Birthdays are a funny thing. They are supposed to be meaningful, monumental even. But I’ve always found them to be rather like New Year’s Eve, overhyped and ultimately disappointing. And as we get older, depressing. A few days ago I turned 49. “Oh, its the beginning of the end,” people told me. “The big 50 next year…it’s all downhill from here.” and other such ridiculous nonsense. “But why?” has been my consistent answer. Why should it be depressing and downhill and the end? I am so looking forward to turning 50. I have long thought that my 5th decade is going to be my best yet. 50 and fabulous. 50 and fighting fit. 50 and fearless. And technically this is my 50th year, so why not start celebrating now. I don’t generally do much birthday celebrating. Instead I use it as an excuse to do more Londony things, as if I ever need an excuse for Londony things. Last year I stretched it out and did a full week of Londony things with different people, 
including breakfast in the Sky Garden with Sara, sculpture walk with Milly and drinks in the London Eye with my husband, Craig. But this year I wanted something a bit more. Not expensive, fancy more. Not exclusive London more. Not once in a lifetime more…just me more. As in how I see the future. And would remember forever. A tall order, perhaps, but my passions are widespread and I know clever people. One of the cleverest is Vanessa, the woman behind the amazing Secret London Runs running tours. “I might like to run on my birthday,” I said to her back in June. Almost without hesitation came the response, “why don’t I write a Famous Annes of London tour.” Why not indeed.
But this wasn’t just a super fun run in honour of my famous London namesakes, with Philippa and Alice and Vanessa, it was a flamboyant start to my year long pre-50th celebration. Yes, year long. If I want to celebrate for a year, why not. It’s my beginning of the beginning. (Most certainly not the start of the end!)
So at 6:10 pm on the 7th of September, 2017, my 49th birthday, Alice, Philippa and I met Vanessa at the Duke of Wellington statue outside of Bank station for an adventure through the City, the West End, Soho and Camden. Along the way Vanessa introduced us to the most wonderfully
colourful and interesting Annes. Naughty, powerful, rich, talented and sainted. We saw where Anne Bronte met her publisher, who was of course expecting a man, not a provincial young lady. We admired a statue of Shakespeare and agreed that being left his second best bed in the will didn’t mean he didn’t care for his wife, Anne Hathaway…she got the money too. Poor Anne Askew was racked so badly for her religious beliefs she had to be carried in a chair to the stake, to be burned alive for heresy. Anne Redshawe ran The House of Intrigue in the 18th century, a lesbian brothel frequented by ladies of the upper classes. Anne Morrow Lin
dbergh, Queen Anne, and her mother Anne Hyde all have great stories. St. Anne, Jesus’s granny, got two stops. The second included 
an extraordinary mural. Art! Plus a few more Annes (I can’t give all the secrets away!).
By the time we arrived in Camden, tired but full of happy history, Craig, Ange and Paul had a table waiting and wine cooling. The evening rolled on. The laughter rang out. It was the BEST birthday ever!!
But that was just the start. Shortly after we came up with the plan for the Anne run, I decided it would just be the first of….well….50. To prove that I am not afraid of turning 50 by literally running into it…..50 times. That is the challenge I have set myself, to run 50 races or events (of course Secret London Runs will feature often in this experience!) in the year. So after each one I will have either a medal (I do love a bit of bling) or some fab photos of London (can you ever have too many?).
As I started to look at the options, and there are so many running options in London, I quickly realized that the challenge isn’t really going to be the running so much as one of logistics. Stephen, 3rd child, age 13, has so many rugby matches this Autumn I need to figure out how to be in two places at once. But I am a mother, I can do it! In fact, as I type I already have 3 runs under my belt. Two days before the Anne run, I went on the Street Art run with Secret London Runs (same week counts,
I need all the events I can get!). Not only was it great to run through East London and find some incredible street art, we were filmed by a young, local woman who couldn’t believe we were doing such a crazy thing. Running! To see art! Later, one of the men in my group stopped to help a collapsed homeless man, “I am a first aider,” he explained. With impressive efficiency he established the man was breathing but unconscious and helped arrange for an ambulance, and then we carried on. London life.
Yesterday morning I ran the Clapham Common 10k with Run Through UK. No watch, no earphones, nothing but London sunshine. And the peace of mind to enjoy it. A terrific medal too. It was then that I realized this isn
‘t really a challenge at all. It is a privilege. More than a privilege, a gift. I have the health, the time and perhaps most importantly, the freedom in which to make this happen. Suddenly a silly, self-indulgent idea becomes a feminist statement. Maya Angelou rings in my ears. “I am a woman PHENOMENALLY.” Now I do love that. Passionate about that. My London Passion. xxx
Instagram: @mylondonpassion
On Tuesday night I was supposed to join Secret London Runs (the cleverest and most fun running company out there) to find the hidden noses of Soho followed by some pub conviviality. But it was r
aining. Hard. It was cold. I was tired. And I am a terrible map reader (no wonder I only guide inside), I can’t even follow google map instructions properly. Getting lost in a cold hard rain while running isn’t fun. So I made my (pathetic) excuses and stayed home. But the lure of the noses had me. And getting lost while strolling on a sunny, warm Saturday morning is bliss. Not least because I absolutely LOVE the morning after the night before in big cities. When the streets are devoid of people but the detritus of nighttime fun is everywhere, Show me your filthy doorways and your littered alleys. Hastily bagged rubbish and appallingly parked cars. Mysterious liquids running down pavement cracks. Dried vomit and pungent wee. Shuttered windows and
metal encased entrance ways. The silence. The stillness. The emptiness. I love it. You can walk in the middle of the road. Snap photos of street art without anyone tutting. Notice things you would otherwise never spot. A chance to look up and around. The perfect time to find a few noses.
Ears? They seem to be casts of the artist Tim Fishlock’s own ear. Why? When? What for? I haven’t a clue. Both on Floral Street. One attached to a Ted Baker shop, the other the Tintin shop. If there is a political or social message being made here, I missed it. Or else I am too worn out by the last election to care. But they are rather magnificent ears. Gorgeous helix of the auditory system. Certainly something worth smiling about. And smile I did. As I wondered about. In the early morning sunshine. Backtracking, diverting, enjoying a city stretching itself awake and taking on the day.
And all with a tremendous sense irony. Because I was hunting for what could be symbols of anti-big brother behavior in a city experiencing a heightened state of surveillance. Police, barriers, road blocks everywhere. The St. Anne’s church in Soho, which boasts a gay congregation, had security out front when I walked by. I have no doubt that computers and cameras are working night and day to track people with terrible intent. And, one week on from the London Bridge/Borough Market attacks, that is exactly how we want it. Need it. 
This is the world we now live in. As I walked up Haymarket I noticed the London Welcome Everyone banners hanging from above, in a variety of languages. London: multicultural, international, the best city in the world, and site of yet another extremist attack. Freedom, of the monitored variety, the plurality of modern living.
But let’s get back to the noses themselves. Found the first one on the Admiralty Arch. It took a while to find it, but once spotted I couldn’t believe I had ever passed under the arch, currently impossible, without seeing it. Another nose on Great Windmill Street and then into Soho. Oh what a rich past this area has. The oversized protuberance on Meard (one thought to have been added later) can’t quite compete with the history of this very short street of still existing and stunning original 18cth Georgian townhouses, including
the one with the famous sign This is not a Brothel. Then on to D’Arblay Street where I worried the crowd outside the inexplictably popular Breakfast Club that I was trying to queue barge (as if!) to find what (to be honest) looked more like a bent screw than a nose. Peeked through an olive tree on Dean Street, loitered outside the Milkbar on Bateman and found the last nose on what was an otherwise totally uninspiring printshop store front on Endell Street. Equally fun were all the Invader pieces I found. A French street artist who creates 1980s video game creatures out of tiles and mounts them high up.
My first outing with SLR was on their Jack the Ripper night, a few weeks ago. A short run, in teams, through Spitalfields/WhiteChapel/City in pursuit of clues on the identity of Jack the Ripper. Actors (or long-suffering friends?) were scattered along the route, dressed in Victorian costume, ready to answer questions and direct or mis-direct inquiries. This should have been so my kind of thing. But at the very last minute, my only teammate and above mentioned Alice had a childcare crisis and couldn’t join me. When I finally arrived at the starting venue, a pub just off Petticoat Junction, the only other single runner was a woman who told me, but only once we were outside in the freezing cold!!, that she couldn’t run. Oh dear. Suddenly my running attire seemed woefully inadequate to cope with the weather. Because we walked. Slowly. It was bloody cold. I did try to get into the spirit of it as much as possible and, as we were now not really competing against other teams for times, I felt free to chat away to the Victorians as much as I liked. We were hardly going to get less cold or be any slower. This is how I know that the policeman at the Tower is from Ventura, CA and that pretending to sell oranges in front of the old Billingsgate Market is a cold and lonely prospect indeed.
We didn’t guess the correct villain, but I did get some lovely photos of London at night, never can have too many of those, and had my circumstances been different, it would have been a fantastic night. I had to try again.
One of the first stops was the ruins of Winchester Palace. London history can be dreadfully confusing, both chronologically and geographically. This is a good example. The Bishop of Winchester had his palace, not in Winchester (about 70 miles SW of London) but here on Bankside, between Southwark Cathedral and Clink Prison. The Bishops, down the ages, would have allowed prostitues to ply their trade in the area, but for a sizable fee. Extracting money from the desperate has always been a reliable money maker for those in power. But when they died, these same women were not given final rest on consecrated ground. Instead, they were buried at the Cross Bones Graveyard, along with plague victims and the general poor. A literal dumping ground for the unloved. A final insult to lives filled with injury.
The land was closed to burial in 1853 on health grounds. It retreated into folk-lore and was then forgotten. Until London Underground started digging around in the 1990s. And historians realized what they had found: a tip filled with the unwanted of ages past. A garden of sorrow, if ever there was. Now the gates are covered in ribbons and it has become a quasi-shrine to remember the outcasts and unwanted of society, though increasingly it has become a place for people of all traditions to show respect and remembrance. Today, many of the ribbons are for people who are deeply loved and painfully, achingly missed. 
A baby, a young mother, a son. It is a wall of collective grief atop bodies for whom no grief was shown. With the iconic Shard looming overhead. Circle of life at its most theatrical.
mylondonpassion 