Ply Brook

The official lockdown guidance says that you can only go outside for shopping, and other essential things, and exercise:

“You should minimise time spent outside your home, but you can leave your home to exercise. This should be limited to once per day, and you should not travel outside your local area.”

I am trying to walk everyday in January. I suspect many people stuck at home through lockdown have some craving to get outside. I appreciate that I am lucky to be able to work at home but I do need to get outside occasionally and give brain something else to think about. And it’s the only exercise I am getting which, given that I seem to stress eat at home, I really need. My walk on working days is in the morning, before I start to work, and is very limited to around the streets nearest my house. Just me and, a very occasional, jogger or dog walker.

Because I need the exercise, I try to do a longer walk at weekends. It’s been amazing how PY and I have been able to find some new paths and places nearby. Places, I imagine, we would never have discovered if it was not for the restrictions. Today was one of those days.

Pyl Brook is a small stream in southwest London that I never noticed, either in real life or on a map, before. There don’t seem that many places where you can get close to it but we managed to find one near the graveyards and crematorium towards Morden: this is taken from a little bridge looking between some houses. I wonder what it’s like when the water level is higher?