I had one of my silly ideas yesterday, but one which, in the end, turned out to be quite cool. One of my Australian friends is James Morrison, who I know from Blackheath cricket club. Yesterday they were playing in Charlton Park, where I first met them. I was eager to see James, who everybody calls Tesco due to his second name, to speak to him about the Ashes and the Bairstow furore. However, getting to the park about mid afternoon, I found the team in play but without James: it was only a friendly, so he had decided to stay home. The other guys on the team told me that they would probably be going to his place in Peckham for a post-match barbecue though.

It was then that I had an idea. I had never visited Peckham before, but what if I could go crash the party, rather like showing up randomly at Charlotte’s house in Chester all those years ago. I came home to message James and ask him for his address. Obligingly he gave it to me, provided that I didn’t post him any plastic cocks. I checked the address on google maps and then set off.

It would take me two busses to get to Peckham, but getting to my friend’s house didn’t look too difficult. By then, however, it was about 4pm and I knew I needed to be back in time for dinner. I got the bus to Lewisham, and from there a second bus to Peckham. That was straightforward enough, but then the fun started. Of course I had checked the address on google but couldn’t remember the directions I needed to take. Fortunately I had noted the address on my Ipad, so I started to ask people whether they could point me in the right direction. Most were very helpful, but Peckham turned out to be a complete labyrinth: it took about an hour of going down random suburban streets and getting lost before I found Tesco’s place, eventually with the help of two pretty young women on their way out for dinner.

The look of my friend’s face when he opened his front door to find me on his doorstep was incredible. He asked me what I was doing there so I explained. Unfortunately, I had arrived too late for the barbecue; even more unfortunately, the house didn’t look very accessible. Nonetheless we chatted there on the street for a while. Predictably my Australian friend was wearing a T-shirt with Australian wicketkeeper Alex Carey on it, supposedly to taunt us Poms.

By then it was getting late, and I soon needed to head home. Fortunately the journey back was much less complex than the one there, and I was back here by about eight, in good time for dinner. You could say that it was a pretty pointless trip, going all the way to Peckham and back for a ten minute chat. But such adventures, going to parts of the metropolis I have never visited before, fill me with more and more confidence. I now know that I can get to an area like Peckham and back in a couple of hours. Navigating the city is becoming easier and easier. That was ultimately the real point of yesterday’s exercise; surprising Tesco was a cool bonus.