[Here’s a link to other forays around my map.]

What makes a grid square interesting? Is it all the things there? Or is it the things that I see? The things that make me curious, that spark connections and ideas? Within this grid square people are living and dying. Loving and crying. It is busy with people driving and walking (only two cyclists) and sitting and chatting. I might well pass one of the ten murderers we each walk by in our lives. None of us thought of the others we would never meet or how our lives would all contain this hour. It’s not what you see, it’s how you look.

Something I have enjoyed throughout this project is arriving in each grid square with little idea of what will capture my attention, but an increased certainty that something will. Every time I have been pleasantly surprised by what turns up. I have no idea at the start of each square what direction it will go what I might find or see, like all good exploring.
And so if I find it under-whelming, with little to interest me or catch the eye of my camera, the fault is likely to be mine. Is how much we see dependent on how much we look? The square isn’t its fault, it is my fault. I knew that as I struggled round today’s streets, but I also excused myself somewhat on the grounds of illness. I sweated and shivered through last night, unable to sleep. This morning I dragged myself to my shed to work, but after an ineffectual hour of book writing I decided to try to salvage some productivity from the day by getting my camera and cycling out to explore another grid square.

What caught my eye on the map today was the almost total concretification of the grid square. There was one footpath marked, running for about 80 metres behind the backs of houses, and one scrap of woodland tucked in a fold of main road against a roundabout. That was it. The whole square was covered with a man-made mosaic of terraced streets, railway lines and roads.

With this expectation, my first surprise then was how much greenery I noticed. A cedar tree on a square of grass surrounded by a 1980s development of one-bedroom retirement bungalows. The grass outside blocks of flats allowed to grow knee-high and flourishing with clover, buttercups and grasses. Elder shrubs taking seed on the flat roof of a row of garages. Yellow hawkweed flowers and brambles bursting through broken concrete in alleyways. Small lawns at the foot of a tower block. Neglected gaps between homes filled with green undergrowth (and mattresses, beer cans and plastic bottles). The verges of the railway line as lush and impenetrable as any jungle.

Perhaps towns are greener than I thought, but we also throw away huge amounts of rubbish. Today was bin day so the streets were lined with overflowing wheelie bins and bin bags. I was surprised how many skips I saw on the streets too. Every year we dump a massive 2.12 billion tons of waste. If all this waste was put on trucks they would go around the world 24 times. This stunning amount of waste is partly because 99 percent of the stuff we buy is trashed within 6 months. Imagine 15 grocery bags filled with plastic trash piled up on every single yard of shoreline in the world. That’s how much land-based plastic trash ended up in the world’s oceans in just one year. The world generates at least 3.5 million tons of plastic and other solid waste a day, 10 times the amount of a century ago.

I tucked down an alleyway behind a homeless shelter hostel and out onto a main road busy with cars and lined with the shops you expect on British high streets: fast food franchises, cafes, barbers, charity shops and convenience stores. There’s a Slovakia, Bulgarian, Lithuanian grocery too. These shops service the rows and rows of terraced houses that covered today’s grid square, all built in the past century and most since the Second World War. The older streets bristled with roof top chimney pots, intermediate ones had front gardens and rows of lock-up garages, and the newer ones simply had space to park as many cars as possible right outside the front door.

The cheerful chatter and laughter of school playtime carried the length of the street I was cycling down. Matching the children for exuberance if not volume was a bunch of sparrows in a privet hedge (Googles ‘collective noun for sparrows’… A quarrel of sparrows! A perfect name!). It was the only strip of hedge on the street, about three metres long, but it was a haven to wildlife. House sparrows have experienced a rapid recent decline, particularly in urban and suburban environments: greater London lost seven out of 10 sparrows between 1994 and 2001. The causes remain largely unknown, with everything from cats to air pollution being blamed.

‘Stop Smoking, Start Vaping’ urged a sign at the vape shop. Good for business, I guess, but probably the first half of the sentence alone would make for better advice. I have never tried vaping so was tempted to pop in and indulge my curiosity. But I’ve already got enough vices (Hula Hoops, Haribo and more!) so I just carried on my way, past an antiques shop whose sign –again– tickled my curiosity with its oxymoron: ‘Antiques Olde and Modern’.

Rows of brick terraced houses. Rows of gardens. Roses, washing lines, and trampolines. Behind each street is a rutted, potholed back alleyway with grass growing in the middle and brambles and nettles sprouting around each neglected garage topped with barbed wire.

It’s fairly quiet at this time of day around the residential streets. I’m sharing the streets only with Amazon delivery vans, Deliveroo mopeds doing the lunch runs, and some young mums with toddlers. A man leans on his upstairs window, drumming his fingers on the sill, gazing out, but whatever he is seeing is inside his mind not out here on the street. On a street corner I passed two old men chatting about the England cricket team. A couple of streets down two other old men were discussing the local football team. Someone hoovers their car. A postman knocks on a door then turns away when it isn’t answered. A window cleaner reaches up to the first floor with a long mop. An old lady stands and watches him. Every day life that I drift amongst in the feverish haze of whatever virus or bacteria has hitched a ride inside my body today.

I am totally out of gas now. I flop outside a newsagent’s, then pop inside and emerge with a homemade vegetable samosa and a Diet Coke. Despite being regarded as a staple of Indian cooking, the samosa’s roots are decidedly more complex. Its origins can be traced in gastronomic literature to 10th century Middle Eastern cuisine. Early medieval Persian texts make reference to the sanbosag, meaning ‘triangular pastry’. Throughout Arabic cooking history, sanbosag, sanbusaq and sanbusaj are all present: regional and dialectal varieties of a dish travelling by trade routes from North Africa to East Asia. These depictions tell of small mince-filled triangles, eaten by travelling merchants around campfires and packed in saddlebags as a snack for the next day’s journey. It is thought that India and Pakistan first inherited the samosa when these cooks from the Middle East migrated for employment in the kitchens of Muslim nobility. Ibn Battuta, a medieval Moroccan-Berber traveller – regarded as one of history’s greatest – notes a meal in the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq, 14th century Sultan of Delhi: “sambusak, a small pie stuffed with minced meat, almonds, pistachio, walnuts and spices”.

Diet Coke’s history is less auspicious, and its ingredients more mysterious than the humble samosa. Ordinary Coke has a ludicrous 7 teaspoons of sugar in each can. But then again, Diet Coke is sweetened with something weird made in a lab. Coca Cola try to minimise the fakeness of aspartame by saying that it’s made from the same building blocks of protein found in everyday foods, like meat, fish and eggs. That sounds nicer than describing it as a methyl ester of the aspartic acid/phenylalanine dipeptide. Either way I’d be better off heeding footballer Cristiano’s advice to drink ‘água’ rather than Coke.

And that is pretty much that. I finished my samosa and went home.

The End.

This is the first time I struggled to be captivated by a grid square on my map and the first time I have struggled for things to write about. Normally I have to leave out so many things that I have seen or thought about. It is also the first time I have been ill and failed to pay close attention. But all this has done is reassure me that every map is interesting, if only the person exploring it is interested.