Seen on the bus

Number W15 - Leyton to Hackney

• A extremely portly man, snoring so loudly that even the people wearing headphones could hear him.
• A teenage girl, taking her little brother to primary school, quietly reading out loud to him as he sits on her lap. 
• A tall man, with a rakish cut over one eyebrow, carrying a spade.
• An elegant lady with a bright pink scarf knotted jauntily around her throat, who sits very still with her eyes shut.
• A mother with five swarming children all in primary school uniform who like to jump off the seats and swing from the poles.
• A man with a pair of women's opaque black tights on his head.
• A boy and his Dad trying to do maths homework together.
• A rainbow of chattering teenagers, in the various brightly coloured blazers of Hackney's high schools and academies.  At least two local schools require their pupils to wear vivid purple blazers and ties.

Two heads are better than one - maths homework on the bus

Tights on head

Road trip

We drove back home from Mum and Dad's on Sunday.  They live in South-West France, so it's one heck of a drive.  The part through France takes eleven hours, and when the ferry and the drive up through Kent and into East London are included, the whole journey takes around sixteen hours.  

I've always rather enjoyed long road-trips.  I did a few when I was at University and studying in America for a year, although I still have the classics on my to-do list: Route 66 from Chicago to LA, and the full East to West Coast trip, New York City to San Francisco.  When I was living in Australia, in my early 20s, I drove from Brisbane up to Cairns which is still my longest road trip (nearly 24 hours in driving time, although we spread it over three days).  In 2010 the children and I took a road trip from France to Switzerland, and then back along the German border to northern France and home.  That remains the longest trip I have done without someone else to share the driving.

We're used to the long drive down the length of France.  It starts with rolling off the ferry very early in the morning, and then we drive down the Calais peninsula, admiring all the wind turbines along what the French call the 'Autoroute des Anglais', because every other car (at least) is English.

 

All along our journey, the main role of whoever is navigating is to avoid Paris AT ALL COSTS.  I am well used to the mad, fast, often intolerant driving that goes on in a capital city, and I actually used to drive around Paris a fair bit when I was younger and working there, but I wouldn't want to do it now.  Paris traffic is either at a complete standstill, or moving eye-wateringly fast, and you need to be unhesitating and precise in your navigational skills at all times.

Much of our drive through France is on the autoroutes.  French autoroutes are owned by private companies, and most charge tolls to drivers.  However, the tolls are pretty modest - our eleven hour drive costs around £30.  I'm more than happy to pay because the autoroutes are such a pleasure to drive on - quiet, incredibly smooth and well-maintained, and well supplied with 'aires' (service stations).  Some of the aires sell petrol, food, magazines and are parked up with hundreds of trucks and cars, but others are just a selection of picnic tables and parking spots in a little forested glade, set back from the motorway.  On our way down we found a particularly nice one somwehere south of Orleans, where Olivia did some sunbathing and Graham did some yoga stretches (our journey down was the day after his marathon, so sitting in the car for 16 hours was tougher than it would otherwise have been for him).

We have flasks of coffee and bottles of water for drinking on the go, and a plentiful supply of chewing gum (neither Graham or I like long drives without chewing gum - is this strange compulsion just us?).  The children are plugged into their iPods, and spend the whole time reading.  Whoever is driving gets to choose the music for the front, and the passenger is not allowed to argue with the driver's choice.  Graham and I take it in turns to drive/choose music for about two hours each. 

The temperatures rise steadily as we get further south, and finally we turn off the autoroute and drive down small, rural roads for the final forty minutes or so to Mum and Dad's house.  We all know these roads so well, and Graham and the children and I all look out for the landmarks that tell us we are so very nearly there.  Coming back home, there is always a strange moment of disconnect when you get off the ferry at Dover, and England now feels like a strange and foreign land - so used are we to French voices, driving on the right and the sight and smells of the French landscape.

And then it's done.  The car engine is turned off, we all get out, have a stretch and start unloading bags.  If we are arriving at Mum and Dad's there are excited hugs, delicious wine and a hot meal before bed.  If we are arriving back in London there is the excitement of seeing the hens again, the comforting familiarity of being back home, and a mental calculation of how many more months it will be before we can get back in the car and do it all over again.

    

Overheard on the bus

Number 56 - Clerkenwell to Leyton

• "I would go skateboarding, but I can't find one with brakes"
• "I literally can't even look at my own belly button"
• "I wouldn't want to own a shimmery skater skirt - but a black one might be okay"
• "I maintain perfectness at all times"
• "I wish Google Images was a shop"
• "I've been asked to draw my tattoo so many times - I just can't be bothered any more"
• "That's not even a thing"
• "You know, I can just sense which bus stop we're at - it's kind of like an extreme psychic ability"

The unlovely East End

I love London, and especially the East End of London, and am usually fiercely loyal...but the area where I am working at the moment is really rather grim and hard to love.  A dual carriageway thunders through the middle of it, the pavements are greasy and dirty, the Georgian and Victorian terraces were almost all destroyed by a combination of the Luftwaffe and the town planners of the 1960s, and replaced with tower blocks. The shops are tired and half-stocked and people hurry along to get somewhere else rather than linger here.  

My fifteen minute walk from the tube station to the hospital does not fill me with wonder and excitement...

...except for just one short moment when I walk over Regent's canal, and on a clear day can turn my head to the left and glimpse the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf rising out of the early morning mist.

And this is why I will always love East London.  Even in the middle of the grime and the deprivation, there's still something unexpected to see which makes me smile and feel alive at the start of a long day's work.

Seen on the ferry

P&O, Calais to Dover

The White Cliffs of Dover, seen from the ferry

• A tired Dad making a cosy nest on the floor for his wriggly toddler, out of coats and a beloved blanket.
• Two teenage French girls tucking into a breakfast feast of ham baguettes, boxes of salad, cheese and crackers, pains au chocolats and Evian water.
• A middle-aged man with a sun tan, sitting next to the window and working his way steadily through a wordsearch book.
• An extremely pregnant Dutch lady buying five different bottles of perfune in Duty Free.
• A rather harassed looking school teacher trying (and failing) to round up a class of Year 7s wearing matching purple hoodies with Ski Trip Austria emblazoned across the back.
• A woman in pyjamas and a slouchy woolly hat telling everyone how seasick she felt.
• A grandfather saying to his grandson, "Everything's all right now I've got my Sunday Times."

Waiting to drive off the ferry and back into England

Seen on the Tube

District Line - Mile End to Kew Gardens

• A lady reading The Highway Code and sighing heavily.
• Two work colleagues, heads bent together over an open lever-arch file, looking up at each other shyly when their hands accidentally brushed together.
• Two elderly trainspotters, with notebooks and cameras on their laps, loudly discussing the points system at Willesden Junction.
• A young lady, with a cascade of spectacularly curly blonde hair, sitting very still and poised in a corner seat.
• Two Japanese teenagers, with matching spiky rubber covers on their iPhones, sitting on the floor of the carriage and chatting quietly.
• A young man wearing a trilby hat at a jaunty angle and carrying a jute shopping bag with House of Commons printed on the side.

Pink and white camellia bloom at Kew

Blue skies and magnolia blossom at Kew

This post is for Tracy and Kristina, who shared a glorious day out with me at Kew, and who liked Monday's post so much.

Seen on the Tube

Central Line - Leytonstone to Oxford Circus

• A man in a black nylon jumper, deeply asleep with a completely serene expression on his face; his fingers laced together neatly in his lap.
• A young man with red headphones, reading The Mail on Sunday and frowning.
• A smart young lady surreptitiously slurping a McDonald's milkshake, hidden inside a bag of shopping on her lap.
• A young man with green headphones, chewing gum and dozing lightly in between stops.
• Two people in thick wool coats, sweating heavily.
• A young woman with her hair in a high ballet bun and a stud through her right eyebrow, smiling at the photos on her pink iPhone.
• A tired middle-aged woman holding a polystyrene cup with three dark red roses in it.

The view East from Hungerford Bridge, at sunset last night. Waterloo Bridge in the foreground and the City behind.

Time off

Half-term reading for C

Time off is always welcome - and time off from school is particularly appreciated around here, even though school itself is generally enjoyed.  This past week the children were off school for half term, and G took a week off work as well, so we all had a week off at home together which felt very special.

We crammed our week with Good Things:

• a family trip to Kew Gardens with cousins, uncle and aunt.  With the aid of a toppled snowman, C was taller than both Uncle and Dad for the first time.



G, C and Uncle M

• a family trip to Cambridge to see the newest member of the family, and another uncle and aunt.  O took approximately 200 photos of her smallest cousin.



Baby A's perfect little hand

• a birthday for G
• a trip to the other side of London to celebrate a milestone birthday for G's father



O reading and C listening to his iPod on the tube

• a long walk through the forest with old friends
• a day chilling out with more old friends, some computer games, and knitting for the Mums


Slow but steady progress on my shawl

• a day at the Olympic Park to watch the Track Cycling World Cup at the velodrome



Cheering on Team GB at the velodrome

Everyone's back at school and work today, and I miss them.  I am tidying, and cleaning, and setting the house back to normal.  It feels too quiet, but I go back to noticing - and appreciating - the small things. 

I spent a happy half hour in the garden this morning, chatting to the hens as I cleaned out their eglu and inspecting the progress of the buds and bulbs.  While we've been having time off with family and friends over half-term, the plants in the garden have been hard at work.  Spring is so nearly here.

Snowdrops

Clematis bud

Midweek colour

Seen on the tube:

• a tall, willowy young woman with bleached-white hair cut in a thick fringe, carrying an enormous pink leopard-print bag
• a man in open-toed sandals, trying not to sneeze
• 3 men with brown, soft-leather messenger bags
• a young woman with bright purple tights and 3 inch heels poking out from under her black burqa
• a man wearing a beautifully cut brown suit

Seen (and smelt) at Kew Gardens:

• pink roses
• red roses
• peachy roses
• yellow roses
• big blowsy roses
• white roses
• and a small selection of aphids and ladybirds - because nobody's perfect, not even the roses at Kew Gardens.

Weekday walk #11

I've been washing some of the treasure I picked up from the Thames foreshore at low tide yesterday.

Gill and I were walking from London Bridge to Limehouse, along the north bank of the river, but had barely walked 100m before we were enticed onto the muddy shore by a very low tide, some friendly archaeologists from the Museum of London, and the sight of hundreds and hundreds of old clay pipes and other interesting bits of historical debris.  We pottered along the beach, exclaiming at all the things we could see.  Anyone is allowed to use their eyes only to look for treasure on the foreshore, as long as they don't dig or scrape the surface in any way.  You must not dig or use a metal detector unless you have a valid license from the Port of London Authority.

And then we decided to explore further, and we walked under the large pier that you can see behind Gill in the picture above.  This is what it looked like when we walked in.
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We weren't under there for long - maybe 20 minutes - but we were totally absorbed in what we were doing, and crucially we kept walking further in, while we were looking at the rubbish around our feet rather than at the river in the distance.  I suddenly heard Gill shout and I looked up at her, confused.  She thought we'd got lost because she couldn't see which way we'd come in - then in a split second we both understood that the river was rushing in and that our way out had almost disappeared under the incoming tide.  The water was hitting the wall at the back of the pier; on the right hand side in the photo above.

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We have never moved so fast in our lives!  Gill got a wet foot, and we both scraped our arms against the wall and got covered in slime, but we made it out.  I think another 60 seconds and we would have been trying to wade out, or shouting for help.

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We were both shaken and felt rather stupid - we had no idea the tide could come in that fast.  But we know now, and will be much more careful in future!  We came up to street level and sat outside the Tower of London for a restorative cup of coffee and a chocolate brownie.

We quickly left the crowds around the Tower of London behind and came to St Katherine's Dock and Wapping, which is one of my most favourite parts of East London.  You are close to the river all the way, along Wapping High Street and surrounded by beautiful historic wharves, pubs and warehouses.
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We stopped for lunch in a little park, overlooking the headquarters of the river police.  Just as we got out our sandwiches about twenty policemen, all wearing full body armour and carrying guns, ran down the gangplank to their jetty and got into two black speedboats.  I think it was a training exercise, but it was still extremely unnerving - I don't like seeing armed police - and I was glad we hadn't needed them to rescue us from under the pier at London Bridge an hour earlier.  They would not have been impressed!
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By now we were thoroughly spooked by the way our day was unfolding, and we finished our lunch and set off for the final short walk to Limehouse station.

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There were glorious views of the widening river to cheer us up, and bright kayaks tied up in a green lock near Limehouse basin.
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When I got back home I was horrified at the state of my poor hands and only slightly less horrified at how lucky we'd been to come away with one wet foot and some dirty, broken fingernails.

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But I still think it was worth it for this amazing treasure.
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The journey

It takes us about sixteen hours to travel from our house in London to my parent's house in South West France.  That's a very, very long way to drive. 

We set off at 4am, and arrived at half past eight in the evening, French time.  Just in time to share a bottle of wine and sit down to a family meal around the big wooden table in the kitchen.

There are ways of making a sixteen hour journey bearable - and on occasions it even felt like a fun adventure:

• Pack vast quantities of food in the car.  More than you think you can possibly eat.  We took sixteen sandwiches, a giant fruit cake, oatcake biscuits, crisps, kitkats, chewing gum, 3 bottles of water and 2 flasks of coffee, and ate most of it.  Nice, homemade food is a must on long journeys - it saves your sanity and your wallet.
• Only attempt such a long journey with children old enough to keep themselves amused for sixteen hours.  Until a couple of years ago we just didn't go down to visit my parents in France.  It was too long a journey for the children (and therefore us) to endure.
• Provide the children with things to do.  Books and iPods do it for mine.
• Know your route before you set off.  There is nothing worse than marital navigational rows at the start of a holiday.
• Agree ground rules for music choice during the journey.  In our car it is very simple: the driver chooses the music and nobody else is allowed to complain.  This means that both G and I are very keen to share the driving equally.  He endures my Country Classics playlist with very good humour and I don't say a word when he puts on Joe Satriani guitar wig-out sessions.  That's fair.

G said there were two moments when the sixteen hour journey seemed completely worthwhile.  When we finally turned off the motorway and drove down through the Aveyron Gorges into St Antonin - the views, as the sun set, were breathtaking.  And when we were sat around the table, with a glass of cold wine in our hands, laughing and chatting with my parents.

Buggy headlights, at the end of our drive along the length of France

Waking up this morning to sunshine and wisteria