perhaps if I'd mentioned Brownsea Island it'd've performed better. 10) Dartford (25 photos, 160 views): Yeah I get that. 11) Foro/Palatino (30 photos, 188 views): The astonishing classical treasures in the centre of Rome. Bow Roundabout update Silvertown Tunnel webpage explains why. All physical mitigation works are now complete. The link under the flyover at Bow will remain closed until we complete more works to protect the structure later in 2025. I suspect they've realised it'll take more than a small low headroom sign to protect the underside of the flyover from potential damage so will be adding more signs or some other kind of protection. A lorry hitting the concrete structure could be incredibly disruptive. Superloop update Every 8 minutes: SL4 (Canary Wharf → Grove Park) Every 10 minutes: SL8 (Shepherds Bush → Uxbridge) Every 12 minutes: SL1, SL2, SL3, SL5, SL9, SL10 Every 15 minutes: SL6, SL7 London Loop update section 18, i.e. Chingford to Enfield Lock. This is another section that can be ridiculously muddy even in normal weather, indeed at the end of February the Inner London Ramblers warned of "slippery mud" and "extensive flooding" and strongly recommended the wearing of "good boots". I can confirm that after six weeks with no rain it was merely a very pleasant ramble and unusually solid underfoot. Here, in addition to the absence of mud, are the ten things which most surprised us along the way. 1) A seafood takeway on a boat at Enfield Lock selling tiger prawns, calamari and octopus. 2) Wondering why all the ducks along the Lea were in groups of three, in each case two males pursuing one female. 3) Crossing the Greenwich Meridian in the middle of a car boot sale. 4) A songbird in a tree on Sewardstone Marsh belting out a ridiculously wide range of chirpy songs, as if working through the preset tunes on an old Casio keyboard. 5) An Islamic cemetery that definitely wasn't on the hillside last time I walked this. 6) A girl dangling her feet in a freshly dug grave and laughing while on the phone to a friend. 7) Noticing that all the graves were pointing in a southwesterly direction that definitely wasn't southeast towards Mecca (then using Google to confirm that Muslim graves are always aligned at right angles). 8) The Leopard Gates outside the Scouts National HQ at Gilwell Park, where one of the leopards got damaged so the 97 year-old sculptor came out of retirement to carve a new one. 9) The absolutely excellent view across London from the top of Yates Meadow, which the official Loop route inexplicably bypasses. 10) Walking round a corner and suddenly passing two young men coming the other way, one wearing a straightjacket and looking immensely embarrassed at being spotted in what they'd hoped was the middle of nowhere. 60+ card update E-bike update xxx I think we can agree this is not the best possible announcement. It draws more attention to two obscure cross-river services than to the e-bikes themselves. It's like saying the asterisk out loud. But as we discussed and discovered, it's hard to do better.-->