Back to Thamesmead

When we were in South London on Saturday, our bus swept past this stop. I was sitting on the upper deck and I had the surreal sensation of being enveloped in a pink cloud. I saw the dirt pile out the window, the bleak industrial landscape, and imagined how the bus stop must look, with that lone pink tree standing sentinel.

I could not get that image out of my head.

So yesterday, after I took Olga to the park and as I prepared to run errands to get ready for our departure for the Seychelles today, I decided I had to go back to South London and get a picture of that tree, that bus stop. It haunted me. And I couldn't wait, because the tree would stop blooming soon -- it was now or never.

So that was my afternoon yesterday -- a tube ride, another tube ride and then a bus ride back to North Greenwich, and I am so happy with the results. I love that picture. I didn't count on the beautiful, windswept shape of the tree, which makes it all the better.

As long as I was down there, I thought I'd go on to Thamesmead, as was my original plan on Saturday. So I did, getting off the bus and wandering through a landscape of urban Brutalist architecture interspersed with big, grassy park spaces.

No one ever told me there would be horses wandering around Thamesmead. But there are. That was a surprise.

I didn't try to find specific movie locations for either "A Clockwork Orange" or "Beautiful Thing," both of which were filmed here. But I got a general sense of the settings, seeing the buildings up close and wandering through their maze-like courtyards, labyrinthine outdoor corridors and forbidding ground-level car parks.

I actually like the architecture, though the buildings are showing their age.

This morning Dave and I have to pack and get ourselves out of here. The dog is already at her boarding quarters. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to blog from the Seychelles but I'll try. If not, I'll catch you up when we return in about a week!

South London Lunch

Yesterday we went down to South London to meet Sally and Mike for lunch. We invited along Anna, one of Dave's coworkers from the music department, and her husband Lawrence, who funnily enough just bought a house a few doors away from Sally and Mike. We figured they should all meet!

We had a good pub lunch and then made our way to Anna and Loz's house, where we saw all their planned improvements.

I admire anyone who enters the real estate market here in London and emerges unscathed with a proper house. Dave and I have talked about trying to buy, but it seems like a much scarier process than it is in the states. For example, one can make an offer on a house and have it accepted by the buyer, and still lose the house to another purchaser who offers a higher price at any point before closing. Besides, property prices here are insane, and getting more insane all the time.

Anyway, my original plan had been to leave lunch and go to Thamesmead, a '60s planned community along the river, to do some photography. Almost from its inception Thamesmead was considered a forbidding environment, representative of all the bleakness that a London council estate can embody. Parts of "A Clockwork Orange" were filmed there, for example.

But we didn't leave Anna's until 5 p.m., so I ditched that idea. Instead we walked to the top of a hill at an old quarry near their house in Charlton, from which we had expansive views over Canary Wharf (above) and the Thames Barrier (top).

Another resident of the street where Sally, Mike, Anna and Loz live is Herbie the Love Bug -- or at least his blue cousin.

I may try my Thamesmead outing again today, though with all we have to do before our trip tomorrow, it would probably make more sense to stay home.

Triceratops in Drag

Several months ago, a trio of plastic toy dinosaurs appeared in the computer room in the library at school. Lots of groups use that space, including an after-school photography program -- I thought the dinosaurs might have been models they used to teach depth-of-field or some other photographic principle. In fact, I thought about photographing them myself -- but then they disappeared before I had a chance.

Two of them reappeared this week, a Stegosaurus and a Triceratops. There were no obvious clues about where they'd gone, except that the Triceratops had been painted to look like a drag queen or a cheap tart.

Vegas, baby.

Speaking of cheap tarts, early this morning -- after I'd walked Olga, and as I made coffee -- I heard shouting from our parking area downstairs. I went out on the balcony and saw two scantily clad women squatting against one of our buildings, loudly and apparently drunkenly exchanging words as they simultaneously took a slash (as the British say). Charming. They stood up, readjusted their micro-minis and teetered out to Portobello Road on ridiculously high heels, apparent casualties of a wild Friday night.

Dave and I did our own celebrating last night, though not nearly to the same degree. We popped a bottle of bubbly (a gift to Dave from the American School in Paris, in thanks for his hosting of the international concert band a couple of weekends ago) and toasted the beginning of Spring Break. We don't have to go back to work until April 22! After a crazy hectic workday yesterday, the sub phone is turned off and my desk at the library is clear -- and I am ready to relax.

Accessiers For Sale

Another great storefront, which I pass every day on my way to and from work. It looks like it was originally called "Moon Talk," for some reason, and doubled as a travel agency. Now it has mutated into "On Talk." (And is there really a cafe in there?)

I shot a second version of this photo with a person walking in front of the store, but I don't like that one as much because the passerby blocks this priceless sign on the door (left).

Today is our last day of work before Spring Break. Woo hoo! I have been working like a dog this week to get all the subs lined up for the week of our return -- at least the ones we know we need -- at the end of April. Also, this week has been busy for last-minute sick calls, probably because everyone has the same thing I had!

The library has been busy too. Everyone wants books for the break. Well, all except the high school students, who seriously never read a book, it seems. The middle school kids go through books like water. Then they get to high school and recreational reading apparently grinds to a halt. I suppose they get too busy on Facebook. (And yes, admittedly, with loads of homework.)

Our Seychelles departure is coming up in just a few days. I haven't done much to prepare for this trip. Yesterday I bought a guidebook, and just this week it occurred to me to check and see if we need malaria medication -- but surprisingly, given that it's Africa, there's no malaria in the islands. So that's one complication we won't have to deal with!

The Black Death

Did you see the recent articles suggesting that the Black Death, the 14th-century outbreak of Bubonic Plague that killed six of every ten Londoners, wasn't spread by fleas on rats after all?

Based on an examination of 25 skeletons found beneath London's Charterhouse Square just last year -- the same Charterhouse Square that is home to the elegant Art Deco apartment building featured on the TV show "Poirot" -- scientists now think the plague was pneumonic. In other words, it infected people through the lungs and spread from person to person.

The reason for this, careful study of those skeletons reveals, is not that the plague was any more virulent than the modern variety. It's just that Londoners were in terrible health. They had rickets. They had anemia. They were malnourished. They were, in short, sitting ducks for infection.

It can't help but make me contemplate how hard life must have been in those days. Backbreaking labor, filthy cities, no medicine beyond basic superstition. Did you ever see "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"? Those scenes of peasants mucking about in the mud? That's probably fairly accurate.

I can understand why the church was so strong. It was the only place of beauty and peace in anyone's life, certainly in the life of any city dweller. And amid wholesale catastrophe -- the death of entire families from an illness that must have seemed positively apocalyptic -- it answered questions that were otherwise unanswerable. It didn't answer them correctly, but still. No one else had anything better.

(I was interested enough in medieval history to try to take a course in it in college. It was the only course I ever dropped. Sitting in lectures about a head-spinning assortment of Plantagenet royalty, I quickly discovered that my interest is strictly that of a layman, not a scholar.)

It's also amazing to think there are still skeletons from the Black Death beneath our feet in modern London. When I walked through Charterhouse Square in 2011, it never occurred to me that I might be walking in a place of burial. I suppose any plot of land in a city as densely populated, for so long a period of time, as Central London is likely to contain some bodies. I just assumed skeletons that old would have disintegrated by now.

Nope -- they're still there, waiting to surrender their secrets to our thankfully modern science.

(Photo: Balcony in Notting Hill, on Saturday.)

Old River Rocks

Mary Moon, one of my fellow bloggers, wrote the other day about the changing nature of love -- how time wears "so many of the rough edges that used to catch and cut," as she put it. Things that once seemed important have lost their weight while others have proved foundational, she wrote.

Her post resonated with me because since I met Dave, I've often thought about how different love is when you're older.

When I was in my early 20s, I had a long infatuation with a close friend. Any of my other longtime friends who read this post will know exactly who I'm talking about, because back then I could never shut up about him. I felt that love with such intensity. I yearned for him. I glowed in his presence. I wrote long journal entries about him. The fact that my love wasn't reciprocated didn't stop me. In fact, in a crazy way, it added fuel to the fire. His lack of reciprocation never seemed genuine or final because he hadn't come out, and I was convinced he eventually would -- and in my imagination, once he did, all would be settled. I lived for that hazy goal of a distant someday, completely unable to walk away from the situation.

This went on for several years -- entirely, entirely too long -- until my friend finally did come out. He promptly began dating other guys and dropped me like a hot potato.

When I look back at that period now, it all seems so crazy. The fierceness of the love I felt, the certainty amid all signs to the contrary, the emotional sturm und drang. It seems silly and youthful and all-around mistaken. I don't regret it, exactly -- not the friendship, anyway. Amid all my inner emotional turmoil we had a lot of fun and made a lot of great memories.

But when I compare those feelings with my life now, well, they just seem completely alien. When we're older we approach love in a completely different way. It's so much easier. It feels more comfortable. There is no need to talk about it, agonize over it, become possessive or distraught. Things that once might have caused hurt feelings or arguments now raise barely a ripple.

I think we also stop looking quite so much at the future, at what we want to happen, and look more at the now, at what is happening. For example, I don't know many people who enter mid-life relationships with the goal of changing their partners. We are more likely to accept them as they are. Which can only be a good thing.

Of course, comparing these two relationships is like apples and oranges, given that my love for Dave is reciprocated. But even my other, more balanced youthful relationships, fleeting though they were, were more infused with drama than this one. We mature. We mellow.

"We are old river rocks now, worn smooth," wrote my blog friend, Mary.

Thank goodness!

(Photo: Cheerful rubbish bins in Notting Hill...with a sneaky cat.)

Missy & Nancy

Well, that day of rest did me a world of good. I am in much better shape today and ready to head back to the library. I wound up doing quite a bit of work from home yesterday to sort out some substitutes, and I vacuumed the house, did laundry and made a run to the dry-cleaners, so the day wasn't completely wasted.

I also took a quick photo walk around the neighborhood. All the local characters were out and about. I saw Ron and Betsy (or Mitzie?). And I saw Missy and Nancy (above), a pair of aged pugs tethered together who often follow their owner around Portobello Road, and who I photographed about two years ago.

I got the story on these two. It turns out that Nancy is 15 years old and blind. Missy, a relatively youthful 14, leads Nancy on the tether. That's Missy in front above (according to the owner, who should know).

I spent the afternoon reading "One Man's Meat," a book of essays by E.B. White, mostly from the 1930s and '40s. I bought this book more than 20 years ago -- in fact it still contains a bookmark from the bookstore in Tampa where I got it -- and it remains a favorite. White is one of my writer-heroes. Such a natural, with perfect economy of words and just the right balance of humor. He's partly responsible for setting the tone of much mid-century writing in literary periodicals like The New Yorker and Harper's. He wrote about visiting Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., in 1938, and how even then it was subjected to litter and bureaucracy -- no longer the retreat Thoreau had found about 90 years earlier. Fascinating!