“What’s the secret to your relationship?”
“Food!”
“It’s the only time she’s quiet!”
“No, really it’s communication. Communication and openness. We always saying the things we need to, even when it’s hard to say. I know can tell him anything.”
“You’ve got to be able to be honest with each other.”
“And I’m impulsive and he’s a thinker. So I’ll do something and straight away fall on my face, and he’s there, being patient, so when I fall on my face he picks me back up.”
I’m really passionate about mountain biking and motorcycles.
I make sure I get in a lot of practise and take advanced courses but it’s also psychological. You’ve got to be confident in your ability and relaxed and then it all comes together. As soon as you start to stiffen up and doubt yourself it’s going to go wrong.
“He loves to steal my underwear. He takes it off the clothes horse and chews it. I’ve had him for six months and he’s got through five pairs!”
“What’s the best thing about having a dog on the tube?”
“You suddenly have so many more people to talk to.”
“I ran for the 1 in 4 people with mental health problems, including me, who need support. I ran to prove to myself that I can achieve something that feels pretty impossible. I ran to show the twelve year old me that there is so much more to life than just wishing I wasn’t in it.
It completely exceeded my expectations. It was so amazing seeing all of my friends along the route, I just couldn’t stop smiling. By the end my cheeks hurt as much as my legs did!”
“I’m running today for a charity called Turn To Us. They fight poverty in the UK. My wife ran three years ago for the charity and now she’s coming along to support me.”
“What’s been the hardest thing about the preparation?”
“Just the training! I have a little daughter - we’re a young family so it can be really hard to find the time to train.”
“What are you most looking forward to about the marathon?”
“Finishing!”
Good luck to everyone running the #londonmarathon today! Can’t wait to cheer you all on.
“I’m a filmmaker and I made a documentary about refugees. I feel like a lot of the issues around refugees are being confused. People say that terrorists are hiding amongst the refugees but terrorists are found in lots of different groups and those groups aren’t tarnished in the same way.
Filming refugees showed me that these people are desperate and they’re scared. To then be sent away when they are on the cusp of safety, well it’s just one trauma after another. I had to come out to the protest today and show my support.
You can judge a society on the way they treat their disabled, their poor and their women. I would tell Donald Trump to look at himself and the way he is treating these people, because what does that say about him?”
#muslimban #standuptotrump
“I work with preschoolers and I love it. We dance, we tell stories and they have so much energy. I get my energy from them.
They tell you you’re beautiful, they tell you they love you. They change the way I see the world. If you look at it as an adult, if you think about it, everything is complicated. But if you look at it like a child, everything is simple.”
“It was her birthday a few days ago so we’ve been celebrating all week. We went on a big forest walk in Milton Keynes and today I think she’s eaten her body weight in chips!
Her name is Gytha after a Terry Pratchett novel. All of our pets are named after characters from his books. Gytha is a witch in the book but she’s also very comic, and we got Gytha when she was a puppy and she was mad so it seemed to fit.
We got her when we were living in Mexico. Her brother was a street dog and we rescued her. She moved to China with us and then we moved to London. She hated the journey. She doesn’t even like being on the floor on the underground so being in a cage for twenty four hours of travelling was horrible for her - and for us. She’s very huggy usually. It’s one of her best traits.”
Thought of the day - and perhaps a particularly fitting one for January!
Commute Blog was lucky enough to be featured on @bbcnews-blog today! You can read all about the story behind the project here. If you’ve come from the Beeb and want to keep up with the latest stories from London Underground, be sure to follow our Facebook: www.facebook.com/commuteblog
“I’m really into cosplay. You dress up as different characters and act out all sorts of scenarios with other people. Sometimes when I’m travelling on the tube in costumes I get a lot of funny looks and kids point at me. I don’t mind the kids, I only mind when adults give me strange looks.
I’ve made friends from all around the country from doing it. There are two other girls and even though we live really far apart we speak every day.”
“What do you like most about cosplay?”
“When you dress up as certain characters you feel so much more more confident. Because you’re just a character and the things you do aren’t real and don’t have permanent consequences, you don’t have to worry so much about what you’re doing. In real life I worry a lot!”
Sadly we’ve come to the end of the Commute Blog/South + North London Cares collaboration.
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading the stories as much as I enjoyed hearing them and that it might have changed the way you view the older generation. There are very few differences between us except our life experiences, and by understanding each others’ you can also enrich your own.
If you wanted to help with the great work that North London Cares and South London Cares do, you can find out how to volunteer or donate at their websites: www.northlondoncares.org.uk and www.southlondoncares.org.uk. If you aren’t London based then I hope you’ve been inspired to bridge the generational gap in your own small way, whenever you can. You never know where it may lead!
“I said to myself, when I retire I’ll go to the end of every tube line. I haven’t yet made it. I’ve been to all sorts of places. Watford, Chesham and Amersham - they’re lovely. You get can there for free which is very good. Strangely enough I’m doing so much these days that I don’t have time to do these things very much, even though I enjoy them!”
—–
I spent a day with North London Cares and South London Cares, two charities which connect young Londoners with their older neighbours to help build friendships. This week I’ll be sharing some of the stories the neighbours told me about the changing face of our capital city and the connections and friendships that sustain us.
“I used to wear a big hoop skirt on the tube when I went out with my sister. Once the doors shut on it because it was so big, but when they opened again there wasn’t a mark on it!
I still love London, I suppose because I was born here. Whenever I feel down I go up the escalator to Oxford Street and I see all of the shops and I feel like a different person. I don’t even need to buy anything. It’s just being there, looking in all of the windows. I love it.”
——
I spent a day with North London Cares and South London Cares, two charities which connect young Londoners with their older neighbours to help build friendships. This week I’ll be sharing some of the stories the neighbours told me about the changing face of our capital city and the connections and friendships that sustain us.
“I wouldn’t regret the time I spent in the Land Army. It was hard work, very hard work, because we had to take over lots of different jobs. For instance I had a milk round I had to do and I said ‘well the only thing is, I don’t know the places. I don’t know the area.’ ‘Oh don’t worry about that,’ they said, ‘Old Po, (that was the horse), she knows.’ And she did. She stopped at all the places where we delivered the milk. I didn’t even know how to steer a horse!
I learnt life while I was there. I went in as green as anything. Quite a few of us did. We came from all sorts of places to do this job. I’ve got some lovely, lovely memories. There were times when it was really hard, I mean, when we first went in, we had to dig round these fruit trees and things and of course the girls weren’t used to using their hands. One of the girls had terrible blisters, hers were infected, but she just went to the hospital, had them bandaged and carried on.”
“Do you think the older generation is tougher?”
“I think we can learn from each other dear. I love all you young people. I can learn things that possibly didn’t occur to me before, you know? And I hope that we can give something in return, like the stories I can tell you.”
——
I spent a day with North London Cares and South London Cares, London-based charities which connect young Londoners with their older neighbours to help build friendships. This week I’ll be sharing some of the stories the neighbours told me about the changing face of our capital city and the connections and friendships that sustain us.