Between the pandemic, dissertation writing, and a stint with crutches, I’ve spent much of this year at my desk beside a window, looking over the road in front of my flat. As lockdown progressed, I started recognizing the daily parade of people, dogs, and bicycles gliding past the window as they made their trek down my street. For myself, as mundane as it may sound, joining in with the daily procession of London walkers became an anchor in 2020.
Some days the walks were simply around the block and to the grocer. On other occasions, I would use this period of daily exercise to see a particular neighborhood. Walking several London boroughs while avoiding public transit helped accumulate miles. But the observance of these near-daily walks also helped to maintain a semblance of former normalcy.
Of course, there was some time for taking some letter-related photos along the way.
Monograms in Marylebone, Bermondsey, Sloane Square, and Kensington (clockwise from the top left).
Mosaic entryways in Hampstead, Camden, Fleet Street, and Marylebone (clockwise from the top left).
Disappearing signs in Westbourne Park, Southwark, and South Bank (left to right).
And though this is a low-quality photo, the timeliness of the statement makes it one of my favorite pieces of architectural lettering from my 2020 walks:
Kirkaldy Testing Museum, Southwark.
And then every day, it was back to the flat, to repeat it all the following day. The walks were not overly exciting and the photos were certainly not remarkable, but they got me out of the house and through the year. In some small way, so did the daily routines of the community of walkers, bicycles, grocery wagons, and the two nameless white terriers tottering past my desk at the window, too.
Bette(r) Days celebrates the things that did not suck in 2020. Each day in December, we’ll be posting about the highlights of our collective garbage fire of a year, type-related or not.