The end of the line

After decades of taking the Piccadilly Line tube on every trip to London I've ever made, and after decades of snickering like a 13-year-old boy every time they announce where the eastbound train is actually going, I finally went there:

I then took a 5.7-km hike all the way to Barnet through an urban forest and past some of the nicest houses I've ever seen. There was also the bit where I saw two crows eating a pigeon alive, but we don't need to discuss that further.

And of course I wound up the day at the Southampton Arms, my favorite pub in the world. It did not disappoint.

I'm heading back home this afternoon, picking Cassie up this evening, and if things go well, I should be dead asleep by 9pm.

When I was a student in London in the early 1980s, the Greater London Council subsidised Tube travel very heavily. That ended in the Spring of 1982 after Bromley, one of the London boroughs south of the river, challenged the policy in court on the grounds that it was unfair on Bromley residents, since no Tube lines served the borough. On the last weekend of cheap fares, my friends and I decided to take the Tube to the furthest station, which we had determined to be Amersham on the Metropolitan Line. It turned out that the Amersham branch was closed, so we ended up in Chesham instead. We wandered round the leafy suburb for half an hour, no doubt alarming the gentlefolk of Chesham with our student exuberance, and then caught the Tube back to central London. I've also ridden the full length of the Piccadilly Line from Cockfosters to Heathrow, but that's another story.