It's been a while since I got to travel to London - and certainly it's a long time since I found myself alone there. In fact, it's become so usual to be part of a pair, visiting and revisiting haunts, that I'd forgotten some of the associations which Paddington has accumulated in recent years. As well as being the launchpad for many a wander and the welcome first sight of the way home, it's become associated with separation and loss - and I chewed this over a little on my journey east. Today would unravel some of that in a sense - I was here alone, but I'd be travelling back to my wife and my new home later. It was a remarkably cheering - and still weirdly novel - prospect, and after an unexpectedly bright journey up I greeted the vaulted roof of the station with the warm familiarity gained only by enduring both happy and melancholy moments together - Paddington is an old friend who I don't see nearly as often as I'd like.

Taking advantage of the early arrival I hopped directly onto a 205 bus. The city was busy - as ever I'd utterly failed to predict events, and there were various goings-on which were adding to the traffic - not least Wimbledon. We made slow but steady progress around the arc of the Euston Road. It was good to see the familiar, solid sights as we edged forward. I'd repeated this trip so many times, eastward with hope and expectation and westward with satisfaction, tired feet and a checklist of new prospects to investigate - the city slowly revealing itself by being walked. The Crossrail works were still affecting the ever-excavated Moorgate, so we zigzagged into Shoreditch, approaching Liverpool Street from the east and north. A few confused passengers scrambled off in surprise and we pressed on, the bus almost empty now. It still hadn't started to rain, despite an ominous cloud, so I bailed early, finding myself on the dry pavement near Whitechapel Road Market. I had a loose itinerary, as ever fanning out eastwards from the city edge - and this time based on a reading of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz. This tangled, dense web of prose had provided much food for thought, but most immediately it had opened my thoughts to the array of tiny Jewish burial grounds scattered through the eastern edges of London. I had worked out a very rough route which led to several of them - including the Ashkenazi burial ground on Alderney Road which had initially sparked this walk. Opened in 1697, the site is enclosed by the houses fronting Mile End Road and a high wall facing a tired but interesting square of homes. It was quiet and rather humid, voices carried from a nearby playground and a large St.George flag flapped from an upstairs window. The door in the wall was closed, and a chink of light through a letterbox jammed with circulars unwanted by the dead revealed little. I skirted the site which connects to the Velho - the oldest of these sites, and entirely enclosed by the properties. No amount of trespass was going to get me a view inside, so I set off across the quiet square towards Bancroft Road. Here, almost in the precincts of the weird ziggurat of Mile End Hospital, there is more to see. The cemetary is now a quiet green space, most of the stones lying flat on the ground. Beyond, a shallow viaduct carries the line from Liverpool Street, little hope of eternal peace with trains to Chingford and Cambridge shaking the graves. After following my instincts into a dead end near the hospital grounds, I retraced my steps. The old men sitting outside a polish cafe seemed amused to see me re-emerging from the little network of streets. I wandered back to the main road, a little footsore given how long it had been since I walked.

Having been mostly thwarted in my primary purpose I needed to decide how to proceed. The answer of course lay eastwards - it had been too long since I'd walked this way, and I needed to feel familiar pavement underfoot. I set out along the endless corridor of Mile End Road as it turned into a valley between cliffs of new-built student dwellings, occasionally punctuated by heritage buildings now featuring gourmet burger joints. The traffic was incessant, hypnotic even. The clouds rolled forward - already there was a haze towards the river, and rain threatened. As I reached the Green Bridge near the Regent's Canal, it began. A heavy downpour of the type which cannot ever sustain itself long. I dived into the cafe I'd often spotted under the bridge. A young, smiling woman broke off her cleaning to make my latte. A sole other customer sat nearby, staring at us as we conducted the transaction. I sat near the window, pulled out a map, regrouped and watched the rain slow to a trickle. The cafe owner arrived with friends, dripping gold and sarcasm. He clasped his friends necks like a cartoon Mafiosi and chortled unpleasantly, leering at the cafe girl. "Your boyfriend here?" he glared at the other customer, whilst addressing her. She coloured up, looked away and he pointed out the purple stain of a bite on her neck to his friends who snorted and gurgled. The boy scrambled for the exit in shame and horror. The girl's smile faded. I left too - the vague sense of despair hanging over the place was too much to bear. It was still raining a little but the pavement was preferable. I pressed on east, and let the rain soak into my sweater - it began to feel a little too wet as I approached Bow Road station so I sheltered at a bus stop, exchanged messages home, and waited...

Finally I decided I needed to move on. There was nothing to lose by getting wet, and I had plenty of time to dry off later. I edged carefully around Bow Roundabout and descended the steps to the towpath. A favourite spot - even drenched and still feeling oddly dispirited by the cafe, this was somewhere I felt at ease. As the canal surface sparkled with rainfall, I trudged the wet grit of the path, bumping into only the very occasional cyclist coming towards me. To my right, the heft of the Olympic Stadium bulked out the view. It was in the process of being dismantled and reinvented for its next incarnation. After passing the junction with the Hertford Union Canal I had a choice to make. I'd meant to head for White Post Lane, but the slope up to the Greenway was tempting . In the end I let instinct win and I found myself once again topping the Northern Outfall Sewer, striking out towards the View Tube where I knew coffee and shelter were available. Soon I was seated, steaming in the warm cafe and sipping an excellent coffee. As the mist evaporated from the windows, I found myself looking out at the Olympic Park and realised that it was now possible for me to walk in unmolested. Years of being excluded from the site were over at last, and here I was idly passing my precious day of walking in this makeshift cafeteria on the edge of the park. Finishing my coffee and packing away my notebook, I set out to break new ground...

I thought first of Tellytubbies. That strange, hyper-real green sward which the odd humanoids danced and capered on was before me. The park undulated, bursts of colourful flora floated above it. Ranks of lighting columns marked the footpaths, and they led down - to the City Mill River. To that stretch of river which had been an impossible goal until now. I scrambled down the steps two and three at a time, and at the foot I found a junction. Southwards lay a fenced off path under the railway, not yet ready for me. Northwards, the river curved around the foot of the stadium. I followed the curve, a vast green bank to my right as the river edged the huge bowl. I had been close to the stadium before, but never this close. The bridges arced overhead, approaching the entrances - and I calculated with a look at careful notes I'd made exactly where the stockpile of low-level waste was stashed. I touched the aggregate pile which turned the horrible cargo into a simple bridge abutment and felt connected back to years of reading and writing about the Olympics. It had passed, things had moved on, but here was tangible evidence of all that had been expressed. I moved on, finding myself almost emotional at the thought of being inside the fence at last. So much change seemed to hinge on that period, personally, nationally even. It was a moment to take stock and move forward... and I did, towards the monolithic Orbit - less a sculpture and more a watchtower close-up. I wander around it, gazing up, trying to capture in a photograph the dizzying sense of queasy instability that it's odd curves elicit. It's still a very silly, unpleasant structure, a balancing lump of concrete sitting atop a twisted tower of steel. Without meaning or merit, neither beautiful nor sublime. The pathways radiating out from it took me towards another waterway, and I traced this to it's junction with the River Lea under a rather pleasant copper faced bridge, which reflected the water and it's pathways. It was hot and humid again, with dark clouds tumbling towards us from the south. I skirted the river, crossed it and emerged on the eastern side. Small concession stands selling overpriced snacks lined this route. Families and park employees wandered around yet I still felt like a trespasser. The pathway ended at a road crossing - across the street the park continued, and a stream of young people dressed in white t-shirts with coloured facepaint were streaming towards a makeshift stage. Wardens directed them as they trollied their cargo of lager towards the site. The Holi Festival of Colours sounded like a spiritual event, but appears to be a heavily marketed appropriation of an authentic Indian festival. People turn up colourless and leave scattered with paint dust and optimism. I turned aside and wandered along Loop Road which leads to White Post Lane. Territory became familiar. The rooftops and graffiti of Hackney Wick appeared overhead. It was odd and rather disorienting to see them from this angle. I wasn't ready for this conclusion so I turned back towards the stadium and edged along the River Lea, descending briefly into a wonderful nursery garden behind tiny wicket gates. It felt unreal and strange, under this ominous sky beside the sweep of the stadium. Unseen from this angle, the cranes removing the top layer of the stands hummed and clanked. I found myself following a makeshift pathway which wound towards the Navigation and deposited me on the towpath again, not too far from where I'd entered the park. The heavens opened. I sheltered under a bridge for what seemed like an age.

The break allowed me to gather my thoughts a little. I realised I'd been wandering aimlessly and letting the strange emotional twist of finally entering this site of exclusion and alienation getting the better of me. I needed to regain control of my walk, and I did so by following the towpath to White Post Lane, and ascending to the street. This was the sentry post - even a year ago blocked and caged still. But now it was simply a road between the forlorn edge of the Wick and the weird sheen of the park. Still a gateway, but unmanned and unacknowledged by officialdom now. I explored the bridge, walking back and forth over it, half expecting to be hindered by a passing security guard. It didn't happen so I renetered the park, and turned left onto a curving road called Clarnico Lane - a nod to the past which took me up to Waterden Road. The Lea continued into the North Park, but would have to wait for a day when it wasn't busy with revellers. I walked back to Stratford, battling against the tide of youngsters, bright eyed, expectant. More girls than boys, the odd strange older woman yelping and whooping among them. A strange mix. An odd idea. Such is the future of this biggest of public parks. I found coffee and electricity in the whirl of Westfield and made notes.

My route back east took my back along the same route by bus - looping into an as yet unused bus station near the press centre, soon to be a new media outpost at the east of the city. Then I was onto the familiar roads around Victoria Park. This had been the edge, but now it was just a stop along the way. I had new paths to tread, the possibility of completing my navigation by river in the area - and oddly I found I didn't entirely dislike what had become of the Olympic Zone. I missed it's oddness, its ragged rurality, the strange emptiness of the wilderness that used to be here - but the sweeps of green, the views that opened, the sense of being in a valley between swathes of the city was new and intriguing. I allowed myself to dry off as I headed homewards, unsure when I'd be heading back this way. The storm had broken, and my old ideas about this part of the city had been washed away. But there were new layers of exposed earth to sift...

It's a rare luxury to get out to see music locally nowadays, and especially rare that something comes along which grabs my attention quite like this did. Picked up via a brief mention on the Fence Records beefboard, this show was billed "A Night of the New Old Time". Beautiful letterpressed posters and a curious venue which I must have walked past thousands of times cemented the deal - I had to be at this one. So, I found myself wandering around central Bristol on a humid night with a threat of storms in the air. The Benjamin Perry Scout Hut is a fairly anonymous brown wooden shack, right by the riverside. It's still an active Sea Scout meeting place, and as I arrived there was a buzz around the downstairs section as kayaks were returned to the boathouse. Upstairs was a tiny room, decked out in maritime and scouting memorabilia. The only concession to electricity tonight, a string of fairy lights wrapped around the low beams of the roof. From my vantage point at the far end of the room I had a view of the City Centre through the window, and I was struck again just how strange a proposition all this was.

After a bizarre and eclectic DJ set played on a pair of ageing wind-up gramophones, Boxcar Aldous Huxley took to the stage. They certainly looked the part - their solid looking drummer squashed into a corner and the odd, mildly unhinged beauty of Zuleika Zigfield in her 1920s garb, playing the saw. Amidst all this, Liam Kirby stalked the tiny area which constituted a stage - wild haired and enthusiastic to convey the inspiration behind the songs. Kicking off with a track which was about "the electrocution of an elephant and the last days of Nikolai Tesla" it was clear that the music was about as strange as Boxcar Aldous Huxley's appearance. Gently brushed drums supported banjo, clarinet and saw. Dabs of judiciously applied harmonium traded with Kirby's sometimes indistinguishably quiet vocals. Things were a little more robust when the rest of the band joined the choir - and particularly when Zuleika Ziegfield added her tremulous high voice to the mix. A couple of songs in I was sold, tangled up in the strange storytelling, and genuinely pleased to find my own reference points in the tales. "Cable Street" linked the legendary battle of locals and Moseley's fascists with an unlikely love story and the burial of John Williams, supposed perpetrator of the Ratcliff Highway Murders in 1812. This kind of linking with place was always going to work for me, and coupled to the woozy, oddly Eastern European sounds which the strange mix of instruments produced, I was hooked.

As another track began with "when the last train rolls out of Brookwood..." and went on to weave a strange macabre tale around the mysteries of the Necropolis Railway, I was beginning to think someone had raided my record collection and my library and somehow built a band out of all of the illogical, disconnected bits. The strange thing was it worked - and as the odd, Balkan reggae morphed into a sort of charleston-meets-ramshackle-punk sound, Kirby produced a trombone and led the band into a further transformation - emerging as a an ad-hoc northern miners brass band. The band were perhaps at their most accessible on "A Song For Thomas Scott", where their voices merged to form a trombone and harmonium driven ballad dedicated to historical Canadian politician Louis Riel. The audience loved it, the band seemed to be having a great time, and the coupling of unamplified, stomping acoustic music and the strange old venue was perfect. All over far too quickly, and certainly on the list to see again.

Hailing from Brooklyn, NY and playing their first UK show The Dust Busters again visually fitted the bill exactly. Three young men, looking like they'd tumbled out of a Greenwich Village folk club directly into this Scout Hut, starting their set with fiddle, guitar and banjo. Anyone expecting more of the same brand of eccentric neo-traditionalism that Boxcar Aldous Huxley had provided was going to be disappointed. This was serious stuff - and with an attention to detail and tradition which seems to have disappeared from much of the American folk scene, The Dust Busters set about plundering the rich vein of ballads, rags and dance tunes which the continent has provided over the last century or so. Songs were interspersed with knowledgeable and engaging talk about their origins, the band determinedly keen to persuade the audience to check out the century-old original music as much as their own album! Throughout the set Walker Shepard, Craig Judelman and Eli Smith shared vocal duties and switched instruments regularly - showing an almost embarrassing ability to play virtually anything. The audience loved it, with a couple who had been twitching restlessly in front of me finally pushing out of the door onto the balcony above the river, and starting to dance wildly. It was that kind of night.

At one point, a curious frisson shivered through the room - as The Dust Busters played "Casey Jones" as reworked by union man Joe Hill, a bunch of teachers and civil servants at the back of the room began singing along earnestly. Their own strike was unlikely to involve train wrecks or dead scabs, but all the same there was something a little inspirational about the way they connected with a tune from long ago, in an age where the battles were very different indeed. The Dust Busters, whilst steering clear of political comment, managed the mood of the audience perfectly. Seemingly they knew just what to play and when, and as more sombre tunes like "Two Soldiers" faded, they'd break into a frenetic ragtime fiddle-driven jig. As the skies darkened, with the lights of the city and the tiny strand of fairy lights in the hut the only illumination, the atmosphere was magical and it was clear we were witnessing something pretty special. The band were called back for encore after encore, and eventually I had to discreetly slip away leaving the spellbound audience to the next tune.

Carefully negotiating the cobbles of the boatyard on my walk to the station, and with the distant sound of The Dust Busters fading in the twinkling scout hut, I was stuck by how this felt like a really special event. Sam of Shieldshaped who had put tonight together had done a fantastic job - from selecting a perfect venue, down to the beautifully conceived posters for the event. Like all the best shows, I came away inspired with new things to check out. Here's to the next Shieldshaped production!

More information on Boxcar Aldous Huxley can be found here, and their five-track album "The Initial Proceedings of the Boxcar Aldous Huxley Historiographical Society" is available on a beautiful 10" vinyl and download package from Bandcamp.

The Dust Busters can be contacted via their website. Their debut album can be downloaded at iTunes.

The third and last in a month of Open Days and Galas which has seen some interesting new locations visited and many obscure and exotic engines sighted and photographed. What perhaps surprises me most is that I never get tired of tramping around, twisting my ankle on ballast and fighting for photographic positions at these events. The same old faces crop up, some welcome and some not, and all in all a good time is had. So despite another ridiculously early start and some frankly irritating twittering for much of the journey, I was happy to be heading for Tyseley - a site seen from the Paddington-Birmingham line many times but never visited. The occasion was the 100th Annivesary of the former Great Western Railway depot on this site, and part of the attraction was that as well as a museum the site remains an active depot - now serving the new London Midland franchise. So an easy journey up, a swift dash over to Moor Street and brief ride on one of the local services stopping specially at Tyseley today brought us to the queue with half an hour before opening time.

The rather compact museum site was packed with history - and a small, but notable criticism was the lack of room for manoeuvre in the site at times. Steam locomotives reflecting the depot's past role ranged around the turntable, and spent much of the day rotating and then working the short shuttle service up and down the depot site for a crowd made up of families and enthusiasts alike. Beyond the turntable, in the London Midland depot a number of locomotives and units were spread around with plenty of room for photography. These included, still on the back of it's low-loader, 139001 - the first of the Parry Peoplemover cars which will soon work the Stourbridge Junction to Town service, replacing the Class 153s which currently work the 'Town Car'. At eleven sharp, a crowd gathered near the workshops to witness the naming of depot shunter 08616 as 'Tyseley 100'.

A quick look around the shed, with various flavours of Class 170 including the recently refurbished 170397 with it's rather classy looking new interior which hopefully reflects the shape of things to come for the whole Crosscountry fleet. Also in the yard were a number of preserved and privately owned locomotives which receive overhaul and attention at the Tyseley site - including a brace of Class 33s and the sparkling Electric Blue 86259, with it's namesake BRMB disc-jockey Les Ross on hand to talk about the loco and serve as a compere for the naming ceremonies. The second of these saw former 47732 renamed and renumbered to one of it's former identities: 47580 'County of Essex'. The locomotive was positively shining, in Stratford Depot's trademark variation on large-logo livery, complete with cockney sparrow beneath the nameplate. A fine piece of work and testament to the skills of those at Tyseley depot along with the Stratford Group. I hope the aim of getting this locomotive back onto the mainline is achieved very soon.

After a bite to eat and a final wander around the site which was now busy with locals and visitors from further afield like ourselves, decided to head for the station and join the large group of enthusiasts chatting and watching the trains in the now fairly strong afternoon sunshine. Spent a happy couple of hours watching freight workings, and the Wrexham and Shropshire movements heading through the station. Following departure of the final planned freight for the day, set off back to Birmingham on another of the additional services. Despite a delayed Voyager back to Weston, made the connection with a local unit and found my way to the end of the platform at Highbridge in good time to watch 55022 thunder by hauling 'The Cornish Explorer' in rather overcast conditions before heading for the pub to celebrate!

A fine day out and another positive day for the railway, as much cash will have been raised for charity by the event. In a summer with few railtours of note (at least for me) these galas and open days have provided excellent entertainment. Long may they continue.

With the printer installed, set to work on Inkblot, a GNOME ink level indicator based on libinklevel. I'd started work on this for FuzzyTheBear and his wife, on #lemmings, working blind and by guesswork having sold my printer some weeks previously. Seems that my guesses had been moderately good, since once built it worked reasonably well.

Did a little cleaning up, added support for separate Cyan, Magenta and Yellow reservoirs if present, and made a tarball of the progress. Next steps include some device detection and some minimal preferences (its currently hardcoded to look for a USB printer because that's what both Fuzzy and I have!).

Another project to fiddle with intermittently...