Wivenhoe one.

Hellooo and welcome to the first of a new load of blogs coming from pretty little Wivenhoe. I haven’t managed to get hold of a road map yet – I’m working on it* – but for this small introduction piece I don’t really need one. I only walked down ONE road. I’m lazy but you love it.

Oh, I nearly forgot to mention. This is an evolution of a series I started bored before uni in which I attempted to walk every street in Letchworth. Haven't finished that one yet but we'll see how this one goes. FIND IT HERE

*Finding one. I’d love to be able to keep you updated on my walking through drawing what would be a pretty awesome medieval map but I don’t exactly have the necessary skill set to do so

All ready to go. Notice correct sock to day alignment

The starting point: my house. Watsham Place, Wivenhoe, UK. Observe the lovely road sign that can withstand being bumped by my friend Johno in his car. He's a terrible sober driver. 

The view as you step out of my house and the direction in which I will be walking this afternoon

To the left, to the left. More on this later.

To the right - and a window to Mark's room

Onward, then, and a lovely picture of next door to me: the fire station. Handy if we're ever ablaze. Crossing the road, and we see a pub and the road to uni in front of us. Funnily enough, we're pretty much the first house in the suburb that is Wivenhoe, so about equal distance between uni and town. I have never set foot in this pub. It is named The Flag and one of the first things I heard about my house once friends had popped round to say hello was a rumour that it is a racist pub. To the other side, we can see One Stop and some other shops: an empty one that used to sell flowers or mirrors or something, Hair Technique (where I get my barnet done), Henley's the award-winning chippie and Boots. We're going in this direction. Henley's never really impressed me beyond its signed pictures of celebrities on the wall (Jonathan Ross, Chris Tarrant, Frank Bruno TWICE, Jasper Carrot et al) but recently it's tasted a lot nicer and I've found myself won over by its large portions at a relatively cheap price. I've never realised just how conveniently located our house is.

Faster than calling 999

Racist pub -> expensive corner shop that I shouldn't use in the stead of regular weekly shops but I still do

FISH AND CHIPS HERE 

Turning left at Boots, we get to the only road I'll be walking along today. But first, an apparently dangerous bollard:

Hazardous

... and we arrive on a fine row of bungalows that seem, well, charming. The gardens are all well kept & I begin to suspect that a blog stretched out from a single road won't be quite as boring as first expected. The houses look like this:

Judging by the camper: excellent residents.

If you're new to this series, it's at this point that I begin to bitch about people's gardens and windows. Here are two houses that seem to be named after places in The Lord of the Rings and a house that feels the need to display both '15' and 'FIFTEEN' in case the postman is an idiot. Which is unlikely, because they live close to me and the guy who delivers my post is really very nice. I apologise for the unclear pictures: that's the zoom. This is my first photo-taking walk and I haven't quite built up the courage to get close to people when taking pics of their house yet.

And onward. One guy is very slowly building up a garden chess set. He's stuck on one of four rooks. Much more excitingly, I found a garden with disgusting furnishings: a tree-look bird table with a stone squirrel on it and a stone snake to scare away bloggers who go for walks with their phone cameras. Nutter.

The second might actually be a little bit funny if I'd had the gall to hang around long enough to grab a decent picture. To make do, I have enlarged it for your delectation. But now it just looks massively disproportionally important to this blog. I HAVE FEW STRAWS TO CLUTCH

Nothing else really interesting on this road. A massive tree root, two colourful garages and a dude working on his car. How dull. 

MASSIVE. I told you!

...and we return home. Let's go round the corner from my house, towards our garage. Walking past the two other houses on our little terrace, I can see that the third has bin bags outside, an open electricity box and what looks like white spray paint on the door, downstairs AND upstairs windows (only the ones facing the same way as the door). Although this is where a lot of the football team live, and they do have a rivalry with hockey, I don't think they've been attacked or anything. It's probably snow spray that they haven't bothered cleaning off, right?

House number 3) - vandalism or bad fake snow still there in February?

Fuck da feds, I'm going this way (I didn't go that way)

Left at the end then, and towards my back garden. As the turning (it sounds long. It's actually about fifteen paces) approaches, I realise that I've never actually gone beyond it and decide to continue straight, to see the house behind mine. It turns out there's three. And they're really nice. One day, if I've done alright in life, I hope to be living somewhere like I do now. I seem to have forgotten to take any pictures of two of the three, maybe because one house didn't have net curtains and I'd feel bad scouting for thieves. This one has a big telly, a small fountain in the back garden and a basketball hoop on the side. Another is almost farm-housey, maybe owning the fields that are next to mine. 

Left at the tree for mine. Straight ahead on the left is what we'll term the farmer's house and at the end is the nice big house

The back of my terrace

Totally a bit farmy, right?

'Cross Fare'? This is the inside of the farmhouse gate

Let's turn around. Might as well show you my garden whilst we're here for a nice round trip. Disclaimer: we're students. Don't judge us too much. The left of these three garages is ours, and we have a door to it in our garden. More than that sucker middle house can say! In this we keep my beer brewing kit that it's currently too cold to use and we let Dom, a really nice man who lives round the corner and works at uni security, keep his 'classic car' in the winter. I haven't got anything bad to say about the guy, I sometimes see him at 3am drunk coming out of a club and have a nice chat with him. His car, though, isn't so much classic as old. But I'm no connoisseur.

This is my room & my shadow. I live downstairs next to the kitchen/living room and have a French window (well, in this case, patio door, not French windows (boo)) which is useful if I'm hiding from people but need the toilet. I can sneak round/go in the garden. HYGIENE SUX

A dead pot plant that was here when we arrived. In it I have left my herbs that died from not being watered when I was home for Christmas

Graham, our metal tortoise, next to the smoker's patch and a broken one of my pasta bowls. The old coffee jar I put out so Rich had somewhere to put his butts is kind of full, as you can see, but that's no excuse for him not to pick them all up. This annoys me.

Our slowly growing traffic cone collection. The one on the left is kind of lime green but you can't really tell any more. Bad photo and it's rather weathered

That's me done for my first walk in Wivenhoe. I hope you like this sort of thing, because you're likely to be getting a lot of it in the coming months. Or not. Subsequent posts will be about the same length, but much more brief coverage of a much longer walk so should be more entertaining. Pop back soon please.

Before then, you might want to give my friend Forest's new blog a try. He's just starting up, so be nice to him. At the time of posting, he's not actually published anything but word is that the first is scheduled for posting in twenty minutes' time.

Have a nice week!

J