margaret21

Liquid History: a Trip on the Thames

Adam’s splendid birthday cake. The design is full of allusions, only one of which will perhaps be accessible to you.

I love the River Thames, and I love a river trip. Our friend Adam’s birthday treat to himself and all his friends was just that. A river cruise taking in everything from the London Eye, past wharves and warehouses, parks and pavilions, bridges and Big Ben. I didn’t take my camera, expecting not to be tempted by photography. I was tempted though, so thank goodness for my phone.

I was tempted by what always seduces me about the River Thames: the old, battered, rusted and gritty references to its industrial and commercial past and present. The juxtaposition with new money: glittering ultra modern towers thrusting skywards, surrounded by squadrons of cranes. Expensive new housing where during my childhood there was only industrial waste. Even a helicopter, on duty for …. something.

Olivers’s Wharf is no longer an industrial centre, but desirable housing.

Dirty-British-coasters-with-salt-caked-smoke-stacks* – or their freshwater cousins anyway, share the waterways with commuter clippers, speedboats and long, slow, rust-coloured barges. Rotting houseboats cling to the shoreline below busy streets and assertively up-to-the minute financial districts.

There are peaceful moments too. Here is Battersea Park, and the Buddhist Peace Pagoda. When I was a child, our flat in Victoria looked directly across at the four imposing towers of Battersea Power station. It’s now decommissioned, and is a housing and residential development, though looking at this image, it’s hard to believe.

Battersea Park.

The Peace Pagoda, Batterea Park

Battersea Power Station

A line of cormorants occupies a pontoon below Cheyne Walk, one of Chelsea’s most desirable addresses. And seagulls choose any old rusting buoy to rest on.

We finish near the Houses of Parliament. This view is not quite right. One iconic element is missing, all wrapped up in the manner of a Christo sculpture. What is it? No prizes… not even a river trip.

Returning to our riverside mooring. Goodbye, south London.

Click on any image to view it full size.

*from ‘Cargoes’, by John Masefield

Ragtag Saturday: Asylum – from Kurdistan to Leeds

Ripon is a City of Sanctuary: one of many cities throughout the UK proud to offer a place of safety, sanctuary and support to those fleeing violence and persecution.

At a recent meeting of the group, an asylum seeker from the Kurdistan region of northern Iran told her story. I’d like to share it with you.

X is an intelligent young woman with a loving and close extended family. After school, she went to University to study, and met the man she went on to marry.

As they began their lives together, they began to question their Muslim faith. They took their doubts seriously. They looked at other world religions, like Christianity. They prayed, they read, they trawled the net in search of answers.

One day, their house was raided. They came home to find their computer taken, their books in disarray, and anything dealing with religion also taken. They knew they were in danger.

Family members rang up. ‘You need to go. Quickly. Don’t bother to get stuff together, or get your affairs in order. Just go.’

So they did. First of all, they went to Germany, then England, where they spent about a month in the prison-like surroundings of an asylum seekers’ detention centre. They were advised to find someone in England who would be prepared to act as a sponsor. Somehow, X’s father found someone in Sheffield, and that’s where they went next.

I don’t really know the next bit of the story: only that she spent a great deal of time under the care of the NHS before they ended up in Leeds. And that’s where they are now. After more than two years, their application for immigration status has still not been heard, so they live on their allowance of £37.75 a week each which covers everything apart from housing: their food, household needs, clothing, transport, fuel and heating…..

They’re intelligent and highly qualified – X’s husband is an engineer, she a business studies graduate, and both of them have learnt English from scratch whilst being here. But neither of them is allowed to work. They would like to. They’d like to be tax-paying and contributing members of British society. Instead they draw their meagre benefit and do voluntary work and eke out a precarious existence, not knowing what will happen next.

X has had a break. The University of Bradford has offered her a place, and a scholarship open only to asylum seekers to read for a Foundation year in medicine. She’s grateful to the NHS and wants to give something back .

I have no photos to illustrate this story. Instead, I’ve chosen a gallery of images from Unsplash to try to help us all imagine what she thinks of when she remembers the life she has lost in Iran: her family, the countryside and townscapes, the culture she has left behind. She must have complicated feelings: grateful on the one hand to be safe; fearful of the future; homesick for her family and former home, and the life she thought she and her husband were preparing for; excited by her new opportunity; worried about money – all the time, and about their asylum application.

The Ragtag Daily Prompt today is Sanctuary.https://wp.me/p9YcOU-nq

To view the gallery full size, click on any image.

A winter walk: footprints, snowy sheep – and just one robin.

I think I like this kind of wintry day best of all. We’ve had a carpet of snow on the ground, blanking out grass, pavements and drifts of snowdrops. But today, it’s just a little warmer, and the snow is softly melting into the ground. But still here. We go out for a walk, before the cold descends once more. Winter footprints are visible now, because the impacted snow has dissolved away, leaving a silhouette of – what? Is that a crow print? A pheasant? Oh look, those are rabbits – look at how they land, four square and neatly as they run. And here’s a dog of course.

The landscape assembles itself into broad strata of austere colours: raw umber earth; no-longer pristine snow, almost dappled in places; perhaps some olive-shaded grass, and behind all these, a line of winter trees, their skeletons highlighted against the grey sombre skyline.

We see this robin on a fence post.

But apart from him, sheep are the only living creatures we spot on our walk today. Against the snow, they aren’t white at all, but a slightly dirty cream. They scratch an unsatisfactory meal from the less snowy parts of the fields. They come to look at us. We look at them.

Then we look for snowdrops instead, and for wood. It’s forbidden to go out at this time of year without coming back with an armful of kindling for the log burner.

And how glad we are to get back to our log burner! We enjoyed seeing our familiar landscape clothed in its skimpy veil of whiteness. But we appreciated getting back to warmth, a fireside, and a nice cup of tea even more.

Here’s a contribution to Jo’s Monday Walk (Jo’s own walks tend to be in Portugal these days. That’s where she lives. Feeling chilly Jo, reading this?)

Click on any image to view it full size.

Ragtag Saturday: Three months of trying…..

Maybe it’s time for a Zoë update. You remember Zoë. She was the baby granddaughter who couldn’t wait until her due date of October 25th, and frightened us all half to death by being born on August 7th instead.

She’s getting on for six months old now. Corrected though, she’s only just over three. She spent astonishingly little time in an incubator, was out of hospital before she hit 5 pounds in weight and has been doing well ever since.

All the same. In her early weeks, she did little but sleep, eat … and grow. Her milestones are those of a late October baby. She still spends a lot of time sleeping, eating and growing, but now she’s adding skills daily. She discovered how disarming her smiles could be. And now, she’s putting in energetic sessions trying desperately hard to biff at the toys hanging from her baby bouncer. Such an effort! But so rewarding when she lands the telling punch.

This is my contribution to today’s Ragtag Daily Prompt: effort.

Walking in Woolwich

I was with Team William & Zoë at the weekend. A walk in Woolwich seemed a fine Sunday outing.

Woolwich is firmly a part of London now. But it wasn’t when it was omitted from the Domesday book in 1086, on the grounds that it was part of Saint Peter’s Abbey in Ghent.

It wasn’t when Henry VIII founded a dockyard here in 1513 to build his royal ship Henri Grace à Dieu. It remained a royal dockyard till 1869. Then a Royal Laboratory, producing explosives, then a Royal Arsenal. By 1741, it had a Royal Military Academy too. Woolwich was a fine industrialised garrison town.

Royal Arsenal

Until it wasn’t. The dockyard closed first. The Academy moved to Sandhurst in 1945. The Arsenal closed in 1967, though during WWI it had employed over 70,000 workers Woolwich fell on hard times. Even though, or perhaps because it became home, in 1975, to Britain’s very first McDonald’s.

It’s beginning to recover. Those fine military buildings are finding new uses as housing. With improved transport links, Woolwich is being touted as south London’s ‘next big thing’.

We did explore. That military architecture really is pretty fine. It forms the backdrop here to Peter Burke’s Assembly, 18 cast iron figures which speak of Woolwich’s busy industrial past.

And I love a gritty urban riverscape too. We planned to walk on, to the Thames Barrier.

But it was cold. It was raw. We wanted to enjoy our exploration. So we will come back another day, when the sun is shining. And we’ll return to Vib too. The bao at this wonderful Vietnamese café are certainly worth exploring.

Walked on Sunday, published on Tuesday, this is a candidate for https://restlessjo.me/jos-monday-walk/

Ragtag Saturday: Frosted fields

It was -3 degrees in the night. It was still -3 degrees, at nearly nine o’clock in the morning. But I started my walk anyway. Right here in the garden, next to this hellebore.

Here were the pleasures of scrunching through crisp, frosty grass. Through small puddles, frozen solid. Watching long shadows extend the trunks of trees across the width of a field. Sheep doing their best to scratch a breakfast from the hoary grass. Bracken with delicately rimed edges. A car on the roadside, blinded by Jack Frost’s artwork.

The sun rose and despite the cold, quickly burnt off the chilly white from the fields. The newborn lambs, which I’d hoped to spot in West Tanfield had been kept indoors – I could hear their plaintive bleating in barn. Instead – winter blossom, catkins, and a sky-blue sky.

This is my contribution to Ragtag Daily Prompt: Frosted. And though I walked on a Wednesday, posted on a Saturday, to Jo’s Monday Walk.

As ever, to view any image full size, simply click on it.

A district and its doors: El Carme, Valencia

When we were in Valencia, we stayed in the old district of El Carme, just within the old city walls. It had its glory days in the 19th and 19th centuries, but fell on hard times. By the 1980s, and into the ’90s, people referred to the area as ‘H&M’ – that’s hashish and marijuana. Anyone with any choices moved out. As dilapidated buildings collapsed – like here….

…. street artists moved in. Followed by other creative people, attracted by low rents and prices. Now El Carme’s narrow streets are vibrant, buzzing, crammed with bars and fashion boutiques.

No bars, restaurants and shops here. But in other ways this is a typical street in El Carme.

And yet its wealthy elitist past lives on, in its doors. Why did such tall narrow houses have such magnificent doors? Well, the rich wanted to live here. They needed to express their individual wealth in some way, since spacious grounds were out of the question. Doors then. Doors through which a man on horseback could enter. Maybe a carriage too. Stables and servants downstairs. The noble family above. No two doors were the same. Here’s a small selection.

This is my entry – my first – for the popular Thursday Doors challenge, which I first learnt about from Judith’s ever-interesting blog, Beyond the Window Box.

Click on any image to view full size.

Washday

I’m a simple soul. Watching a line of clean washing blowing and tugging on the line on a sunny, breezy day is one of life’s small pleasures. Gathering up the clean dry clothes and sheets at the end of the day, and burying my nose into the pile for that incomparable fresh smell of clean washing is another.

Perhaps this is why, when I’m in Spain, I’m a sucker for shots of long lines of clean washing draping from a balcony, or hanging from a sagging line on some tall apartment block.

And that is my angle on why I’d never have a tumble drier in the house, Ragtag Daily Prompt readers. Damp-and-refusing-to-dry washing is much more my cup of tea.

Ragtag Saturday: Foraging in Valencia for marmalade in England

One of the joys of being in Valencia was walking down streets and through parks lined with orange trees. It’s orange season right now, so they were looking at their best. They’re bitter Seville oranges of course, the ones we use for marmalade. Juicy sweet ones would probably be too much of a temptation for passers-by.

Last Sunday though, when we were walking in the Turia, we spotted fallen fruit under many of the trees. A forager by nature, I couldn’t leave them there to rot. No, we had to gather them, so that when we returned home, we could have a very special souvenir of our holiday. Home-made marmalade, cooked from fruit gathered in Orange Central: Valencia.

Foraged oranges.

Part prepared…..

Chopped and ready for the final bit of cooking.

I can’t show you the finished article. The marmalade is simmering on the stove as I type.

Today’s Ragtag Challenge is: cook

P.S. …..

Hope – English style

We’re back. Just in time for That Meaningful Vote. Let’s not go there. Instead, let’s focus on something that England is undoubtedly good at: mid-winter hope.

The first snowdrops.

Helleborus Niger.