Dear Readers, in a few days we will be going off on an adventure. I wonder if you can guess where we’re going? Answers in the comments please! It’s our first ‘proper’ break since 2020, so we’re both excited and a little daunted.

More to follow!

Mum and Dad on their wedding day in 1957. Not sure who that other woman is 🙂

Dear Readers, it was five years ago that my Mum and Dad had their 60th Wedding Anniversary party in Dorset. They got a card from the Queen too, as everyone who manages 60 years married did. There was so much then that we didn’t know. Five years later, all the people in the photo above are dead.

Dad giving his 60th Wedding Anniversary speech, while Mum offers encouragement….

Dad got very confused when he was giving his speech of thanks. At the time, he blamed it on his glasses, but thinking back it was clear that he was deteriorating – five years earlier he would have extemporised, but this time he was completely lost. I can see the concern on Mum’s face, looking at this photo. A year later, he would be diagnosed with vascular dementia. Fifteen months after this, both Mum and Dad would be in a nursing home. On 18th December 2018, Mum died. Dad followed her on 31st March 2020.

Mum, Dad, my brother John and I at the cake cutting….

But I still remember the joy of that day. Mum said it was the best evening of her life. Both of my parents were surrounded by people that they loved, and who loved them. They were together, and so they would be until the last moment of Mum’s life. Mum was always worried that Dad wouldn’t cope without her, but because he was already in the nursing home, which was familiar to him, and because his memory was failing, he seemed content. It is strange the way that things sometimes work out.

Looking back now, a few things come to mind. One is that it is important to celebrate things, to make the effort, to make memories. Often it can feel as if it isn’t worth the bother to go that extra mile, but it is. It would have been so easy to let that 60th Anniversary be just another meal out at the local pub, but I am so happy that it was more than that. We need reasons to be together, to rejoice in other people’s happiness and successes. So often, as people get older, we only meet at funerals.

Cakes from Mum and Dad’s 60th Wedding Anniversary Party in 2017. Note the freesias!

Something else is that we waste so much time worrying about things that don’t happen. We can plan and prepare for every eventuality, and there’s something very comforting about feeling that we’re in control. So often we aren’t, as the Covid pandemic has shown. I think that many of us are in a state of high anxiety all the time these days, and sometimes we can’t help it. I occasionally reach a state of equanimity which is very refreshing for me, where I plan for things in the full gut-knowledge that something else entirely might actually occur. It doesn’t feel like resignation, it feels like freedom. I don’t know how I got here, but here I sometimes am.

And finally, I’ve come to the conclusion that we mustn’t put off saying and doing the things that are really important to us, especially with regard to the people that we love. When my lovely Auntie Rosemary was dying, I wrote to her to tell her all the reasons that she mattered to me, but actually I’d been corresponding with her for months, so I’d said most of it already. I am operating on the basis of no regrets these days as far as I’m humanly able – no arguments unsettled, no love unexpressed. If I think of something that I want to do for someone, I try to do it rather than putting it off. We do not have forever, and neither do the people that we care about. If there is one lesson that the past five years have taught me, it is that the Buddha was right – we are children playing in a burning building. Life can be so beautiful, but it is also so short.

Dad enjoying his 60th Wedding Anniversary speech, with Mum preparing to give encouragement if necessary….

Canadian Fleabane

Dear Readers, I realised when I’d finished yesterday’s post that poor old Fleabane hadn’t been celebrated in a poem. And so I found this, which I loved. It’s by Rin Ishigaki, who was born in 1920 and worked as a bank clerk, giving her the name of ‘the bank clerk poet’. I’m not quite sure why it’s affected me so much, but there’s that sense of time passing, of great upheavals and change, and those two last lines made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. See what you think.

The poem is a bit of a cheek because Philadelphia Fleabane is actually much closer to Mexican Fleabane than to our plant, but I’m going to move swiftly on.

PLUCKING FLOWERS by Rin Ishigaki

I plucked wildflowers at Marunouchi in Tokyo.
At the end of the 1920’s
I was in my mid-teens.

On my way to work
To the Bank
The hem of my kimono-trousers flapping
Just a dash up the embankment beside the footpath
Before my eyes an open field.
Clover
Dandelions
Philadelphia fleabane
Wildflowers too poor
To decorate my desk at work.

Its been about half a century since then
Days came when the buildings blazed in the flames of war,
Around the postwar Tokyo Station
Just like a graph of the economic boom
Tall skyscrapers bloomed.

I retired at the mandatory retirement age,
I don’t suppose any firms are left which take
Girls straight from primary school.
Even women are questioned about their market value
And ranked accordingly.
Women bloom in competition
But the day has finally come when they cannot possibly be wildflowers.

Farewell Marunouchi
Now no open fields anywhere
The thin green stem that I once squeezed
Was my own neck.
© Translation: 2005, Leith Morton

A pine marten. Image taken in south-west London!

Dear Readers, of all the creatures that you might expect to catch on a camera trap in your garden, one of the most unlikely is a pine marten, and yet that’s exactly what you can see in the image above. The photo was taken as part the Zoological Society of London’s Hogwatch scheme, which is monitoring hedgehogs and sometimes spots other animals such as foxes and badgers (and domestic cats of course). However, pine martens are critically endangered, and the nearest wild population to south west London, where the photo was taken, is in the New Forest seventy miles away. This is the first time that a pine marten has been recorded in London for over a century.

So, how did he or she get to the capital? There are populations of urban pine martens in other cities, and I remember one eating biscuit crumbs from my hotel window box in Obergurgl, Austria about twenty years ago, but this individual may well have escaped from a collection, or have been part of an unofficial rewilding scheme. Let’s hope not as far as the latter goes – releasing an animal in the London suburbs is surely not the best way to assure its survival. But the folk at ZSL will be monitoring their cameras to see if there’s more than one pine marten. This animal seems to be in excellent health, and to be behaving normally, which is good news.

There has been some talk about releasing pine martens as a biological control for grey squirrels – in Scotland, where the bulk of the pine martens live, they seem to find it difficult to catch the faster, lighter red squirrels, but may have a field day with the bigger, slower grey squirrels. Alas, we all know how these stories end – pine martens are also very fond of eggs and young birds, which I suspect are a bit easier to catch. Nonetheless, if they turn up naturally these rare and beautiful mammals would be a splendid addition to the Capital’s fauna.

Pine marten (Photo by Alastair Rae from London, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)

The view back to ‘Charlton Riverside’ from the Thames Barrier Gardens

Dear Readers, after leaving the Thames Barrier we are now walking south from the river, through a variety of parks and open spaces. First up is Thames Barrier Gardens, where we encounter this cheeky chap. Honestly, grey squirrels sometimes remind me so much of glove puppets that it’s difficult not to laugh. Of course life is deadly serious for these animals at this time of year – grey squirrels don’t hibernate ‘properly’ and so they need to have enough nuts hidden away to last them every time they wake up in the winter. This squirrel seems to have one very perky ear, and one that is non-existent.

We pass a ramshackle building which sports this sign.

We walked round and round but there was no sign of any sculpture, let alone one that would be maliciously damaged. However, in trying to find out about it, I did find this project by Patrick McEvoy, which was commissioned during the pandemic. McEvoy tried to find some inventive ways of emphasising the social distancing rules, and these would certainly have made me chuckle. No sign of them now, sadly. McEvoy used themes that reflected the area’s maritime history, and I love the idea of the measurements being in carp or barrels rather than the drab ‘2 metres’. You can read the whole article here.

Photo by Luke O’Donovan https://royaldocks.london/articles/please-keep-seven-carp-apart-in-thames-barrier-park

Photo by Luke O’Donovan https://royaldocks.london/articles/please-keep-seven-carp-apart-in-thames-barrier-park

And then light dawns. I think that the sculpture must have been this one: Ash and Silk Wall, by Vong Phaophanit. It was apparently installed in 1993, and very beautiful it must have looked too. Sadly, in this semi-derelict area, far from any residential communities who could have felt ownership of it, the installation was apparently repeatedly vandalised, and even the illuminated bollards that lit the way to it were smashed. Having worked in community gardens and woodland over the past twenty years I’ve come to realise that it’s essential for the preservation of these amenities that local people are involved in any decisions about what goes on in them. Clearly, this didn’t happen here, and there was no one to speak out and protect it.

Ash and Silk Wall by Vong Phaophanit – Photo by Colleen Chantier ART on File from https://londongardenstrust.org/features/art1808.htm

Onwards! We head to a main road and cross into Maryon Park, closely followed by Maryon Wilson Park. These parks were named for the Maryon Wilson family who lived in nearby Charlton House, but they were originally part of Hanging Wood, which included a number of sandpits (before carpets became affordable for ordinary people, sand was a popular floor covering). Hanging Wood was also a hideout for highwaymen who frequented Blackheath and Shooters Hill. However, it most likely wasn’t named after what would happen to the Highwaymen, but because of the steepness of its slopes, so that the trees appeared to be ‘hanging’. The park was featured in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film ‘Blow-up’ which featured David Hemmings as a photographer who accidentally photographs a murder scene. Although the film features a fine roster of British actors of the time (Sarah Miles, Jane Birkin, Vanessa Redgrave, Peter Bowles and Janet Street-Porter as an uncredited dancing girl), the scene where Hemmings photographs a writhing Verushchka is maybe the film’s most famous scene, and the source of a hundred parodies.

Poster of ‘Blow-up’ http://marqueeposter.com/product/blow-up-1966-italian-4-foglio/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22650846

This is a very quiet park, with some fine mature trees. When we were there, the only sound was the thwack of tennis balls from the nearby courts, and the squawking of the inevitable ring-necked parakeets in the trees opposite.

This ash tree did look on the verge of toppling though and so we passed under it with some alacrity.

There are some really magnificent specimen trees, including this Spanish chestnut. Maybe the parakeets were keeping an eye on it and waiting for ripeness.

Normally we would stride energetically up a flight of 101 steps at this point, but sadly they’re under repair, so instead we had to make a gentle meander up a gradual slope. We cross the road and are now out of Maryon Park and into Maryon Wilson Park, which has a small childrens’ zoo, featuring some Kune Kune pigs, sheep and a wide variety of waterfowl, all impossible to photograph through the fine mesh fence.

And now we turn into Charlton Park, site of Charlton House, one of the finest examples of Jacobean architecture in the country. This is one of those places that I’m sure we’ll be back to visit properly. The house was completed in 1612 and used to be the site of the annual Horn Fair. Sadly, this became such a scene of drunkenness and general buffonery that it was banned in 1812, though it has made a more genteel come back in recent years.

We walk along a grassy path between the trees and the young footballers taking their exercise.

When we leave the park, this modest road is named for the garden designer who worked on the grounds of Charlton House, Inigo Jones.

The next little park (called Horn Fair Park) has a very nice BMX track, but is otherwise quite non-descript although, if you look back, you can see Canary Wharf peeking through the houses.

We cross another road and we’re on Woolwich Common. For some reason I was rather taken by these bollards – they remind me of corten steel, the pre-rusted steel cladding that is so popular amongst architects these days.

Woolwich Common has a long involvement with the military – this is where the soldiers used to group before picking up their munitions from Woolwich Arsenal and boarding their ships in the docks. It has an open and airy feeling, and for a few minutes there I thought I was in Dorset rather than Zone 4.

And look, molehills! How exciting. I have seen many a molehill, but never one of the ‘velvet gentlemen’.

There’s a largish flock of crows picking over the molehills – I imagine that quite a lot of small insects are disturbed by the activity of the mole, and I sense that these intelligent birds are taking advantage.

I get very excited about this bird – is it an immature stonechat? On second look, I’m fairly certain that it’s a dunnock, behaving like a stonechat. They can be dastardly like that.

There was clearly some bother here during the summer, though –  there is quite an extensive burnt area. Fortunately it looks as if it’s regenerating.

And then we’re at Shooter’s Hill, and heading off to catch the bus, having run out of time for this particular bit of the walk. There’s always so much to see, and of course so much coffee to drink and cake to appreciate. When we get the bus we head off not towards Woolwich (which would be sensible) but towards North Greenwich, so we get a fine tour not only of IKEA and TK Maxx but also Primark in the ‘Millenium Village’ Complex. Still, it’s been a lovely walk, and to end with here’s a photo of the haws on the hawthorn on Woolwich Common. They should keep the birds happy for quite some time.

Dear Readers, we started this week’s walk from Woolwich Elizabeth Line station, the scene of our transport debacle last week. Where are all the people, though? At one point we were the only people walking from the Northern Line to the Elizabeth Line at Liverpool Street Station, and very eerie it was too. Maybe half the population of London is in a certain queue starting in Southwark and wending its weary way for twenty-four hours to the Palace of Westminster.

We walk through the Woolwich Arsenal, where there is a fine array of cannons (including the 18th-Century cannon with wings shown above – it comes originally from Saxony and was no doubt captured in some battle or other). This is not surprising as the site was a munitions factory and shipyard from Tudor times, and until very recently had an interesting museum called Firepower explaining the past of the historic buildings. Alas this is now permanently closed, with a new site planned for Salisbury Plain.

Still, there are a variety of weapons of war dotted about (though clearly you aren’t allowed to interfere with them, so I was unable to have a Cher moment). Probably just as well.

And if all the cannon weren’t enough, they’ve even found a use for some of the cannonballs.

Well, we’ve been walking for at least ten minutes so it’s clearly time for a coffee. We found a very nice place next to these statues, which have a very Anthony Gormley-esque feel to them. Actually, the piece is called ‘Assembly’ and it’s by sculptor Peter Burke.

Just around the corner is a collection of concrete slabs which turn out to be engine blocks, probably from some piece of long-disappeared industrial machinery.  What caught my eye was the warning sign on them. A Focal Historic Artifact!!! Lord have mercy.

And then we head back along the Thames. Look at this view. There’s Canary Wharf in the background, and the Thames Flood Barrier in front. I’m sure that if a Tudor shipbuilder was dropped here, he wouldn’t believe his eyes.

As per usual there’s some new building going on (Luxury Flats!) so we have to detour from the river, but for once we don’t get either lost or nearly mown down by a passing cyclist. We pass some people angling in what were once the dry docks for the Royal Naval Dockyard (again from the 18th-Century), but which have now been stocked with fish.

Some people were also angling in the Thames itself. Bearing in mind the endless discharges of sewage into rivers up and down the country I’m not sure I’d be keen on eating anything that came out of the Thames at the moment, although the river has been getting cleaner for years. Also, I was taught to be quiet when tiptoeing past anglers, but this lot had brought their own sound system. Clearly, Thames fish are hard of hearing.

Further up, we passed this rather sad little mosaic which has clearly seen better days. Elfrida Rathbone (1871 – 1940) was a kindergarten teacher who taught children who were considered ‘incapable of learning’. Along with her cousin, Linda Gregg, she demonstrated that given the right education, many children could thrive and could learn to read and write. The charity that she founded still exists to help children and young people with learning difficulties.

Further up, there are a few more cannon to entertain my husband….

And some weeds to entertain me. Ragwort and Canadian Fleabane, anybody?

And honestly, where would we be without buddleia? It’s everywhere, in every shade of purple, lilac and white.

Then we have to skip up this rather fancy staircase (with husband in the photo Yet Again)….

…to get a slightly closer view of the Thames Barrier….

There it is!

…before we are diverted via ‘Charlton Riverside’. This is a seriously atmospheric spot – the old factories are still standing, including the old Siemens factory where transatlantic telephone cables were built in the 1880s. Siemens also contributed to the PLUTO project in World War II, where an oil pipeline was constructed under the English Channel to bring much needed supplies to the UK. The factory closed in 1968, but you can get a sense of how big an operation this, and the other factories here, would have been, and how many people they would have employed.

Some 7000 homes are going to be built here. I’m not clear how many will be conversions of the old factory buildings, and how many will be new builds.

I rather love that this factory is now home to a first-floor martial arts centre.

And then, we are meant to turn inland, but we are much too close to the Thames Barrier not to have a close look. This engineering marvel protects central London against a storm surge, and the barrier is raised if a combination of high tides in the North Sea and river levels at Teddington indicate that water levels would exceed 16 feet in the centre of the capital. It took ten years to build, and cost the equivalent of £1.23 billion. It may well need to be modified due to the increased risk of catastrophic weather events due to climate change. I have never seen it actually raised, and frustratingly that’s going to happen next week when I will be off on an adventure (of which more soon).

The Thames Barrier Park has all sorts of bits of engineering equipment from the building of the Barrier.

And then, we climb a flight of stairs, and there it is, glinting in the sunshine.

You can get a better idea of it from this photograph of the barrier raised. It’s 520 metres wide, and manages to hold back all that water. Let’s hope that it continues to perform its function for many years to come. I do wonder, though, what happens to all the water that doesn’t end up flooding central London. I’m not sure that I’d want to be living in Thamesmead, or indeed in the new Charlton development.

The Thames Barrier (raised) – Photo from the Environment Agency

And so, from here we track inland. But more of that tomorrow…..

Dear Readers, I remember that when I was five years old, I was watching the state funeral of Winston Churchill on our tiny black-and-white television set, entranced by all the pomp and ceremony. My beloved Great Grandmother had recently died, and I didn’t know quite what to make of it. She had had polio, and so had callipers on her leg, and used crutches for her whole life, but she was a formidable woman. Once, she picked up a youth who had been bullying my gran, upended him into a dustbin and sat on it until he begged for mercy.

“Will great-gran’s funeral be on the telly too?” I asked. I wasn’t sure why my Dad guffawed.

It took me a while to realise that not all deaths are equal. Some get international television coverage, and some take place in the shady corner of an urban graveyard, and some take place in a crematorium with a couple of mourners, as was the case with some of the homeless people that I worked with.

I am grieving this week, but not particularly for Queen Elizabeth. I’m sure that she was another formidable woman, and she has done a great job and all. I feel as if it’s the end of an era for sure – after all, she’s been Queen since before I was born. But on Wednesday last week, my beloved Aunt Rosemary died of liver cancer, which claimed her life less than a fortnight after diagnosis.

Rosemary lived in Collingwood, which, as regular readers know, I visited many times, lastly in April this year. Although she was in her eighties she still walked faster than me, leaning into the future like the prow of a ship. She did yoga several times a week, and when she took her beloved wheaten schnoodle dog Charlie out for a walk he got a proper workout.

But what was so special about Rosemary was her interest in people. Whoever crossed her path was a potential friend, and people confided in her almost instantly. She was fascinated by people’s stories, their histories and the things that they’d done. She remembered all the details too. She was still going for hikes in the mountains around Collingwood in the spring of this year, and was regularly hosting lunches for various community groups.

Rosemary was an extraordinary cook. She could make something out of nothing, and then make it reappear in such a delicious and different guise that you wouldn’t know that it was yesterday’s leftovers. She was ahead of her time in not wasting anything, be it food or scraps of material that she often turned into wonderful quilts and wall hangings. And she was so generous – she shared her skills and her good fortune with everyone who crossed her path, be it the birds in the garden, people in need, or her hungry visitors. I always said that I ate better in Collingwood, with Rosemary’s home cooking, than anywhere else in Canada, including all those fancy restaurants in Toronto. Rosemary put her big, kind heart into everything that she did.

Some examples of Rosemary’s quilting, she designed both of them.

At my wedding back in 2001, my mother was admiring a brooch that Rosemary was wearing. In spite of my Mum’s protestations, Rosemary took it off and gave it to my mother on the spot. Forever after, when I’d been to Canada Mum would ask after ‘that lovely lady who gave me the brooch’. Rosemary perfected random acts of kindness before they were fashionable.

I love the photo below – it’s the exact moment that my Mum (on the left) was admiring the brooch (Rosemary on the right, with her lifelong companion Linda watching on)

And, like me, Rosemary loved the natural world. She worried about the plants in her garden, she fretted about her orchids getting whitefly, She noticed what people were planting, and she watched the birds on her feeders with a kindly eye. She was interested in everything, and it kept her much younger in spirit than her years. There was nothing cynical about Rosemary, nothing world-weary. To be truthful, I am still reeling, and I know that the other people who loved her feel the same.

We live in such strange times that it’s hard to get our bearings. For some people, I’m sure that the sorrow that they’re feeling about the Queen’s death has been sparked by the memories of other, more personal losses. The event feels like so many things: a lightning rod for supressed emotions, a chance to show respect, an unexpected day off. Nobody quite knows what they’re supposed to be feeling, and it doesn’t help that we’re being told how to behave and what our emotions should be twenty-four hours a day. Today I learned that people were being prevented from visiting the Covid Memorial Wall opposite the Houses of Parliament if they weren’t part of the queue for the lying-in state. As I said earlier, not all deaths are equal.

The loss of my Aunt Rosemary has left a bigger hole in my life than the loss of Queen Elizabeth ever will. Every death is a tear in the fabric of the universe, the end of a story. It’s true that Rosemary will live on in my memories, and in those of the people who loved her so dearly. But I will never eat her pancakes again, try to keep up with her on a dog walk, or sit in her living room watching the grackles taking more than their fair share of the bird food. My life is diminished by her passing, but maybe that’s the measure of how much of an impact she had on me, and all those around her. May she rest peacefully in the knowledge of how deeply she was loved.

Dear Readers, you might remember that I’m doing an Open Degree with the Open University, which is mainly focussed on environmental science and biology (though goodness knows there are lots of other exciting courses as well – Death and Dying, anyone? Or Art History? Or Sustainable Development? Anyway, this year I am doing two 30 credit courses – Cell Biology and ‘The Biology of Survival’ which is largely ecology. So, I’ll be looking at the teeny tiny things that make up the bodies of all living things, and the much wider picture of how organisms fit together.

For my cell biology course I actually have course books! I do love a good course book, there’s something about underlining passages and writing notes that helps consolidate things in a way that doing stuff on a screen just doesn’t seem to do.

It’s going to be hard work, as usual, but it does help to keep the brain active, and I love to learn things. I am a thwarted mad scientist, so this course is pretty much idea. And I particularly love the idea of challenging cells in part three of the curriculum. Does this mean that they are belligerent little devils, ready to slap the unexpecting biologist upside the head? Alas, I fear that it just means that they are structurally and operationally difficult to understand. Still, I am up for the challenge! Wish me luck….

An Amelanchior just down the road from me.

Dear Readers, there have definitely been winners and losers amongst the street trees on East Finchley’s County Roads. This Amelanchior is leaning at a most precarious angle, and is losing its leaves early in spite of some neighbourly people watering it whenever they got a chance. I know there are different schools of thought about whether or not to stake trees, but this tree and, strangely enough, its older cousin across the road (another Amelanchior) are both on the slant.  I wonder if this is to do with the species, or the soil conditions, or bad planting, or something I haven’t thought of? Give me a shout in the comments if you’ve any ideas.

One thing that it isn’t is the direction of the sun, as the houses in the photo face due south, and so I’d have expected the tree to lean in that direction if it was going to go anywhere.

But some trees have clearly had a lovely year. Look at this crab apple!

It is absolutely laden down with those hard, sour little fruits. I must keep an eye open for parakeets, they don’t seem to mind the mouth-puckering astringency of those fruity bullets.

I have honestly never seen so many, and I half hope that the parakeets get the lot, as otherwise they’ll be slippery mush all over the pavement in a couple of weeks. It’s been a good year for fruits of all kinds in this neck of the woods, I wonder how the berries and nuts are doing where you are?

And so my busy week is nearly at an end, I have thrashed numerous project reports into submission and I can definitely see the end of it. Thank goodness for this blog, at least I have to tear myself away from my laptop once per day.