WALKING WITH WELLIES

 

Photo: Caroline Gannon

So we walked, the four of us, Jen, Jonathan, Caroline and me (Caroline took the picture above which is why she's not in it but she's in the one below), on the foreshore of the Thames, between Bermondsey and Rotherhide.  The tide was low but gradually coming in.  It was a short and only occasionally tricky route but it had a lot going for it. I’d never previously set foot on the foreshore, had only vaguely thought about it, but Jen, the instigator of the expedition, was quite the aficionado.  It was a great walk.  And I was glad I had my wellies.

 

The foreshore was full of curiosities, both natural and man made: rocks, oyster shells, eroded bricks, tires, driftwood, and rather less plastic detritus that I’d expected.

Somebody had built a sandcastle,

Somebody had left or lost a boot

 

Of course when you’re on the south side of the Thames you stare across the water at the architecture on the north side 

but there were one or two architectural wonders on our side too, such as this nice bit of streamlined modernity:

 

Now as you know, I’m a great picker up of trifles, or souvenirs, or rubbish, on my walks.  But the fact is, you’re not allowed to remove things from the foreshore without a permit, and we didn’t have a permit so we took only photographs, left only footsteps, as the saying goes.

 

The woman above did have a permit, she said (we didn’t ask to see it) but she also said she hadn’t found anything very interesting.

There was even a sign in one spot, possibly not official, that said, ‘don’t move the stones’ but since the simple act of walking made stones move this was hard to obey.  And you know there weren’t any cops patrolling the foreshore, unless they had some secret and inscrutable method of surveillance.

 

However I did find this:

 

Another Caroline Gannon shot

It was a small glass jar with what appeared to be a wet and tattered five pound note around it, held in place by rubber bands.  

I picked it up and the five pound note looked real enough though probably too tattered to be legal tender. But I removed the fiver and found what appeared to be two genuine and perfectly intact Chinese bank notes under it, also wrapped around the jar.  

Suspecting contraband or, say, a trafficked human pituitary gland, inside the jar (though I suppose a human pituitary gland is a kind of contraband), I opened it up, and as far as I could tell it contained only river water.  What it had contained previously is anybody’s guess. And obeying the law of the foreshore, I wrapped the notes around the jar again, replaced the rubber bands and put it back among the rocks more or less where I'd found it.  It was the right thing to do.  

Nevertheless it’s the kind of thing I’m going to be thinking about for years.  I mean, who wraps English and Chinese bank notes around a glass jar and throws it in the Thames?  If we’d been living in a novel this would have been the start of a great and rip-roaring adventure.  As it was, we went to the pub.

 

       Then we went back to Bermondsey tube station for some fairly hard core Brutalism.  London, she’s exhaustible, innit?