I said in May that I would have a rest from blogging until I had finished my new novel. I have now completed revision/edit/part re-write number five and it still needs more work, so lets have a rest and indulge in a bit of bloggery.
While I have been tapping my keyboard (years ago I would have said scribbling) in Walthamstow, in order to keep my heart muscles functioning, to keep my elderly body alive, I have continued with the walking every day when it isn't raining.
So, from my house fifteen minutes and across Chalk Bridge over the River Lee to Wild Marsh West. Then you have a choice between a well laid out fine gravel footpath, or a grassy swathe that heads off through the scrubland. It has been mowed, presumably by the Council, and I think it is probably designed for horses to gallop along. Any way I decided to walk along it rather than the path, and to be in East London and so near to home, walking on grass by trees and water, is so much better than pounding pavements, which I have been doing for the past five years. Even sandy footpaths are not as soul resting as grass.
Being an ignorant city dweller, I have no idea what all these wild flowers and plants are called. I wish I had some knowledgeable person to walk with me and say "That is bird's foot trefoil" or "Betty's slipper" or whatever.
Everywhere there are blue flowers, purple flowers, yellow flowers and of course, here and there, a crumpled beer can. A reminder of where we are. The East End of London. Anyway, this grassy track is better than the towpath because there are none of Boris's hooligan cyclists on it.
Wondering who left beer cans in this delightfully peaceful place, I came across a group of anglers sitting on the river bank fishing. And what else were they doing? They were drinking cans of beer, at eight o'clock in the morning. Angling is a serious sport, needing lubrication, much like darts no doubt. But it reminded me of May Morning many years ago, sitting in a punt below Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, waiting for the dawn, waiting for the choir of Magdalen College to sing whatever beautiful song it is they sing at dawn on May 1st, and drinking champagne at six o'clock in the morning, so judge not that ye be not judged, as the Good Book says.
In the punt with me was the poet Adrian Mitchell of dear and happy memory and two girls whose names I have long forgotten. They also would probably have been poets, because in that year 1953 I wanted to be a poet and only mixed with people who wanted to be poets.
The grassy path leads to Stonebridge Lock, where the narrowboats and houseboats have permanent moorings, with little gardens on the bank, white picket fences and furniture with umbrellas, lawns, footballs and of course red gas cylinders and occasionally greenhouses. There is a new narrowboat I haven't seen before called "Ten Bob Note" with at least half of its roof solar panels, very enterprising.
Just as I don't know the names of the flowers, I'm afraid I don't know whether it was a coot or a moorhen, diving down below the surface, leaving an expanding ring on the water, coming up several minutes later, sometimes on the far side of the river, then diving again, and again, until finally it came up with a fish in its beak. So there are fish in the River Lee. Perhaps anglers don't just go there for the beer.
This walk with wisps of mist rising from the river is so remote from the rest of my life, yet so close that in twenty minutes I will be unable to cross the road because of the volume of traffic.
I seem to have a more interesting life since I retired. Later that day I walked along Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea to the Army Museum to be interviewed by an author, Julie Summers, who is writing a book about experiences of evacuation in the 1940's. When it is published, chapter 9 will be called Norman Andrews.
Next week I shall be at the meeting of the Waltham Forest Poetry Stanza, reading my poems and listening to other people's poetry, and sampling the excellent range of ciders always available at Ye Olde Rose and Crowne in Hoe Street. As Doc Johnson said, who needs to be bored in London?
Piebald horses graze the Thames Water land around the reservoirs. They look like gipsy horses to me but no sign of travellers. Anyway they have a new foal today and I watched it stagger to its feet. It can only just have been born, still wobbling a bit on its splayed spindly legs.
Corny it may be, but here birds sing undisturbed by technology or agriculture. You might be in the middle of nowhere. On the horizon of course you can see the erections of industrial East London, but it doesn't matter.
