Waterlink Way

I thought I knew all the agreeable walks in the vicinity of my flat. 

Towards the Thames barrier, around the O2 or via Trinity Buoy Wharf.  West to Tower Bridge via the dismal Pepys estate or the venerable pubs in Shadwell.  So a meetup invitation to the Waterlink Way, starting at Cutty Sark and shooting south to Lower Sydenham, was a surprise.  I declined as the day was wet but resolved to explore it by myself another time.

Thursday is a free day; no gym, no writing course and no Arcola. So in crisp chilly sunshine I set off for the official starting point, Deptford Creek. I’d taken the precaution of pocketing a Waitrose cup from my hoard and availed myself of the munificence of the Greenwich branch, sipping hot coffee while contemplating the river.  The spikes of the O2 behind a low-rise building on the opposite bank gave it a Mohican.

Hermione, moving south solely for economic reasons, confessed the change apologetically as though entering purdah and fearful she would be shunned by friends.  Having spent my formative years on the wrong side of London's equator I knew the truth: south is where people go when they are tired of life in north London - to paraphrase Samuel Johnson - or to make babies.  While our ears are rarely calibrated as finely as those of Henry Higgins, the south Londoners’ drawl is as unwelcome to their northern cousins as the grating Brummy or the squeaky Scouse. This distaste is manifested in practical ways: the objections to the proposed Garden Bridge is thinly veiled nimbyism, anxiety that migrant hordes from Lambeth will gain easy access to lusher northern pastures.

None of the capital's great parks lie south of the river, at least in popular imagining. From the jewel of the east, Victoria Park, to the great contiguation of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’ Park, the formidable lungs of the West End, to the stately reaches of Regent’s Park and the wilds of Hampstead, all the noted splendours of rus in urbe, are congregated in the upper half of London.  Blackheath, Battersea and Richmond are almost unrecognised anomalies; as for Battersea Park and Clapham Common, no one outside their postcodes knows of their existence, and even if they did, how could they possibly get there, or, worse, home again afterwards?  The transport is lamentable, the sole tube line does not even acknowledge its southern presence, resolutely calling itself the Northern line.

So my expectations of the Waterside Way were carefully calibrated; I was prepared for the simplistic alliteration to be its most alluring feature.

The Creekside Discovery Centre was surrounded by sculptures assembled from flotsam gathered during the advertised low tide walks.  The coordinator, Bettina, provided me with a set of eight leaflets describing the route of Waterside Way which also furnished ample historical and environmental information for a future Ramblers walk, then locked the gate behind me for the protection of the school children present.

The route laces together half a dozen strips of parkland adjacent to the Rivers Ravensbourne and Pool, connected by nondescript suburban streets, light industry and building sites.  The result is a satisfying incoherence, rather like a poem compiled from words randomly picked from a holiday brochure.

Brookmill Park Pond, the last remnant of a reservoir, is a placid pool surrounded by trees.  A heron paused for a photo, obligingly striking different poses to ensure I captured her best side.

Ladywell Fields was the highlight.  Here the Ravensbourne has been partly diverted through the park in gentle meanders, mimicking its original route and creating a range of wildlife habitats while creating a simulacrum of a countryside meadow.  I’m always on the lookout for refreshment stops and toilet facilities for Ramblers walks and the Ten Thousand Hands café, occupying the old Ladywell Station premises on the fringe of Ladywell Fields, offered both.  I sat in the sun munching a ham and cheese toastie.

Despite the absence of tubes, there is no shortage of railways in south London.  Every half mile I was obliged to dodge under a tunnel or cross a footbridge, so when I reached the end of the walk I decided to strike out to Beckenham Place Park, confident that I’d be able to catch a train from one of the plethora of suburban stations which included park’s name in their title: Beckenham Road, Beckenham Hill, Beckenham Junction and New Beckenham.   The park is dominated by a golf course and a dilapidated clubhouse where I recalled having a measly sandwich during my tour of the Capital Ring.  I avoided the golf course and headed towards the less manicured northern end, aiming for Ravensbourne station, in honour of the river I’d been tracking.  It turned out to be on the wrong line so I consulted the map and headed off to New Beckenham station which, at the end of the day, felt further than it looked.  Sure enough, there were trains to Lewisham, but only every half hour, a frequency which would be derisory on the tube, Overground or DLR.  I realised that it’s not the lack of railways or stations from which south London suffers so much as an inadequate supply trains. 

© David Thompson 2016

Rochester

I went from Lewisham, Gerry from St Pancras and we met on the platform at Rochester. He immediately started to inveigh against the station. 

'It's tawdry,' he declared. 

'Well, it's new,' I countered. 

By the time we got off the concourse and were trying to cross the main road to the tourist office he was fulminating, 

'Where's the pedestrian crossing? What if we had children or a buggy?'  I shivered. Their absence was one thing for which I was grateful.  The tourist information officer defused his wrath by replying mildly that lots of people had complained about the absence of a crossing but there was nothing she could do about it. She deflected further discussion by handed him a complaints form, then recommended visiting the castle, warning us it was a ruin, in case we thought the place would be stuffed with oriental carpets and French ormolu clocks.

We explored the high street, mostly local shops interspersed with mandatory estate agents and I looked at property prices. Gerry filmed pigeons shredding a lump of bread by tossing it. We wondered why they didn't hold it with their feet and peck instead. Tempted by the hill, we climbed to the higher reaches and were rewarded with sweeping river views. Reclaimed land, covered by housing and a park, separate the steep hillside and castle from the river, still a respectable width after the encroachment. The stone balustrade from the old bridge had been transplanted and is now the embankment wall. Two new bridges accommodate road and rail links to Strood on the opposite bank.  A parade of white motor boats, nose to tail like a traffic jam, spoke of affluence. Thirty five minutes from St Pancras, Rochester is commutable and not moribund like Margate.

The Coopers Arms menu enticed us for lunch. We had scarcely crossed the threshold before the barmaid said hello and smiled broadly. A good start, I thought.  Gerry couldn't resist the Kent sausages and mash, while I succumbed to the Brie, bacon and cranberry baguette and a naughty glass of Shiraz. It was delicious. We lounged, amused by the twee placemats offering an embroidered history of the oldest pub in Kent, doubtless one of many making that claim.

At the cathedral entrance, a churchy woman roused herself from a puzzle book.

'Have you visited us before,' she intoned.

'Not for a while,' I equivocated, hoping to deter the lecture she was about to commence.  The place comprised two buildings, one several centuries older than the other, she explained. I've never really seen the appeal of cathedrals and when she announced proudly that there would be a concert at the weekend I wondered why they didn't simply demolish the place and build a decent concert hall instead.

We skirted the castle grounds and wandered back to the high street. Gerry gravitated to one of the many second-hand bookshops.

'Might as well give up selling books, make more money on these,' muttered the proprietor.

'Bric-à-brac?' I queried. He looked disapproving. Clearly he positioned himself differently in the market. He waved towards several large wooden cutouts of historic racing cars, complete with racing drivers' profiles.

 'Just sold these, he'll be taking them to Beaulieu next week for the event and sell them for £100 each.' He didn't seem to begrudge his customer scooping the profit.

'Be getting rid of these art books next week. Most'll go on the skip.' I was surprised. 

'No one wants them now, except the biographies. If it's not on the telly, they're not interested.' 

'So the new Dickens series must be boosting trade,' I said, catching on. 

'Hasn't made any difference.'  He stomped off. 

Being on a 'wenture' we were permitted cake, so in deference to the faux Dickens heritage we headed for Peggotty's Parlour cafe. The place was deserted; Miss Havisham's cafe would have been more apt a name, but we were assured they'd just recovered from a lunch time rush. Gerry ordered tea for two and we each selected a portion of carrot cake, massive lumps which could have sustained us all weekend. I poured the tea, tipping the pot periodically as I'd seen my father do. Gerry explained that was only necessary for loose tea leaves and I realised this was an example of behavioural skeuomorphism.

I'd planned to take the return train to St Pancras with Gerry, but on learning that the javelin trains don't accept freedom passes, I decided to go back via Lewisham. These days, a tenner is worth saving.

© David Thompson 2016

City Beach

Before daytime, patches of mist linger over the river. Only orange lamps and their squiggly reflections pierce the pervasive greys. The water breathes in and out, stroking the shore. 

'You can't be half-pregnant,' is a popular bizspeak aphorism and to be both day and night is just as impossible, so the liminal states, dawn and twilight, are treasured for their mystery and transience. The intertidal reach is analogous, neither sea nor land, and equally ephemeral. Twice a day land is dreamed; twice a day it is drowned by insistent tides.  Their clockwork regularity is out of phase with the clock; high tide accompanies breakfast one day, then lunchtime, then supper.  Perhaps life would be more harmonious, lived as it is in proximity to the sea, if we observed the rhythm it implores. Some days the barrier is closed and the moon's pull defeated. Then the beach dries, deprived of moisture, small cracks appear: temporary desiccation. Lugworms crouch in their burrows and gulls strut indignantly, baffled by the famine.

The sweet scent of seaweed exhaled from green-slimed rocks is a reminder that this river estuary is the coast, a finger of ocean penetrating the city. There are fish, and therefore fishermen. Spaced at fifty metre intervals, just beyond calling distance, they slump on canvas chairs, glowering mutely at the water.

'Caught much, mate?'

The response is unintelligible. The purpose is not catching, it's being. Fishing Zen.

The beach seethes with maritime detritus discarded as liberally as space junk. Plastic packaging, wooden spars, rusting cans. Shards of glass recall hopeful bottles tossed overboard; fragments of brick, now as porous as sponges, remember lost edifices; a bald tyre nudges the sand teasingly, unwilling to strand.

After the storm, denuded branches prickle the beach: wreckage from an upstream tree felled by the wind. Unaccountably a battered Punch and Judy stall is deposited, its grotesque figures brackish and fading. Bruising waves have scoured the beach, shifting mud and rocks to reveal metal tracks, extinct conduits for launching vessels from the pounding shipyards, now erased from all but memory. A girl in a red jacket laboriously scrapes letters in the scant sand with a stick, a cryptic message to the encircling buildings and the planes above. Her father throws a ball and a dog bounds into the shallows to fetch it. Children paddle raucously. Beyond in the deep channel, the dog-like head of a seal surfaces, scans the horizon and is hauled under, like a periscope.

As the light fades, the children are rounded up, shivering under thin towels. Colour seeps away until all is suffused in blue and deepens to indigo. By evening, the river belongs to garish party boats, the flashing lights and pulsing beat a substitute for the forgotten industrial clamour of Docklands. Later an ominous heron flaps silently while the orange lamps guard the night.

© David Thompson 2016

Giraffes

'Don't pull that face, if the wind changes direction you'll stay like that.' 

My mother was not superstitious but would happily engage any tool at her disposal for a colourful admonishment.  I didn't believe the threat, but the saying reflects the widely held notion that the environment can mould nature.  The idea that giraffes developed long necks as a result of their parents stretching to reach leaves on high branches was advocated by Lamarck who preceded Darwin.  Experiments have established that this is not how evolution works.  The impact of the environment is restricted to favouring or disadvantaging mutations which have arisen at random, not generating them in the first place.

In the 1930s, the Soviet agronomist Lysenko increased wheat yields by exposing seeds to high humidity and low temperature.  Crucially he claimed that this treatment would also improve the plants' descendants; in other words, that acquired characteristics could be inherited, just as Lamarck had suggested.  His work appealed to the communist party who were desperate to maximise grain production.  Eventually his theories were the only ones permitted.  All over the eastern bloc and in China Lysenkoism became the orthodoxy; geneticists who challenged it were silenced, imprisoned or executed.  But Lysenko's experimental data were faked and by the 1960s his ideas had been largely discredited.  As a biochemistry undergraduate in the 1970s, I was taught that the notion that the environment could influence genetics was preposterous. 

In a strange reversal, modern molecular biology has shown that DNA can indeed be modified by environmental factors.  So although you can't change the genes you're born with, those genes can be altered.  These modifications don't affect the content of the DNA, they simply change the way in which the information is expressed, for example causing some sections to be ignored.  It's a bit like clicking the 'save for later' option at the Amazon checkout: the request is still there but dormant so the delivery centre knows not to act upon it.  Even more significantly, in some cases, the changes wrought by the environment can be passed to offspring; the study of this phenomenon is the infant science of epigenetics.  A project which has been tracking a group of families since the early 1990s has shown that children of mothers who smoked in pregnancy carry DNA markers associated with their mothers' habit.

The implications are immense.  People know that their lifestyles can impact their own health and choose whether sacrificing a pleasure is justified by the benefits.  Dame Sally Davies apparently considers the increased cancer risk every time she fancies a glass of wine.  But such decisions might play out differently if the result is known to impact yet to be conceived children.  Possibly the progeny of feckless parents whose lifestyle has resulted in suboptimal DNA might seek redress in the Courts.  Perhaps couples will elect to have their families sooner so they can commence a life of debauchery without damaging their children's DNA, or maybe they will simply freeze their pristine eggs and sperm for later procreation.

© David Thompson 2016

Sickness

Sick in bed, time crawls. Normally I listen to the news once a day. Anchored in bed, more detached than usual from the rest of the world, ironically I have never been so familiar with current affairs. Hearing the news with every meal, I can map the progress of the items. Breakfast's headline has fallen to second place by lunch; at teatime it has slipped to a footnote; by the evening it has been jostled off the agenda.

My condition, sinusitis generating an agony disproportionate to the cause, a simple cold, invokes rituals honed over the years. Analgesics, steamy showers, inhalations, hot and cold compresses. None are efficacious, merely desperate distractions. I do not know what, if anything, is best to alleviate the pain. And this exemplifies the chasm which exists between me, the 'I' in charge of the flesh, and the flesh itself. The conflation of the person with the body it occupies, a shorthand to which we all subscribe daily, is revealed as false. I puzzle over how to relieve my body of its pain as fruitlessly as I would struggle to assist a cat or dog in distress, unable to communicate the source of its affliction.  Being trapped inside this body is at once the most intimate and most detached relationship, like sharing a prison cell with a stranger. Why has this spot on my arm appeared and what does it signify? No manufactured device is supplied with so little information about how to use and maintain it, yet my body can't be replaced or returned to factory settings.

If I were, magically, able to occupy a different body, how would that feel? More importantly, would it change me? We assume the body reflects the personality: physically attractive people are deemed desirable companions, and when this is erroneous, we are indignant. 'She looked so sweet, but she turned out to be spiteful.'  Yet despite that duality, or duplicity, being a threadbare staple of romantic fiction, we struggle to discard it, the evolutionary purpose it serves trumping even the most superficial examination.

Clothes are a different matter. It is the inner being which selects the outer garments, subject to the physical constraints imposed by the body; no amount of determination will thrust an XXL frame into M tee-shirt.  But rather than a true reflection of the soul, clothes merely reflect the extent to which individual taste is compromised by convention and fashion and limited by cost. Only those who are thoroughly disinhibited, very wealthy and completely immune to trends - a rare combination - can project themselves without distortion through their garb.

As the grip of the infection loosens and I am no longer shackled to pain induced torpor, I will once more assert my dominance over my body. Where knowledge fails, brute force will serve: I'm taking it to the gym.

© David Thompson 2016