Little Venice

I’d been wanting to go to Little Venice for a long, long time. With the perfect weather we are having right now – I feel like I’m in a different country! – I arranged to meet a friend at Paddington and off to Venice we strolled. Okay, so it doesn’t look anything like Venice, not that I would know, I haven’t been to Venice … but it’s a nice place to go for a walk if you’re around Paddington.

I spent my undergraduate days in Birmingham, which is all about the canals, so it was really lovely to see these canal boats again. I remember my last days in Birmingham, back in the summer of 2007, walking around Brindley Place and the Gas Street Basin, hand-in-hand with my then-boyfriend and feeling so sad about leaving. It was late July, sunny and warm and the three years of my student life in the city were over. They had been happy years (mostly). Important years, growing-up and discovering who I was as an adult. And I didn’t want to see it end… So today I had a little flashback of those happy old days.

“You could sell your flat and buy a boat to live on,” my friend B. said as we were passing through here.
“Yeah, I could sell my flat, except I don’t own it, you muppet!”

The hall of residence that I lived in during my first year at uni overlooked a canal and I would always look at the boats dreamily, thinking how cool it would be to live on one. In the summer at least.

The Grand Union Canal connects London to Birmingham. Apparently you can run an ultramarathon (145 miles) along it. “It’s on my to-do list,” my friend B. said, “I hate myself, so I like to do things like that to my body.”






I like this lady’s dress!