A Walk On The Mild Side

Today was yet another poor excuse of a summer's day - wet, cold and windy. It felt more like the middle of autumn than the start of August so we didn't really venture very far - just for a walk down to our local village of Aylesford and a pub lunch to cheer ourselves up.
A walk on the wild side is an occasion or incident involving adventurous, risky or morally questionable behaviour - none of which applies in this particular instance unless you count the aforementioned pub lunch and a couple of pints at our local as morally questionable! This was definitely more of a walk on the mild side and there were certainly no mean streets involved but I did come across this public footpath sign defaced with some purple squiggles on it. That's about as edgy as dear old Aylesford gets! :-)

It's time for another podcast recommendation. I've just finished listening to a three part edition of Sideways narrated by the best selling author and journalist Matthew Syed (this is actually my second recommendation of one of his podcasts) called "China's Ping Pong Power". Matthew is also a former table tennis player for Great Britain and he has always been fascinated by the history of the sport in China since he travelled there to compete against some of the world's greatest players.
He realised that 'the little game of pin pong' has played a vital role in the rise of a great power and the episodes take you from the founding of The People's Republic of China in 1949, encountering the effects of the Great Leap Forward (which resulted in an avoidable famine that's estimated to have killed at least 36 million people by 1961) and the Cultural Revolution on to the thawing of US-China relations during on the Cold War, Olympic glory and the sporting ambitions of the country today. Utterly engrossing!