Fungi foray on Wimbledon Common

Lots of interesting fungi on Wimbledon Common today, including the fantastic, yellow coloured Scleroderma citrinum, the Common Earthball and some fungi that particularly like Birch trees. 

Above, the  Scleroderma citrinum, Common Earthball, often described as looking like a 'warty potato'. We also saw, below, Piptoporus betulinus, commonly known as the Birch polypore, apparently used for sharpening knives, also, the darker fungi below is what my friend Lesley identified as a Russula atropurpurea, Purple Brittlegill, the paler pink one we think is the Birch Brittlegill, Russula betularum, which we did find in a small Silver Birch forest at the Eastern end of the common.

Above, Russula atropurpurea, Purple Brittlegil, below, Birch Brittlegill, Russula betularum,

Below, the Deceiver, Laccaria laccata, first-nature.com says:

"Deceivers are mycorrhizal fungi. The cap colour changes quite significantly with age and depends also on the weather, and this characteristic is the origin of the common name".

By far the most important lesson I learned today is to look at the front of trains before getting on them! However, it was interesting to get the tram from Croydon to Wimbledon and go through exotic places, such as Dundonald Road and Waddon Marsh. 
Thanks to Lesley for a lovely day, at least we got the right train back to Streatham...

P. S I was glad to discover my memory of a stuffed dog on Wimbledon station's platform 5  was not a bizarre hallucination:



"Wimbledon Station was also the haunt of a 'Railway Collection Dog'. Airedale Terrier "Laddie" was born in September 1948 and started work on Wimbledon Station in 1949, collecting donations on behalf of the Southern Railwaymen's Homes at Woking, via a box strapped to his back. He retired in 1956 having collected over £5,000 and spent the rest of his days with the residents at the Home. On his death in 1960 he was stuffed and returned to Wimbledon Station. He continued to collect for the Homes, in a glass case situated on Platform 5, until 1990 when he retired once more and became part of the National Railway Collection"

Tescos, 9 am in the coffee shop

Beech tree at the top of Streatham Common

A large percentage of the leaves have gone now in Streatham, but it's also lovely to see the shape of the trees emerge after months of being hidden behind them. When I was looking carefully at this tree a passing postman stopped to admire it as well.

New Cross Road

New Cross Road yesterday, an odd mixture of houses here, not yet completly colonised by the super rich.

Tan's Cafe New Cross

Tan's Cafe New Cross. There's always a warm welcome here and a very nice cup of tea. Below that, two men adjusting the Crystal Palace Tower today, not a normal 9-5 job...

More of Streatham and a shopper waiting for a cab

Streatham Ice & Leisure Centre this morning

Some sun at last, but it's pretty frosty. Someone has grafittied the side of the new leisure centre, the bit along Natal road, a shame, as the plain concrete looks good, it feels nice too, warm to the touch and polished with great care when the building was being finished.

Legendary shops

My sister suggested I pay homage to these two legendary shops, Ayre's the Bakers (and Confectioners) and the Kristal Pharamcy, don't be deceived by the word 'pharmacy', this shop in Nunhead sells almost anything you could care to mention, including wool. The cake shop is also more than amply stocked. Neither shop has any irritating pretentions towards the artistanal, or whatever the word is.

Pigeons sheltering under the chairs

Another foul day in Streatham, even the pigeons look depressed...below, the old fire station tower also looks quite bleak in the morning drizzle:

Hedgerow, Brecon

I did this 'painting' this afternoon from a photograph I took in the Brecon Beacons of a hedgerow. I used the Artrage app, re-configuring the brushes a lot to suit the way I paint, with a dry bush and scratchy pencil marks on top of the paint. I hope the earthy, autumnal dampness comes across.

Another drizzly Saturday morning in Streatham

Another drizzly Saturday morning in Streatham, a pattern is developing here.

Wandsworth Bridge from Putney

Looking towards Wandsworth Bridge from Wandsworth Park, one of the loveliest little parks in London. It now has an impressive new Putting green modelled, by the looks of it, on the Ryoan-ji  zen gardens in Kyoto, what a great combination! I can't wait to try it out. This is crazy golf with more than a touch of Middleclass aspiration - no open mouthed clowns or mini windmills here. What next - fun-fairs with artisanal Sardinian cheeses as prizes instead of goldfish in plastic bags? 

I was glad to see lots of cormorants lazing around on the silt barges, as ever. 

Wandsworth is still hellish to cycle through, I got off and walked both times, as the one-way system is ridiculous, even for hardened cyclists. 

I always enjoy the last section of the journey back from the Deep South west - whizzing along Furzedown Road and then down into St Reatham. When I used to come home this way from jobs in Putney and Wimbledon a few years ago, round the back of tooting common was a guaranteed place to see foxes larking around in the dark, it's the secret part of Tooting Common a lot of people don't know about. IPhone maps don't reveal the thick woodland behind the Athletics track, they make it look like more boring grey swathes of housing, when you look at it on the satellite setting the area looks as if it's been invaded by giant Brussel sprouts...you'd have thought that would make the front page of the Streatham and Tooting Gazette.

Elaborate glasshouse Horniman Gardens

I think this glasshouse was picked up from another location and plonked here, beside the cafe in Horniman Gradens* , it's now an extended seating area for the cafe. They also have heaters under the umbrellas in the outside seating area, not very green, but great if you like sitting outside, as I do. Amplified bird sounds Echo from somewhere near here, I can't work out if it's an installation or a weird effect of the location, it sounds like a rainforest.

*yep, it came from the grounds of Mr Horniman's house in Croydon, in the early nineteen
eighties.

Autumn trees this afternoon

Streatham common, autumn trees this afternoon.

Beech trees, Brecon

A lane lined with beech trees in Brecon, from three weeks ago, the road is orange with leaves, the ground coming through the leaves has a purple sheen. The trees and the lane seem timeless, I loved walking through these tree tunnels, up the valley to the reservoir, often seeing no one else at all.

More Dawson Heights, masks and exciting fungi..

I went on a nice long walk and fungi hunt today, round the Horniman Gardens, through the museum and back through Sydenham Hill Woods, I did a long drawing in Horniman gardens of Dawson Heights on a misty day and drew some very interesting masks in the museum, some huge fungi fairy rings were in the woods and a big Hen-of-the-woods, full of insects:
"Grifola frondosa is a polypore mushroom that grows in clusters at the base of trees, particularly oaks. The mushroom is commonly known among English speakers as hen-of-the-woods, ram's head and sheep's head. "

The partial fairy ring of HUGE white fungi are, I think, Citopilus prunnulus, The Miller, 
also called the Sweet-bread mushroom.
But I wouldn't be confident enough to eat them...
See below these drawings:

Another market scene...

Yep, another market scene, Northcote Road at the end of the day, for this one I used the Artrage app, I like using the pallet knife and the messiness you can easily generate. it's hard to make a real mess in most drawing apps. I never seem to get bored with markets, they are also quite messy places!  

Below, Dawson Heights in Forest Hill/East Dulwich, designed by the then 26 year old architect Kate Macintosh, built between 1964-1972. I was shocked to read recently they were turned down for listing by the Secretary of State, whoever that is, even though English Heritage recommended they were listed. I think they are intricate and endlessly interesting, you get so many variations on the view and a new way of seeing them just by approaching from a slightly different angle. Coming down York Hill in West Norwood you see them from the side, like space stations, at other times, up close they look like Italian Mountain villages or ziggurats.  When we were kids we called them the 'battleships', at night they do look like enormous liners cruising through South East London.

Beautiful travelling star

On Sunday morning the coffee shops closer to home are all shut. Walking across the part of the Dip that used to be a plague pit (the movers and shakers of Streatham want to rebrand it as the 'village green') I pass two men, high cheeked and distinctly Somali-looking, chatting by the strange henge of angular marble chairs the council just beamed down there one day. The older of the two men has a walking stick, he looks ill and is too thin. The other man is fitter and younger looking. As I walk past them I hear the younger man say to the older "when I first saw you I thought 'what an attractive man'. I thought you looked like an American railroad hobo. I called you 'my beautiful travelling star' ". He's holding a metallic blue iPod shuffle and gesticulating with it delicately as he speaks. I shouldn't be listening-in but the conversation is uplifting, however there's a limit to how slowly I can walk past without drawing attention to myself, so I move on. Once round the corner, opposite the old fire station that's now a mosque, I see there's a cafe open. Entering it is like walking into a Swiss mountain hut, it's wood-lined, dark and cosy. The music the owners are playing is from the 1960s and 70s - Marvin Gaye, Ottis Redding, Hot Chocolate.  Soon an ABBA track comes on. I remember how we loved ABBA as children. I remember there were things to love and live for even then. 

I order my coffee, sit down by the cafe window and start reading a new book. Soon I'm looking round for something to use as a bookmark. Beside my head there's a regiment of HP sauce bottles. I'm struck by their martial formation. On the shelf next to them I spot a pile of leaflets for a solicitor called Mr Lukobi, the leaflets advertise his expert legal services for matters relating to immigration, employment and crime - 'Not guilty or guilty'. He must have well-read customers as the leaflets are shaped like bookmarks. On the other side of Tooting Bec Gardens the huge black tower in the grounds of the mosque is silhouetted against a pale grey sky. Once it must have been used for firemen to practice running up and down, now it looks redundant and desolate. At the top of the rickety tower several huge pulleys wobble in the breeze like hangmen's nooses. I don't know why or how but I write this all down and send it to myself via email because it all seems significant, like there's a cryptic lesson embedded in each and every aspect of the morning.

A woman leans out of her window every morning to smoke

The same woman leans out of an apartment window every morning, smoking in long, languid drags. The number beneath her window sill is peculiarly antiquated. The wide arch beneath the building is also from another era, one of coaching Inns and long trips down to the South coast. I wonder if there are children in the room with her, whether it is one of the numerous bedsits situated above Streatham High road?  Why does she never go anywhere, is she trapped? If so, by economics or more sinister forces? She looks calmly down at the traffic. I wonder if she knows I am drawing her? At Goldsmiths I used to draw someone in an office opposite my own window over and over again, until one day I looked up and an entire room full of people were staring back at me through yellow binoculars. Turns out she was doing a project about spying on lonely people in office buildings and I was one of the subjects.

Shaggy-Scalycap: Pholiota squarrosa

While running round the back of Tooting Bec common this afternoon I saw a magnificent, large, dense, crop of Shaggy-Scalycap: Pholiota squarrosa , growing as it does, beneath the trunk of an old but living (beech) tree. I didn't have a camera or phone on me so the image below is pilfered and digitally doctored. The yellowness is exaggerated here, but it was still very striking :

This is a very flat and muddy run compared to Streatham Common and Norwood Grove, but makes a change every now and then. The Shaggy-Scalycaps were on the Clapham side by a very muddy little stream parallel to the railway line, as shown above.  Map my Ride says "This is a 6.81 km route in . The route has a total ascent of 33.84 m and has a maximum elevation of 48.05 m".
It's a useful tool if you remember to click off the bit that automatically sticks to roads. My quickest Streatham Common run has a total ascent of 52.23 m and a maximum elevation of  73.9 m, it's about 5k but can easily be extended. The run to Sydenham Hill Woods is a lot steeper, with a number of significant hill climbs, I'll map- that next time I run it.

Torrential rain this morning

Torrential rain this morning, drumming on the roof of Tescos while the commuters huddled under umbrellas on their way to the train station and bus stops. The two men below stopped eating their breakfast to stare at the rain.

Rain soaked smoker outside Morrisons this morning

A rain soaked smoker outside Morrisons this morning, there was a cloud of smoke above the man in blue. I didn't get round to adding any other detail, the women were just chatting before going up the stairs to the supermarket. Below, the strange view and reflection in Tesco's cafe window at night, in which you can see the shiny Morleys chicken shop across the road as well as the reflected mezzanine in Tescos.

Below, Peckham Rye on Tuesday morning, that's meant to be The Shard in the background.

More fungi and drawings from today

There were lots of smaller fungi in Sydenham Hill woods today, above, Clustered Bonnets, Mycena inclinata I think. I even saw a bunch of fungi with grey fungi growing on them! Double fungi. The tree below was festooned with fungi, below that are possibly young Sulfur Tuft, same trunk the ones I saw a few weeks ago were growing on.

Below, I nipped into the Horniman Museum this afternoon and drew the fantastic Nigerian Igbo Omabe mask they have, it represents the spirits of dead ancestors. Seems appropriate for this remembrance week.