Morning Walk Story One - Leicester and Alderton

Chapter One In the Beginning - Coriander Road and Bede Island

It was May 2013. “Dave, I am worried about you – you are getting fat” a friend said. “Dave, where did you get your stomach padding?” said another friend. This is how the morning walk stories started. There was no stomach padding and I was not getting fat. I was already obese but happy and feeling healthy and content in my condition. My friends had just watched me playing the part of a failed Holywood Script Writer in a play at Leicester’s Little Theatre. The play was called “You ought to be in pictures”. My character was confronted by the daughter he had left when she was just three years old. Now grown-up, this young girl wanted to find her father on the pretext that he might be able to open some doors in Hollywood. The real reason, of course, was that she wanted to know why her father had left her and his pregnant wife to pursue his dreams on the other side of the USA. The story was especially poignant to me because my own son and only child had been given up for adoption when he was six months old and now, over 60 years later, I still hoped for that knock on my door from a son I had never got to know but still loved.

A couple of week later, I found myself in the company of Davina Jackson, an academic friend from Australia whom I had first met in Beijing at the Digital Earth Symposium. Now, in mid 2013, she was on an assignment at a London University. We met for coffee on the Piazza at Covent Garden and, as I told her the story about the play and my friends’ observations about my weight, she told me that she thought I had some Russian blood in my ancestry, based on my thick-set appearance. This led to the suggestion that I should send off a sample to 23andme.com to get a DNA analysis. From Covent Garden, we walked to where she was staying at the Groucho Club in Dean Street, a favourite of many celebrities in the entertainment world. Outside, drinking a beer in the warm sun, was a face I recognised from “Auf Wiedersehen Pet”. It was Tim Healy whose Geordie accent is his unmistakeable trademark. “This is my new friend” Davina said as she introduced me to Tim. “His son was playing in a band in Hyde Park where the Rolling Stones topped the bill”. “He is an actor” she went on. “I’ve told him he would get much more work if he spoke better English”. After a pleasant conversation about some of the roles Tim has played on stage and TV, we went our separate ways and I made a mental note to check out 23andme.com.

When back in Leicester, I logged on the 23andme.com web site and ordered a kit which included a phial for a sample of sputum and packaging to send off to the USA for analysis. I took the package to DHL at East Midlands airport and a couple of weeks later I got an email with a link to my own secure DNA analysis which showed I was 99.9% European with ancestry that linked one side of my family to Doggerland (now under the sea between the UK and Scandinavia) and the other side to the Basque region. Whilst this was interesting, what caused me to think most was the chart that showed the likelihood of contracting different medical conditions. This showed that I had a 31.7% chance of having Diabetes Type 2, significantly higher than the figure for the general population. This information, combined with the recent remarks about my weight, made me open to serious thought about how I might lose some weight and improve my health.

Within a few days, lying in bed one weekend morning browsing the web, I saw a BBC article about a wearable fitness device called the “Jawbone UP” bracelet that could track your physical activity, sleep and nutritional data. With my background as the former Founding Director of the Serious Games Institute, I resolved to “Gamify my health” by collecting data to improve my understanding about lifestyle choices and how I could take control of my health.

So it was that I began by resolving to walk the suggested 10,000 steps every day (about 5 miles). Setting myself this daily challenge was the start of my “Morning Walks” journey and a transformation in my sense of well-being.

The Morning Routine

Before my resolution to take control of my weight, health and well-being with the aid of wearable technology, I was living in an apartment on Coriander Road in Leicester. My property was based on an area known as Bede Island, surrounded as it is by the River Soar and Grand Union Canal. Today, Bede Island is a very convenient and pleasant place to live with its proximity to De Montfort University and Leicester City Centre. For almost a century however, Bede Island had been an industrial site, originally associated with the Great Central Railway built in the 1890s and later, after the “Beeching Axe” closed Britain’s last-built and most progressive main railway line in the 1960s, it had been a scrapyard littered with old tube trains.

I moved into my Coriander Road apartment in 2005 when I separated from my second wife and began my first spell as a Project Manager at De Montfort University. It was a perfect location for me both from a work perspective and also for my passion for the Little Theatre in Leicester, both of which were within easy walking distance. I had developed a regular morning routine of walking along Western Boulevard to the local shops and buying a loaf of bread to feed the many swans and ducks gathered by the bridge over the Grand Union.

My Chapter One video of this first morning walk story covers Coriander Road, Tesco Extra, the Liberty Statue that was transferred from the old bus station to its present position on the traffic island gateway into Leicester and the feeding of the swans and ducks. I loved this morning ritual and felt in my heart that the ducks and swans got to know me an anticipate their morning feed time. In turn, I got to know the personalities of some of the more distinctive birds on the river, especially the only little white duck who used to boss the other ducks around.

This morning routine was now to be integrated into a much longer daily walking trek, discovering parts of Leicester that I never knew existed and, in the process, helping me to lose a substantial amount of weight.

Chapter Two – Great Central Way and Aylestone Meadow

Great Central Way is a cycle and pedestrian path created on the former track of the Great Central Railway which originally connected Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester to the London terminus at Marylebone station. The path begins very close to the city centre and, although it passes the back gardens of city suburb terraces, it essentially runs through green countryside almost from its starting point.

Steam trains have always been a passion in my life from my childhood days when I used to stand on the landing of my home to watch the 08:10 Kings Cross-Grimsby-Cleethorpes express on its way from Boston station towards Spalding and Peterborough. I would hear the whistle of the engine as I left Boston station about 2 miles away and would wait excitedly for the plumes of white smoke to appear the stacks of telegraph poles in the woodyard beyond the end of our garden. Most of the time these expresses would be hauled by Britannia Class locomotives with names such as “Clive of India”, “Robin Hood” and “Oliver Cromwell”. As I watched them go past, I dreamed of being an engine driver and fantasised about what destinations I might go to. Amazingly, I actually got to drive Britannia Class Oliver Cromwell 70013 after it was restored to main line use at the Great Central Railway and last year I made a short 360 degree video clip of myself driving another ex-BR standard class locomotive as it pulled out of Leicester North Station (formerly Belgrave and Birstall on the Great Central). You can view the 360 video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6QpgKJwBTs

Chapter Two of my morning walk video takes me from Bede Island to the bridge over the Grand Union Canal in Aylestone. The Great Central ran underneath another railway line which still operates as a freight only route, mainly serving the quarries at Coalville. The route took me past Aylestone Meadow which is a haven for wildlife and always busy with dog walkers. Each morning I would bring an apple with me to feed one of the horses kept in the Aylestone Meadow fields. The railway bridge over the Grand Union canal is where I would often drop down onto the canal tow path and continue the walk almost to the Leicester Ring Road.

The crossing of the Great Central and the Grand Union is a reminder of how the railways displaced the canals in Britain's transport network history yet now the canals remain active for leisure traffic whilst many of Britain’s rail routes have disappeared.

Chapter Three – Grand Union Canal

The Grand Union Canal in Leicester is along the route of the River Soar and passes through the heart of Leicester. Most days I would walk along Great Central Way from my home in Coriander Road as far as the place where the Great Central Way crosses the Grand Union just beyond Braunstone Lane East. The canal towpath provided a very tranquil rural setting interrupted only by the occasional road bridge and canal lock.

As well as taking me past some enviable properties whose gardens ran down to the canal, the route was also a reminder of the canal’s industrial heritage as it passes some active textile dye units and some semi-derelict old warehouses as the canal approaches Leicester.

The route also passes The King Power Stadium, home of Leicester City Football Club whose fortunes I still follow on a daily basis. Their achievement in winning the Premier League trophy in the season 2015-16 is unlikely to be surpassed.

The end of my walk along the towpath took me to the De Montfort University campus, some of which now occupies what used to be goods yards on the Great Central and, after the railway closed to main line rail traffic, a scrap yard for old diesel trains and redundant tube trains.

Chapter Four – Narborough Road

Narborough Road, affectionately known as “The Narb” is the main west route out of Leicester towards the M1 motorway. The Narb is one of the most culturally diverse parts of the city and, in my opinion, one of the best examples of different cultures living side by side. This diversity is well represented by the shops which cater for all nationalities including Asian, Caribbean, Polish, Indian and English. Christian churches share the street with mosques.

I often used the morning walk to visit the Café TwoTen which sits beside the railway bridge about half way along Narborough Road but, at other times in the day, I found myself at Subway for a quick lunch or, in the evenings, at the Dhaka deli Indian Restaurant

Chapter Five – Alderton

I came to live in Alderton in 2015. Alderton is a picture postcard English Village in the Northamptonshire countryside near the town of Towcester, famous for its racecourse. Although Alderton is in the heart of some lovely countryside and has a fantastic historical heritage, it is very close to both Northampton and Milton Keynes, making it possible to get to central London by train in under one hour.

I was introduced to Alderton by a dear entrepreneurial friend, Claire, who lived in a small rented cottage in the village and used to invite me over to watch movies every few weeks and share the joys and tribulations of being self-employed. Every August/September, Alderton holds an annual craft fair to raise funds for the church and in 2014 Claire asked me to help on the second-hand book stall. At this time, I was only 3 weeks away from starting a contract with Universiti Putra Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur but it was at a barbeque at a neighbour’s house during this weekend that I met Jackie and found that I had a kindred spirit in my love of travel. We had dinner together before I was due to leave for Malaysia. I invited Jackie to visit me in Kuala Lumpur and three months later she had agreed for me to move my possessions to store in one of her outbuilding so that I could leave my flat in Leicester.

In early 2015, I came back to the UK to live and share Jackie’s home where I now enjoy another type of beautiful morning walk across the fields to the A5 where I have my morning coffee at the burger bar and pick up the paper from the local garage.

I have been very well accepted by the village community who seem to enjoy looking at some of the photos and videos I post on facebook regularly, including some of my experiments with aerial videos and stills taken by my drone.