Olympic Park, Garden, Petroc

 Yesterday I was on an uncharacteristically urban walk, down in 'that Lunnun', as we provincial hicks call it. The walk began at Stratford (definitely not Upon Avon) station, and started amid the retail hell that spreads for some way beyond it. With that behind us, things became more architectural, with many new or newish 'statement' buildings, some of them left over from the 2012 Olympics – the velodrome by far the best, the actual stadium oddly anticlimactic, the exploded helter-skelter known as the Orbit Tower as hideous as ever. The post-Olympic buildings somehow gave the effect of being architects' models or 3-D simulations – or architectural drawings, making us feel like the shadowy generic figures that saunter about in those, lightly touched-in in gouache. However, the best of this part of the walk was not the buildings but the created landscapes of the Olympic Park, most of which have been superbly well done, particularly those around the cleaned-up and beautified River Lea, and will probably look even better in a decade or two, when the whole thing has matured and settled in, and even those buildings might feel more real. 
  Things did get more real later – not always in a good way – as we passed through the achingly hip, graffiti-covered streets of Hackney Wick, now a haunt of 'artists', among other poseurs. However, all ended well – indeed triumphantly – when, to our surprise, we found Hawksmoor's great church of St Anne, Limehouse, open. The interior is a typical masterclass in the management of space and volume (with nothing numinous about it), while the exterior is a grand demonstration of  Hawksmoor's uniquely fantastic imagination. This was ending on a high note...

Back home, I found that, in my mere two days' absence, things in the garden had accelerated, with new flowers blooming everywhere, buds bursting open and tender leaflets emerging, intensifying the vernal green. There is nothing like this time of year in England, when the sun is out and the weather mild (see Browning 'Home Thoughts from Abroad'). 

Sadly, this morning the great Petroc Trelawny presented his last Radio 3 breakfast show. Ever since I gave up on Radio 4's dismal Today programme and turned to 3, thereby vastly improving my life, I've found Petroc's show the perfect thing to wake to, easing me beautifully into the day. And his roving reports from various parts of the country (and beyond) were superbly presented. As for his altogether extraordinary Auschwitz programme... well, I wrote about that briefly at the time. Petroc is moving to the early evening programme, In Tune, but my mornings – and those of many others – will never be the same again. He will be sorely missed.