August Step Count

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August began with a birthday stay for Jane at the Petersham Hotel in Richmond on Thames, where visits to Kew Gardens and Hampton Court were on our agenda. Lesson learnt at Hampton Court – never say to a real tennis player that the rules look complicated. They’ll spend the next 10 minutes (longer if you’ll let them) trying to explain to you that the game is not complicated, thus proving the point that real tennis is really complicated! But I guess it’s not ‘the ref makes the rules up as you go along’, which is my understanding of what happens in Rugby Union. That’s a neat link back to our hotel, as apparently the England Rugby team stay here when there’s a kickaround at Twickenham.

A view of the Petersham Hotel, Richmond on Thames. The building is a 4 storey brick building, with a tower on the left hand side.
The Petersham Hotel. Our suite was directly above the entrance.

August finished with a birthday trip for me to Jodrell Bank on a sunny Saturday, courtesy of my eldest daughter and son-in law, where I took this photograph of the (Grade 1 listed) Mk I telescope. It’s amazing what a mere mobile ‘phone can accomplish these days(*). The new(ish) First Light Pavilion, its exhibition and cafe are very good indeed. (The dome show is an additional £5 per adult, but avoid this if you suffer from motion sickness as it’s very immersive). A free talk on the telescope and radio astronomy, given by a University of Manchester PhD student, was very informative At the time of writing, booking in advance online gets you an annual pass for the same price as a day ticket (£14 for an adult) if you just turn up.

The Mk I radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, pictured through trees against a clear blue sky.
The Mk I Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank

All in all it was a very successful month for the step count (helped by racking up nearly 23,000 on the day we visited Kew Gardens). 834,504 left for the year. My guess is that I should hit the 3 million target sometime in mid-November.

Step count graph. 2,165,496 covered so far in 2024, an average of 5,917 per day, 834,504 steps left to go to reach my target of 3,000,000 for the year.
August’s step count update

I’m hoping September and October will be just as successful as I walk as many railway trails I can find in Derbyshire for Lymphoma Action. You can read all about this – and sponsor me – on my Railway Walks blog. This morning I’ve walked all of the Great Northern Greenway around Breadsall. There will be pictures and mumblings about it on that blog later on today or tomorrow.

(*) Mobile ‘phones have to be set to airplane mode or turned off around the telescope, otherwise they can interfere with its work. No-one wants to think they’ve discovered a little green man when it’s just someone posting to Instagram.