The New Normal (part 1)

The timestamp on the photo above is 2nd March 2020. I think when I took it I had some idea of a post about the approach of spring, even though it was still quite cool and extremely wet out. 

The one below was taken in late February in Hammersmith - that crowned figure is actually at the rarely used entrance to Hammersmith Town Hall, and I know I had a post in mind about how the old town hall building actually makes more sense if you consider that this side - which now faces onto a motorway - was the front, and the entrance everyone now has to enter through (which connects to a bleak annexe which required, when I worked there, the public to either try and struggle up to reception on an escalator with whatever they happened to be carrying - a buggy, a broken leg, all their worldly goods if evicted - or to snag a passing member of staff who could use their pass to get them into the lifts) was actually the back. 

Anyway they're refurbishing now, and hopefully it will all be much nicer and much more accessible. 

I've described it as late February. It was actually February 29th - leap year day - which I started with coffee at the Costa at Kew Bridge, before going into the Musical museum which I had heard about but never been to before and where I had a lovely little tour with an elderly volunteer guide who set lots of the various mechanical musical contraptions off for us and finished up with a Wurlitzer formerly belonging to the cinema in Kingston. They have tea dances there in the museum apparently, and show old films. There's a cafe which I made a mental note to go back to at some point when I hadn't already breakfasted in Costa. 

Then I walked down to Gunnersbury, hopped on the tube, got off at Ravenscourt Park to have a nosey at how the Hammersmith refurb was going, took the underpass beneath the motorway and walked along the river.

It was, as I think you can see from the sky in the pictures, a beautiful, bright, cold day. The Thames Path was busy with joggers and pubs and dog walkers, and so was Hammersmith Bridge, which is closed to road traffic at the moment. There was a small display explaining how a cycle and foot bridge was going to be put in temporarily so people could still get across the river while they repaired the road bridge. 

At Craven Cottage there was clearly a match about to start - hundreds of fans outside and more on their way, walking up through Bishops Park in the opposite direction to me. At Putney Bridge, where I got on the tube again, there's a secondhand bookshop which has been in business 27 years to my knowledge, and probably longer, and which used to have a sign telling customers to post the money through the door if the shop itself was closed. I turned over a few books, thinking about buying them, but ultimately didn't. 

And then, for the third time that day, I got back on the tube and came home, agreeably tired and quite pleased, and didn't write a blog post at all. I'm sporadic at best. I had posted the day before. And most of all I didn't realise, at that time, that I had had a remarkable day. That my old normal - both on weekends and weekdays - of hopping on and off the tube, in and out of shops and museums, moving through crowds of people - was about to change. It was known that Northern Italy had been hard hit by the coronavirus, and anyone returning from those regions had been asked to isolate, and I had taken a phone call at work from a summer school who usually had a lot of Chinese students (we told them it was a developing situation, and to follow HMG advice). But at that point only one British person had died - a passenger on the Diamond Princess - and it still seemed as if it would (or could) be contained. 

The weekend after my walk in Hammersmith I met up for a longer walk with my aunt Angela. As usual we congregated at my cousin's house to pick up the dog and have a cup of tea. We speculated with her whether her mother (also my aunt, and Angie's sister) would still be coming over from Southern Italy for part of the Easter holidays, or if flights would be cancelled. There was talk of Italy being in lockdown, of restriction of movement from north to south, but flights and trains were still taking passengers.  

I think it was the week after that when my aunt came out of the big Sainsbury's in Collier's Wood (I waited outside with the dog) saying how eerie it was - the shop like something from a film, the shelves empty. She had wanted eggs and I think some other things. I had wanted toilet roll. 

So I got the toilet roll from the Esso garage near home, and gave her three of my eggs in the interim. We discussed visiting the Hayward Gallery on the Monday, and she offered to give me a charger for a surface laptop, as my manager had suggested taking mine home every night in case I needed to isolate at short notice and the charger weighed as much as the laptop. I said yes please, although there had been a compromise arrangement, where I left it in an accessible drawer. 

I was considering going to Two Temple Place on the Sunday as well (it's a beautiful building that only hosts one exhibition a year, and they're always worth seeing) but was too lazy. 

Monday, as I was leaving work, my manager rang and asked me if I'd taken my laptop. I was mildly annoyed as I was going to a gallery and was almost at the exit, but turned around, went back up and got it, and passed on her message that we were to take laptops and work from home on the Tuesday. That was because she had been watching Boris' speech. 

The Hayward was lovely, restful, and not very busy. Mondays never are, in galleries, but this was exceptional. The cafe had me and one other person in it. I remember thinking I shouldn't touch things in the shop unless I was buying them, something I used to be told often as a child but have unlearnt along the way. I think I said, for the first time 'I'm not worried about catching it, I'm worried about passing it on', as if I needed an excuse to be cautious. 

I remember my hands felt dry because I'd been washing them so much. Not only when I went to the ladies, but every time I made tea or coffee, or entered a building. 

The exhibition was about trees, and my aunt and I sat in front of a huge screen where a birch forest - or rather a good mimic of one - rustled and swayed, and the leaves budded and greened and grew brown and dropped. 

Tuesday I worked from home. I have not been back to the office since. 

Bright and Breezy..

It's got colder again these last few days, with the promise of snow next week, and especially bitter on the Embankment where the wind blows straight across the river and into your face. There is a lot of light though - as you can see in this picture of Cleopatra's Needle. I must have walked past 50 times and I've never seen the carvings stand out so clearly before.

I was actually on my way to Two Temple Place, which is a gorgeous carved jewellery box of a building that only opens when exhibitions are on. At the moment the show is Rhythm and Reaction: The Age of Jazz in Britain, which sounds as if it shouldn't suit the space but works perfectly somehow. If you're in London before 22nd April when it closes I highly recommend it. 

In 1981 news I've read just one book so far, and predictably enough it's a Ruth Rendell, but I am trying to swim slightly out of my comfort zone for this challenge so as well as Bliss by Peter Carey (a serendipitous find in a charity shop) and Working with Structuralism by David Lodge (I've read quite a lot of his fiction, so it'll be interesting to see his litcrit) I also have Chance by Jackie Collins on the way. I haven't read anything by Jackie Collins since my teens (it was The Stud, if memory serves), and to be honest at that age I was just picking out the naughty bits, so it'll be interesting to see what I make of her now. 

Estuary - Rachel Lichtenstein

I wasn't very polite about this book in my last post so I need to qualify it a bit. Once you get well in and leave London behind it's actually fascinating - all the bit through Essex, the interviews with fishermen, the facts about Tilbury and Canvey Island and sunken ships and WW2. The river really comes alive as a place in it's own right.

Only right at the end does the book drop off again, and I wondered if the author (or her editors) felt they needed to keep the London connection in to sell the book. A pity if so.

This is not a photo from the book. It's from my walk on Tuesday through Rainham Marshes.

The ones in the book are black and white and don't do the subject justice at all. 

Blue skies...

The Thames at Crossness yesterday - I walked up from Woolwich to within sight of the QEII bridge - and in fact to within 2 miles of the end of the Thames Path, but I'd been out in the sun for three hours, which was enough. There's little shade on the river.

The arch on the right in this picture is the Barking Creek Flood Barrier. The cross bar drops down and blocks the mouth of the creek at high tides. There's seaweed on this stretch of the Thames, although (as you can see) it's not really that wide yet.

I'll be returning to Erith for the last bit of the Thames Path and then winding down the rivers Darent and Cray as part of the London Loop, which my aunt and I picked up again starting today.

No good pictures though - some nice horses and lakes, and the sort of cornfields that make you feel like you're in a Cadbury's flake advert - but also lots of brambles and golf courses, and a cancelled train coming home.

The Thames through London

There are various ways to orientate yourself through London - there is the tube, which is inaccurate but sufficient for casual visitors, there are the parks, which run down like a series of wedge-shaped steps through one side at least - Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park, St James' Park. There is the AtoZ. Or there is the simple method I used when I was 19, which was not to bother about where I actually was since I could always pick up a bus back.

The most obvious landmark though is the Thames. You are either South of North of the river, and ancient boundaries invariably end at the river's edge. So Vauxhall is South to Pimlico's north, Ditto Putney and Fulham, Southwark and the City, Lambeth and Westminster.

So, in order to provide some idea of where the places on this blog actually are, and perhaps give people who haven't been an idea of the shape of London and where it sits, I've drawn this rough map.

Further west leads to Runnymede (Where the Magna Carta was signed) Windsor, Oxford, Shepperton Studios, Eton College, Henley Regatta, Kelmscott and the Cotswolds. Heading East you reach Herne Bay, Southend and the sea.

Along the Thames

North Bank at Kew

South Bank at Kew

North Greenwich

Charlton Riverside Looking West

and East

The View From the Shard/A View of the Shard.

I finally got up the Shard a week or two ago, and then posted about something else but anyway, this is the best photo I took - it's not perfect, because it's through glass, but look how tiny everything is, like castles built of wooden blocks and airfix battleships. 

This weekend we walked from Crystal Palace to Nunhead - about 7 miles - along the Green Chain walk, through Horniman Gardens, which has a really nice but very busy cafe, and this view below.

And then went up One Tree Hill, but that picture didn't come out as well so have a watercolour of a goldfish instead. 

(In case you're wondering the bottom right hand corner had an angel fish in it, and there was a guppy too, but I wasn't pleased with them so I chopped them out.) I've been painting a lot of watercolours as part of the Cass Art Make A Splash challenge and if you want to see all my attempts they're on my twitter feed. Some are better than others and some are distinctly worse, but it motivated me to practice, which is always good.

Tramping Round London

My Aunt and I completed the third section - our third section - of the London Loop yesterday. As usual it was a few miles longer than the guidebook claimed, but we've learnt to factor that in.

The London Loop is the wider circular walking path around London - the Capital Ring, which we completed early this year, is the smaller - and performs the similar trick of directing you through green spaces and interesting spots where possible.

We began at Kingston, which is a relatively near and very familiar spot (Kingston was the nearest big town when I lived at home in KT11 - KT being the post office abbreviation for Kingston.) crossed the river and walked through Bushy Park and a Japanese garden I never knew existed, along a winding route next to the River Crane, to eventually end up at Hatton Cross, under the flight path of jumbo jets so close you can almost touch them.

Picking it up at Hatton Cross again we walked to Uxbridge, finishing up with a final stretch along the Grand Union Canal, which I did the length of to Birmingham a couple of years ago (It's a fantastic walk, especially Leamington Spa and Berkhamsted and Birmingham itself) and then before that a strangely well manicured IT park which looked futuristic in the 1960s sense - that is to say, more what architects thought the future would look like than what it actually does - and this after quite a lot of mud on land belonging to Heathrow Airport.

This, really, is the notable feature of the Loop. It's extremely varied. Which doesn't explain why I've chosen to illustrate it using two not at all dissimilar pictures, but they're the prettiest I've taken, and they also have the advantage of being spoiler free.

Because the best walks are those you discover for yourself. There's a nice walk I can take after work via Earls Court and Brompton Cemetery for example, which I've mentioned here before, and another which takes in Gloucester Rd, South Ken, Cheyne Walk and Battersea Park (the key to a good walk is not to go the quickest and most boring route). 

It was while walking on Thursday that I discovered for the first time that Battersea Park has a herb garden and veg patch. 

It was quite late when I took these - hence the lights - and dusk by the time I got to Clapham.

And in other news:

I wasn't at Wembley today, but I had to include this anyway. 

We won.

Evening Walk

Beautiful evening walk down to the river at Chelsea and Battersea yesterday after work (and a slightly odd Wordpress session where the reference librarian at Kensington kept talking down books but the website guy from Wordpress seemed quite neutral.)

Kew, Strawberry Hill and Leighton House

Saturday's walk was the relatively short one of Kew to Richmond along the Thames (my Aunt and I went to see the orchids at Kew again this year. No good pictures I'm afraid, although the displays were stunning.)

I was also up that way 3 weeks ago. That was a longer walk from Kingston to Kew via Strawberry Hill and Richmond, even colder and more empty, especially contrasted with last summer when it was absolutely heaving. There were some dog walkers along the whole route of course – there are always dog walkers and occasional cyclists, you’re never completely out of sight of others for very long.  It was bleak though, and dark as well by the time I got to Kew station. It's lighter in the evenings now.   

Strawberry Hill House itself was actually closed, although you can walk around the gardens and the exterior of the house, so it was still worth a nose at. 

This time, coming from the other direction, we mostly noticed the flooding on the other side of the Thames path, the height of the tide on the river side, and a large and beautiful building which we later identified as Syon House, the gardens and greenhouse of which I think I stumbled upon when I was living in Hounslow and walking to Kew.  Or at least, in the vague direction of Kew.

  

I can date that walk surprisingly accurately as September 2000 because I only lasted 3 weeks in Hounslow, mostly because I had no door key the whole time, so had to wait for the landlord to get in before I could, which meant sitting in the world’s most depressing shopping centre; but also because I found out the room I was renting had actually been prepared for a relation of his who was taking up a place at Guildhall or Goldsmiths, and when she delayed coming over he’d rented it out in a fit of pique. (She eventually arrived a fortnight after I did and moved out about the same time for broadly similar reasons).

Returning to this Saturday’s walk though: Somewhere between noticing but not recognising Syon House and reaching Richmond Lock it finally occurred to us that the river was high because the tide was coming in. 

Of course we both knew that the Thames is tidal up to Teddington – it’s part of the general knowledge about London learnt so early that I no longer remember where I first learnt it. H V Morton? G E Mitton? Jerome K Jerome? One or both of my parents? – and I was once flooded out of a riverside cafe in Richmond in my teens, and my Aunt trapped in a pub on another occasion, but this was exceptional, with water running over the path both in front and behind us, flooding the ditch and across the grass beyond. Wading was the only option. 

I later looked it up and found that this was the second highest tide predicted this year - there's another in October - but it wasn't just us caught out.

There was even a couple with a pushchair, who I think gave up at Twickenham Bridge, but we waded on – in deeper water now - under the railway bridge and then up the side of Richmond Palace, clambering and moving crabwise on top of the wall to the Old Deer Park and hanging onto the railings.

Flooding also at Greenwich apparently, captured on twitter and here: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-flooding-river-thames-bursts-banks-swamping-waterfronts-across-capital-10061480.html which won't hyperlink for some reason, which is annoying.

The only other thing I've done in the last week is gone to the late night opening at Leighton House. I’ve been wanting to see the house for a while, since I work in Kensington, but not wanting to go in my lunchbreak and only have 20 minutes to spend. It was a plus that there was also an exhibition of what I think of, broadly, as pre-raphaelite art (but the internet tells me is aestheticism) on at the moment, but I could tell that I was out of kilter with other visitors. Most people were there for the exhibition alone, whereas if the exhibition had been held in a different space I wouldn’t have gone to it.

Why? Well, it was all a little too beautiful for my taste. Perhaps it’s because I studied Ancient Greece but I’m suspicious of the cleanliness of the marble and the brilliance of the fabrics and the beauty and health and youth of everyone in the pictures and the fact no-one is ever working with the possible exception of musicians. I know it’s not meant to be real, but there’s not real and there’s ‘this bears no resemblance to any human life ever’. It bothered me less when the people were meant to be nymphs than actual ancient Greeks.    

Turner is more my thing and his recently closed exhibition at the Tate was excellent, showcasing his later works. I’ve seen some before at the maritime museum, and of course 'upstairs' in the Tate, but there's a real sense of him trying to capture light and movement in this period, in paintings that apparently didn’t make sense to his contemporaries.

As with Leighton House, I’m always amazed by how many people pre-book tickets, take a special trip to London, pay the exhibition prices, survive the crush (although actually LH was very civilised), and then look at nothing else. With the Turner exhibition it was especially noticeable because the Tate has a stunning permanent collection of paintings by Turner.
There were about 8 people up there, footsteps echoing against the high ceilings.  

Fewer in fact than at another recently visited art exhibit in the Orleans House Gallery which I stumbled across in that walk from Strawberry Hill to Kew. That was also very good, entirely free, and if I had about £900 there was at least one picture I would have bought there and then.

The exhibition itself is of paintings and photographs of Richmond, both old and new, abstract and accurate, and according to the website is open until the 31^st May: http://www.richmond.gov.uk/home/services/arts/orleans_house_gallery.htm.
I’d urge anyone in the area to go. 

Continuing Along the South Bank...

..there are all sorts of historical things: Southwark Cathedral, HMS Belfast, The Tower of London, Tower Bridge, the tattered remains of old wooden piles driven into the riverbed, any amount of seaglass and quite a lot fresh, steps and slipways down to the river itself, chains hanging from the concrete banks, groups of people in anoraks with metal detectors, pebbles of brick worn smooth, seaweed and the salt smell that doesn't seem to hit you until you're this far down. (Although the river is tidal up as far as Teddington Lock, so surely must be salt all through Central London), the mouth to the river Neckinger, where they once hanged thieves caught stealing from the boats waiting to unload.
Nothing though, that hasn't been photographed a thousand and one times before. So I took a picture of the above instead.

South and North Banks

The weather cleared up again on Sunday just after my last blog post and I spent the evening's walk up by the Thames, starting at Waterloo, through the South bank as far as Southwark Cathedral and then back and across Westminster Bridge once it got dark, to Victoria Tower Gardens where the beam of light to commemorate the beginning of the first world war was projecting from.

This is the best of the pictures I took, although nothing I've seen does justice to being there. The light doesn't photograph well and there's no sense of being able to walk around and inside the multiple beams and crowd of people (particularly crowded because it was the last night it was on). 

I feel like I ought to be adding maps to this blog since all I ever post on it is walks, but it's not really possible to go wrong from Waterloo, up the steps and past the Nelson Mandela statue or not you still arrive at the river, through whatever is happening at and around the Royal Festival Hall. At the moment it's a festival of love, apparently, which includes slides for children and structures such as this:

The central word was Agape, one of the ancient Greek words for love (or rather for one of the 4 particular kinds of love, as the language distinguished between these in a way English doesn't do).  

Then on under Waterloo Bridge, past the skateboarders and the OxoBuilding and the Tate Modern, the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe and Golden Hinde and the old Clink, which is now the grimmest possible museum bar the London Dungeon. 

A long way behind though, given that the The London Dungeon had a real human skeleton on display amongst the fake ones right up until they realised the fact in 2011.  

Beverley Brook

Long evenings make for long walks after work. Through Brompton Cemetery, past Lots Road and along the river through Imperial Wharf, or back to Putney from Hammersmith Town Hall, crossing the small bridge where Beverley Brook meets the Thames.

I went back at the weekend to follow the brook walk itself. Maps can be downloaded here but I trusted to signposts and my nose and did quite well without. Edit: Some good pictures of Beverley Brook at Paul Talling's London's Lost Rivers site here.)

It's a nice walk along the Thames at Putney to the mouth of the brook. Being a weekend there was an art fair and music and sailing boats out, which made a nice dawdling gentle start to the walk. There used to be a greasy spoon down here - back in the days when I was attending (cough, bunking off, cough) South Thames College up the hill, and I used to go in and get tea before getting the bus into town and hitting the museums or just walking around all day.

In those days though I was in short skirts and court shoes and patterned tights - not to mention an aran cardigan instead of a coat. 19 years old, about 7 stone 3 and apparently impervious to cold and blisters. Constantly skint with a part time job in a supermarket and a full time education that never seemed as entertaining as anything else I might want to do.

That, though, was then. These days I have jeans and walking boots and a degree and a proper job, and the greasy spoon has been pulled down.

What are still there are the boating clubs. Kings College, Imperial College, Westminster School. And over the river Fulham Football Club. Beverley Brook runs into the Thames on the south side just before that.

It runs almost at once into Barnes common, and the path leaves the brook (it does this a lot) and meanders instead through a cemetery which is completely without fencing, just another part of the common to be wandered through - you don't even notice until you spot a gravestone or two through the trees.

Although the map makes it look as if it's all through green space I definitely ended up on a housing estate at one point, and round the back of the Priory Hospital where a few workers - catering I think, not nurses, were having a quick cigarette and a chat. Other than that the Brook goes through Richmond Common, and on to New Malden. Lots of people out in the hot weather last week, tennis, ice creams, cricket, dogs, kids, cyclists...

Tomorrow is the next stage of the Capital Ring (today was taking The Boy to the park for chocolate ice cream and water fights and helping him stick world cup stickers in his world cup book.)

Harrow to Hendon and probably a bit beyond, weather permitting. I did Greenford to Harrow two weeks ago, up Horsenden Hill where a bird of prey was hovering - I noticed primarily because there was a man with binoculars watching it - clearly waiting for something small and furry to move before it dropped like a stone to catch it.

'Kestrel.' The man with binoculars said. I thanked him and moved on, down the hill, then through Sudbury and up another hill to Harrow.

This is the famous public school, blazers and straw boaters. The high street of the old town runs right through it, and there are signposts to 'Matrons Office' or 'Music Room' off public roads. You can see the centre of London over the top of school buildings. All of which surprised me. I'd assumed Harrow was out in the country, like Eton, and would have expected it to be more fenced in.

The real high street though is by the station. Fast food, clothes shops, fruit being sold from a stall. That's where I'm headed tomorrow for the next leg.

Kew

I didn't get up and do my canal walk yesterday. Instead I went into town to return and renew some Westminster library books, since I won't be working in Westminster any more and may not have them on me next time I wander through on the way elsewhere.

Today I went to Streatham Cemetery (which is in Tooting, just to be contrary) and later Kew.

The cemetery is looking nice, although some of the trees came down in the high winds and rain we've had and have damaged a few gravestones. We (that is to say the Friends of Streatham Cemetery, of which I am a very lax member who doesn't even go to meetings, but does occasionally sell tea and cake on open days) have finally got the back gate fixed, and hopefully will eventually be able to persuade Wandsworth Council there is a call for it to be opened most of the day (at the moment it will only be open when the friends are seeing to the beehives, which is only a couple of hours a day, and obviously that limits how much local people can rely on it being open).

There's a real need, because it's a green space in an area where a lot of people don't have gardens, and it's safer as well - kids can come in and practice cycling before going on the proper roads, and it's a pleasant short cut to the bus route, instead of going a mile out of your way along quite busy streets. So if the council can be persuaded and the custodian hold a duplicate key and open it up during daylight hours it would be a big plus.

Kew was also good but the orchid exhibition was terribly crowded. My youngest aunt and I went to see that specifically, breaking her general rule that you should never go to see any exhibition in its last or first week because it's always terribly crowded. Also £10.90 for tea in a paper cup and 2 slices of cake is daylight robbery, even when I'm not the one forking out for it (and of course we were breaking my general rule of never buying food in tourist traps. See post on Paris). My treat next time, when we will hopefully have The Boy (my cousins 4 year old) with us again.

Which sort of segues me on to schools. When I first went to school I was 5 and 3 months. Not the eldest child but not the youngest. I'm not exaggerating when I say I was the only child able to read at all, and that because my mother had taught me.  The Boy is 4 years and 9 months, started school in September, and is already expected to read 3 letter words. Not his mother's expectation (although she's doing her best to ensure it now it's flagged up) - the school's.

He's at a private school - because his father wanted it and is paying fees, but it's still quite odd, isn't it, that he's expected to be reading 6 months before many of my contemporaries had checked out the alphabet?

At least he's not on the terrible billy blue hat, johnny yellow hat books his mother was on at first though. I remember thinking I'd never have bothered to learn to read myself if they'd tried to get me interested in that tripe.

Mr Men, that's what you need, and Snoopy, and the Puffin.. hmm, I think I feel a trip to the Waterstones website coming on.

Also, here is a photo I took of the Kew shop:

I was wondering - are orchids meant to be hung upside down to grow?