During lockdown, one of the things you're allowed to do is go outside for exercise a maximum of once a day, and you're able to go with one other person outside your bubble if you want to. My husband is my built-in exercise partner, and so we sometimes go out for a bike ride. We enjoy cycling in London because there are so many bike lanes now, and many of them are clearly marked with some even having safety barriers. Part of the reason for this are these "cycle superhighways" that have been created in the city. They make cycling so easy and safe, but the only thing I wish about them is that they were all connected so you could do circuits. Perhaps that will happen sometime in the future. Anyway, as a result of being able to exercise outside, we've been able to discover some interesting areas with old churches and grounds.
St Dustan-in-the-East
One thing that you see a lot of in various parts of Europe are ruins or buildings that have been rebuilt because they were destroyed during one of the two World Wars. WWII in particular was bad because there were air strikes that ended up doing a lot of damage. As we were cycling, we passed by this beautiful old ruin of a church. The college still exists, but the area has been turned into a beautiful garden, and one can sit and enjoy the garden scenery. If you could sit there alone, it would be a lovely place for peace and quiet contemplation, but I imagine that many people enjoy sitting there, so I'm not sure if one could ever experience solitude like that there. In any case, we ended up seeing this place only because there ended up being construction on the route we were supposed to take, and we had to take an unexpected detour. I love it when things like that happen because it seems annoying at first to take the detour, but then you realise that it was so worth it. It's when you can believe in that cliché saying about the destination being less or only just as important as the journey.
Postman's Park
A colleague of my husband's recommended a new place for us to check out. We decided to walk there instead of cycle since we would get a better workout from the hour-long walk to get there rather than cut the time in half with our bikes. It's a very interesting park, also situated on the site of an old church that was damaged in WWII. There were very old gravestones from the 1800s piled up, and some were still standing, but most were so old and untended that the writing had worn away, and we couldn't make out names or dates. It's a tiny green space surrounded by a lot of tall buildings, but parts of the church on the grounds have been rebuilt. But the most interesting aspect of this park is that it has been dedicated to commemorating regular people who died trying to save others. I've taken a few photos to share about who those people were. It's really interesting to see who died and why, in some cases young children trying to save a friend or younger sibling. It's also a little sad to see that, too. You can just imagine how devastating it would be to lose someone, or in some cases, lose both parties when the one couldn't save the other and both died. At the same time, you can appreciate the selflessness of all the people trying to save others, and it's beautiful to reflect on that. The pictures for both this and the section above will indeed look dreadful thanks to Blogger's terrible system for adding photos that I always complain about, but at least you get an idea what the places are like. For the sake of space, I had to decrease the size of the photos below with the various plaques of commemoration, but I believe you can click on them to increase the size so that you can read what they say. In some cases it would have been nice to get closer shots, but there are benches all along, and there were people sitting there, so I didn't want to get too close due to social distancing.
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