First Long Walk

Yesterday was a good day. I got my writing done in the morning . . . took the entire morning when you factor in making breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and washing and hanging up a load of laundry. I originally put down “hanging out” a load, but it’s different here. 

In Texas when I was a kid, the clotheslines were a half-dozen pretty stout-gauge lengths of wire strung between four-inch diameter silver-painted iron pipes something like thirty feet apart. When those West Texas winds came up I would gather the hanging-down corners of the sheets (this was before fitted lower sheets) and angle them to catch that wind in my sails. I hadn’t yet read of Captain Blood on his pirate ship “Arabella,” but I absolutely could have identified with Captain Jack Sparrow. I can still feel the sun on my coffee-bean-brown back and the stiff brown grass under my bare feet, smell the detergent and bleach from my full-bellied sails, and feel the playful tug of the wind I had caught. It was by no means a gentle puppy-tug; it was a German Shepherd of a yank and snap. It took skill to keep the sails filled and not broach the ship. But I managed. It was amazingly satisfying when storms brewed up. I’d bring in everything but that last sheet . . . and the rain would make me haul the sail down and run for the back screen door. I didn’t always make it.

Here there’s a flimsy, light-gauge Rube Goldberg steel tube affair that unfolds like a gangly, anorexic ironing board. Our first week in this house we set it up on the back patio with a large plastic tub of sheetrock plaster on its bottom leg to keep it from tumping over in the wind or if someone couldn’t figure out how to balance the load. I don’t know where you’re from, but “tumping” is a legitimate word in the Texas Panhandle. It means what it sounds like. In my English-teacher-mode, I would say it’s onomatopoetic. There’s the two-dollar word for this essay.

When it isn’t deployed on the patio, folks can erect it in the kitchen, but, since the kitchen is a shared space in this rental, we set it up in our eighty-five-square-foot room. It takes up about twenty of those squares. Can you visualize what I’m getting at here?

I finally escaped the domestic chores - after doing my share - and headed out to locate and explore London’s “Little Venice.” This is where the Grand Union Canal intersects the Regent’s Park Canal at the Grand Union Basin. The Basin is where the water is wide enough to turn a fifty-three foot long boat around. 

These boats are anywhere from twenty-four feet long to fifty-three. Most of the serious commercial boats are fifty-three feet long. In 2019 of the Current Era, there is still freight being moved by barge in the environs of London. Not a lot, but enough. There’s even a special-built duckweed cutter that gathers up the duckweed growing bankside and under the bridges, hoovers it aboard, and turns it into compost ashore. The greatest number of cargo-haulers have been converted into live-aboard houseboats, many of which are pretty much permanently berthed in a single spot with shore-based power and plumbing, And while many are permanently tied to the bankside, there is a thriving industry of renting purpose-built boats to tourists who motor the canal system at the mandated limit of three miles per hour. That’s walking speed. They’re affordable, but they’re not cheap. If you have kids and a dog, it could be a really good deal because the canals connect the major manufacturing cities of England. They are bridged over for automotive traffic, and though the max speed on the water is slow, the only checks to your progress are the locks that raise or lower the boat to the next water level. The canals cut through quiet, high-end residential areas, rowdy industrial areas, and open countryside. A fortnight on a narrowboat is definitely on our bucket list for the coming summer. Maybe with cousins, probably not with our adult kids yet.

I walked the Grand Union canal for a mile or so after stopping for a waterside (in a converted boat) cream tea around three-thirty. Two red currant scones (clunky biscuits), jelly, clotted cream (butter), and a two-cup pot of tea. (I’m starting to hear “pot of tea” in my head with the local dialect’s glottal stops.) I had the option of sitting inside or canalside. No question. Canalside provided lovely sun and a breeze and a view of narrowboats and foot traffic. It was positively delightful. I hadn’t tucked a novel in my backpack, so I updated my London map with colored markers for routes I had walked and inked circles of sites that were important to me that I had found. I also took a few minutes and knifed the garishly colorful glazed cardboard cover from the map. The map folds as easily now, but it’s more compact without that cover, and it fits so much more easily into a pocket. I can also get the the “A”-lettered grid squares now without being afraid of tearing them.

I had earlier found Agatha Christie’s address on Northwick Terrace. There was no blue disc on the building, but it was numbered “5,” so I knew I was in the right place. The tall, thin gentleman in front of the building was looking at me quizzically, so I asked him, “Where’s the blue disc?” An even more puzzled look was his response. When I explained the results of my homework, he told me he’d owned the building for six years, and nobody’d ever mentioned Agatha Christie before. I kick-started the conversation responding, “You’ve never had a retired English teacher come by then?” He has the building for rent, furnished, for fifteen hundred pounds per week (gasp) - it has four bedrooms and three baths and a garage (with that strange English-homeland pronunciation that rhymes with “carriage”). I snapped my photo, and we parted ways. He said he’d look it up to see if, indeed, the celebrated author had lived there. I figure that’s worth another hundred quid a week. Just looking at the architecture (uninspired but functional), I’m certain the original structure was taken down to build the new block. Oh, well. Change is the constant. Maybe there’s a photo somewhere.

Fun note: there is a statue of Paddington Bear under the pedestrian bridge at the Basin. The metal sculpture is coated with a light blue foam coating . . . like a kid’s plush toy. It’s so much fun.

I followed the Grand Union Canal to its Basin. What I’m sure was originally a collection of warehouses and dockside shops is now a towering horseshoe of high-rise-high-dollar apartments and office buildings and trendy restaurants. These buildings are arranged like the box canyon where the Butch Cavendish gang ambushed a posse of Texas Rangers. You know the story: Tonto happened on the scene and rescued the only survivor, John Reid, who became the Lone Ranger. (Cue the “William Tell Overture.”) I was able to make my way out of the canyon and follow the signs to the Marble Arch. The arch was what it said it was. It looks familiar because the 1827 architect modeled it after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and Constantine’s Arch in Rome. It’s a triumphal arch. But it’s not even where it was originally built, in front of Buckingham Palace. It was moved to its present site when the palace was added to. The arch was built originally where the balcony Queen Elizabeth waves from today. If you can move Marble Arch, what’ll they next? London Bridge? Oh. Right.

While the Arch is tucked in amongst the trees, there is a very striking thirty-five or forty foot tall bronze horse’s head cropping the grass within fifty yards of it. I found the horse first, originally from a bus to somewhere else, and then I found the Arch. And then I found the Underground station. I considered catching the train from Marble Arch on home.

But then the thought of my upcoming walk along Hadrian’s Wall fluttered across my frontal lobe, and fired the synapse, “how far is “home” from here?” Turns out it’s only a tad bit over five miles. Of ongoing concern, also, is all the torrential rain focused a hundred miles or so from the eastern end of the Wall at Newcastle-on-Tyne. I’m watching; I’m watching. I’m going, but I’m watching. I’d rather walk dry, but I’m gonna walk. And consider the Romans’ wall.

So off I go. It’s only a quarter of five in the afternoon; I should be home by seven or so.
Yes; it was right at two hours, and I was off my paper map within half an hour. My route took me back over some of the ground I had already covered, and I more or less followed the Grand Union Canal almost halfway home. At one point I figured I had lost the canal, and I stepped off the footpath (English for “sidewalk) beside the street into a small, shaded pocket-park. As I sat there, the roof of a narrowboat dieseled past and I felt so much better about my route. What really comforted me is that the Grand Junction Arms pub -on the Grand Union Canal- is about a quarter mile from where we are staying. So between paralleling the canal and the subway lines, I made it to the house.

Before dinner I computed my mileage for the day. I had started this morning by getting on the London Euston train instead of the Elephant and Castle train. I figured I was good to go. I wasn’t. After Willesden Station, the rails diverged (without “yellow wood”), and I wound up in a part of London I hadn’t yet seen. Well, actually, to tell the truth, that really worked for me. This trip is meant to be an exploration of The City, and everywhere I go is new. Many a time I begin a day starting where I’ve been before and branching out from there. Today I went to the tip of the branch and worked my way back to familiar ground. Then I went beyond that. Since I’m on foot the greater part of the day, I figure all my mileage counts, and today, I covered just over nine miles. That’ll work. I have to average just over twelve a day to be able to cover Hadrian’s Wall in a seven-day.

Anyway, dinner and a trip to the grocery, and it’s time for tonight’s Sherlock video. This is research, I do assure you. Roger Moore’s portrayal in the 1976 “Sherlock Holmes in New York” is -way- down the list. He did smoke a calabash meerschaum, but his lines were forced, even stilted; all the acting was melodramatic. He doesn’t come within visual range of Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett. Not even.

Tomorrow we have Agatha Christie’s play “The Mousetrap” scheduled for the three o’clock show. That play has been running since 1952. It’s only seven years younger than I am. It’ll be fun to watch.

Because Life is Good.

Sixteen hundred fifty words in an hour and a half.
I’ll edit when we get back from “The Mousetrap.”
OK; I’m satisfied with this one; it’s just under two thousand words.
I think I’m going to reduce my sit-down-and-write time to an hour a day because I need to get out and explore. I either have to write about what I remember or what I have seen. It gets fun when I can connect the dots.