To reach today’s square, I needed to make a short crossing on a small ferry, which I knew would be fun but also added the tiniest frac- tion of hassle to proceedings, which is all I ever need to be tempt- ed to procrastinate. That quibble aside, I always enjoy ferry crossings. The only thing that beats them are cable ferries across rivers, with a bonus point for those you have to hail by shouting, hoping that the ferryman hasn’t gone home for lunch or closed for the season. Though these journeys are brief, they have the excitement of crossing a border, a boundary, to somewhere new.

Although today’s river was only a few hundred metres wide, I wasn’t brave enough to swim or canoe across it. The brown water swirled and boiled with eddies and undertows, and ships ploughed up and down. Even the ferry struggled, crossing the current in a wide, swerving arc.

As the ferry slowed down to dock, I looked back across the river at the landscapes I had been linking this year. I enjoyed seeing those con- nections from this fresh perspective, noting how this place joined onto that place. I wheeled my bike down a causeway of riveted girders, over tidal mud and shopping trolleys, then pedalled away from the ferry.

I removed my bike helmet and wiped my sweaty face. It was hot. I was at a memorial to a pilot shot down by German Messerschmitts in the skies overhead during the Second World War. Appropriately, the fields around were filled with poppies. Scattered at the base of the memorial was the rubbish from a KFC takeaway. The ten-piece Wicked Variety bucket contained 4,790 calories, the large fries had 1,440 and there were 750 more in the large Pepsi. I hoped it had been shared around, for that is a spectacular 6,980 calories, enough to fuel one eater through an impressive 69.8-mile run. Although given that they had been too lazy to put their rubbish in a bin, I doubted these calories were being used for long-distance running.

A cockerel crowed from behind a nearby hedge, jubilant not to have been fried. I rarely heard cockerels around here, but the sound reminded me of travels in other countries, of pre-dawn wake ups in the Philippines and the potholed roads of rural Nicaragua.

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I didn’t go out today to explore a grid square as usual, but to see the squares between the squares. I’d found myself with the rare but joyous occurrence of a weekend afternoon all to myself, so decided to go for a bike ride to calm my nerves before the big football match in the evening. I wasn’t playing and was merely preparing to take my seat in front of the TV with beer in hand and loud opinions galore. But the game was still all I could concentrate on.

I headed out after lunch to see how many of the grid squares that I’d visited I could link together in an afternoon. I would ride through as many as possible before I ran out of time, and then zoom home for kick-off. It would be interesting to take stock of all I’d seen so far.