Fats Domino Was Walkin', and So Am I

I walk about an hour a day because I can no longer run. I mean, I can run, but if I run too far I’m afraid of the high price I’ll pay in pain. I don’t have resilient joints (my right shoulder’s been replaced twice, and I’m losing my left hand), and my knees and ankles took a beating when I ran on the sidewalks of West Hollywood for eight years. Then, nine years ago last month, I was hit by an inattentive teen driver in Beacon, New York, and my left meniscus was ripped. My left knee’s never been the same. Most nights, even with walking instead of running, I’d be howling from the ache if Dame Zelda didn’t bring me a hot water bottle. 

The cultural centre of our quiet neighbourhood is the little parade of shops a couple of hundred metres to the south. There’s a pharmacy, and a newsagent’s/post office, and an off-licence (Californians would call it a liquor store), a Chinese takeaway place, a beauty parlour, an opium den, a German bakery, and a German deli. Many Germans have settled here because of the nearby German School. I was only joking about the opium, but one can dream, can’t he Sometimes, in clement weather, the village slag may be glimpsed sipping coffee, smoking, and contemplating her semiweekly change of hair colour, from blinding blonde to darkest black, outside the bakery. I have never bought so much as a pretzel from it, nor patronised the deli, nor conversed with the village slag, though I have watched her try to seduce a geezer on the 371 bus from Kingston.

Most of my walks begin with me heading east, toward central London. I walk past the field on which Queen’s Park Rangers develops young football talent, and on which the Richmond Reprobates baseball team has been known to practice, past a playground, and then through the path between two long brick walls featured in so many Freudian Sluts videos. I emerge in a big field popular with equestrians, and then, after traversing much grass, wind up on a wide dirt bridal path. On my left is the Ham Polo Club, the only polo facility in London. There are commonly matches on weekends, and I enjoy listening to the play-by-play announcer through the facility’s PA system. He reminds me of Chick Hearn, the brilliant Los Angeles Lakers announcer of yesteryear, though I’ve no clue what he’s on about. 

Finally i reach the comically narrow main road that links Richmond and Kingston, the mighty A307, and salute the Fox & Duck, on the opposite side of the road, with my middle fingers. (The proprietor’s daughter booked the Sluts to play there, cancelled on us when someone booked a birthday party on the night we’d been promised, and then never made good on her promise to give us a make-up night. I’ve been in there once, with Dame Zelda, to see a Bowie tribute band that pretty nearly deafened me.) 

Walking north on the mighty A307, which I suspect I could cross, given a running start, in four steps, I must remind myself not to be clumsy and to step off the pavement, as there are always buses coming, and there’s no margin of error whatever. (My telling myself not to be clumsy is sort of like the sun telling itself not to rise in the morning.) I do not turn left on to the footpath that would lead me to the Petersham Nurseries, whose stock in trade isn’t plants, but cuisine, and to which foodies from all over London flock eagerly on weekends. I ascend Star and Garter Hill as fast as my ancient legs will take me, for I am intent on getting my heart beating as fast as possible. I pass the spot on Richmond Hill where I encountered Pete Townshend a few months ago, admire JMW Turner’s view, as immortalised in a celebrated painting, and then descend down the hill depicted above, heading homeward at last, with the Thames on my right, and the beautiful Petersham Meadows on my left. The Thames is a tidal river, and sometimes the tow path is flooded. I bid Eel Pie Island, on which I think Pete used to have a studio, a mental howdy, and overhear many conversations, an alarming majority of them in Spanish. 

The other day, as I neared the car park in which I make the last left turn of my traipse, I espied a wonderful couple. The guy was around my own height — 1.85 metres — and his girlfriend a dwarf who literally came up to his waist. He was walking at probably a third his natural speed in concession to her steps being so much shorter than his own. 

True love, I thought.