Kinetic life is focused on reaching a destination. You harness your drive to complete a journey. In this way of life, it naturally makes sense to find the shortest possible route and take it. Imagine it like a commute. If you were to choose between an express train and a local one, and you saw […] The post Kinetic and energeial living appeared first on Herbert Lui.

It's coming up on a year since I was last in this part of the world, when I had a very lovely lunch in the sun at Dominic Chapman, then a brand new restaurant in the Relais hotel on the banks of the Thames. Strolling around town before lunch last week I was pleased to see he was still at the Relais - he's a talented chef and deserves to do well - but I do remember being one of about 6 people in a vast dining room last May. It's strange how some of the wealthiest areas of the country need to be persuaded to spend money on food, even as they drive around town clogging up the tiny streets in their Range Rovers and Aston Martins. So I was a little concerned that for the whole of a Saturday lunch service we were the only people eating at the new Duke Henley. But I suppose the point of these invites is to change that and get the word out, and perhaps it's not too much to hope the people of Henley can be persuaded out of the giant Wetherspoons round the corner and into this charming, dynamic little startup. Aged beef fat focaccia was the first thing to arrive, which I hope you can tell even from my slightly blurry photo (I really think it's about time I got myself a better camera - any suggestions welcome) was nice and bubbly on top, smokey from the grill and came with whipped wild garlic butter (first week of the season apparently) and rosemary salt. I'm always a bit torn about having butter with focaccia - I have a feeling it's not very traditional Italian - but then rules are meant to be broken, aren't they? Apologies to any Italians out there. Venison tartare came hidden under a layer of powerfully wasabi-spiked cream - horseradish cream, basically, only with wasabi. We were instructed to scoop it out using the accompanying prawn cracker style puffed snacks and while this sort of occasionally worked there weren't really enough crackers for the generous portion of tartare, and they had a habit of disintegrating when you attempted to scoop. So we basically ended up having the crackers on the side and then eating the tartare with a spoon. Tasted good though. These were "Toastie"s, big chunks of chargrilled toast covered in gooey grilled bechamel and umami-rich black garlic, topped with shaved parmesan and what I think were crisp fried shallots. The trick in "poshing-up" cheese on toast is to not have too many confusing flavours, but black garlic and cheese are a perfect little partnership, and the bread was light and easy to eat despite being a generous portion. King prawns with yuzu, jalapeno and cucumber made a delightful counterpoint to the richness elsewhere, adding more of those Asian ingredients to complement plump, meaty prawns. The yuzu and cucumber made a kind of Japanese gazpacho, and there were all sorts of micro herbs and interesting vegetables (sprigs of fennel maybe, and parsley) added to the mix. One of the highlights of the lunch. We certainly only have ourselves to blame for ordering so many dishes with the same ingredients, but it was testament to the skill of the kitchen that these tube-shaped chips, that came with yet more cheese and black garlic, were ethereally light and ridiculously easy to eat. Topped with Rachel, a semi-hard goats cheese, it was another one of those dishes that would have gone great with a pint at the bar, or picked at in their little walled beer garden. We had enjoyed everything up to this point so much that we went for both sweet desserts to finish. This is miso salted caramel tart, with pineapple chutney and crème fraiche, which was dense and gooey and almost slightly too salty but shared between too people not too overwhelming. And this is Yorkshire forced (I assume) rhubarb, chunky and jammy, served with ice cream and shards of berry-studded meringue, which had a lovely summery flavour profile and some fantastic complimentary textures. Both desserts disappeared in record time. 8/10 I was invited to the Duke and didn't see a bill.

London's next dead bus R6: Orpington to St Mary Cray Location: southeast London, outer Length of journey: 4 miles, 25 minutes 347, 118 and 414 have already been extinguished and at the end of this week it's time for the R6 to join them at the big terminus in the sky. You won't miss it. The R6 exists to serve a couple of estates on Orpington's periphery and also to link them to trains at St Mary Cray station. It runs every half an hour and operates with two vehicles. It's not the least used of the R buses - the R2, R5, R8 and R10 have fewer passengers - but it is probably the least consequential unless you happen to live in the right place. In a now familiar tactic, TfL are withdrawing the R6 and replacing it in full by another route. That replacement is the B14, an outlier from the Bexley bus empire which runs via a fairly twiddly route between Bexleyheath and Orpington. The intention is to add one more twiddle at the southern end, following the R6's route in its entirety rather than a direct run from St Mary Cray to Orpington. It'll make every journey on the B14 at least ten minutes longer, the mitigation being that B14 passengers can always catch the more frequent R11 instead and not end up wasting their lives on a lengthy detour. The aim as ever is "to operate a more efficient bus service", and the appropriate buzzphrase is "to better match bus services to customer demand". The R6 kicks off from the lengthy bus stand outside Orpington station, alongside its single decker sisters R3, R5, R9 and R10. The parking space at the end now accommodates the overhead charger for the pantographs on route 358, the tram buses that got social media excited a few months ago. The B14 also starts here, conveniently, and will be shadowing us for the next mile and a half through the town centre. busiest bus stops in London, being served by as many as 17 TfL bus routes, although that'll be going down to 16 from Saturday. It's also despised by at least one local resident who recently submitted a vituperative FoI. “The bus stop opposite the Maxwell is lunacy!! It is: Virtually opposite another bus stop; Adjacent to a box junction; Opposite a T junction; Near a junction where pedestrians cross. I would struggle to think of a more dangerous place to put a bus stop. Please consider removing or moving it. I would be interested to know the number of road accidents in that spot, and if the frequency of accidents has increased since the last road amendments there.” TfL fobbed him off with a suggestion he looked at their collisions dashboard, which I have and there have only been two 'slight' collisions here over a seven year period. Those fears of lunacy are thus misplaced, which is good news for the hordes of passengers who would have been instantly disadvantaged had this awkwardly located stop been closed. We bear off from the main drag at Riverside Gardens, which is good because there are long-term roadworks on Cray Avenue so we're dodging a bullet there. Only the R4 and R6 come this way so they're the go-to choice for every car-less resident this side of the River Cray. The houses are older here and the roads narrower because this has been a hub of cottages since Victorian times. I'm mystified by the name of the next stop being Reynolds Cross/Red Lion because no pub of that name exists, but all is explained when a cul-de-sac of fresh flats appears called Red Lion Close. The White Horse, more recently shuttered, looks like it'll be going the same way soon. 477, an hourly non-TfL service to Swanley and Dartford, but you can't wave an Oyster on that. And then we turn off again for a trunk-shaped loop up a very ordinary residential sidestreet, the kind that wouldn't normally get a service elsewhere in London. Here it's needed so that a couple of hundred homes don't find themselves too far from a red bus, and also so that residents of the further-flung hamlet of Kevington get a vague return on their council tax. By the time we've done the one-way circuit barely anyone is left aboard. A schoolboy hops aboard as we enter the last half mile, his target the station across the valley. To get there we return to the High Street by the village green, which isn't anywhere near as nice as you're imagining, then duck beneath a lofty railway viaduct. On one side are roofing supplies and auto traders, and on the other side a 13th century church with cedar shingles because St Mary Cray is much more historic than it looks. both on the same street, right near the end of the route. I'm guessing that passengers on the B14 won't be happy to find themselves dawdling round the outer estates of St Mary Cray next week, thinking "oh goodness we can't be turning off down there as well good grief we are". And there's every chance they won't be expecting it because from what I saw nobody's gone round and stuck up any posters advertising the change at any of the R6's bus stops, or they hadn't at the start of the week. It could be a very simple poster too, it only needs to say "catch the B14 instead" and be done with it. Instead a big surprise is coming to Orpington as yet another bus route dies, to better match services to customer demand and to save TfL a bit of dosh. • Route R6: route map Route R6: live route map Route R6: route history Route R6: timetable Route R6: withdrawal consultation

There’s something meaningful that you want to do. The only problem is it’s going to take a long time to do it. Maybe it’s schooling of some sort, or chipping away at a big project. Yes, it’s going to take a time horizon of years, maybe even decades. The time will pass anyway, though. Or […] The post The time will pass anyway appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Unchosen Overground line names an excellent scoop yesterday by publishing the longlist of names which were under consideration for the six Overground lines. I'm not sure how much much of the list is behind his Substack paywall so what follows is abbreviated from someone else's cut-and-pasting on Twitter. I've organised the names into my own entirely unofficial categories. (if you don't like these names that's fine because they weren't chosen, so don't moan) Rejected because TfL ultimately decided not to name lines after people [Suffragette] [Lioness] [Liberty] [Mildmay] [Suffragette] [Lioness] [Weaver] [Weaver] Considered for Liberty line Considered for Mildmay line Considered for Suffragette line Considered for Weaver line Considered for Windrush line Also, somehow Discovering Hidden Stories Around the London Overground. This was published on the day the actual six names were announced, so I suspect this half-dozen got further through the process than most. fifty further names which didn't make the longlist, and if you hated these you'll hate them too. But it doesn't ultimately matter, remember, because none of them were chosen.