F*ing cycle path!

I made up my mind last night to cycle in today, and, even though it was pissing down with rain, that’s what I did.

I bought a extremely loud luminous yellow jacket last week for wearing in the rain which makes me look like a bit of a twat, but those who do look at me need sunglasses!

Except, that is, for the fucking idiot driving a Mercedes towards the roundabout I was on. He was clearly not going to stop so I had to abuse him and ask him if he couldn’t fucking see me, dressed, as I was, like a poisonous banana.

En route to the ferry (I cheat nowadays and get the Star ferry from Canary Wharf to the Hilton on the other side of the Thames. It’s like living in Hong Kong again!) I use a cycle path by the marina.

This morning, I encountered four lads walking in it so I slow down, they move aside. But as I pass, one of the charmers shouts out: "Get on the fucking road."

I felt compelled to reply: "Get off the fucking cycle path, you c***."

Honestly, it’s a jungle out there for the humble cyclist.

At the pier, I get on the wrong boat but realise in time, get off and jump on the 'Star Ferry'.

And now, I am freezing my tits off at the factory, where the air conditioning is set to about 10 degrees.

Moan, moan, moan. The weekend can’t come quick enough this week!

It's mad at the factory

My colleague is swanning about on holiday and I am doing two people's work!

Which means, goddamit, I have to work non-stop all day without a break just to get it done in time - and tonight, I am waaay beyond time and still have loads to do!

Poor old me.

And why am I still here? Because I had to spend all day subbing the filth out of an online orgy instead of getting on with my work, that's why.

Grrrrrr.

Culcha is our middle name

Theatreland called to us again last night, this time the rather shabby Gielgud Theatre.

I took The Other Half to see One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Christian Slater and Mackenzie Crook.



It was an enjoyable show, well acted, and, of course, a great story, but nothing quite as remarkable as other things we have seen this year.

Slater, Hollywood boy, did a good job as RP McMurphy, especially as the role is so linked with Jack Nicholson. Crook was adequate as the stuttering Billy, although at the curtain call I had to restrain myself from shouting out G-G-G-G-Garath!

But it is good to see these people acting live. Just down the road, hundreds of screeching morons were gathered to wet themselves over the arrival of Jude Law et al for the première of Captain Skylark, or whatever that film is called.

Why do people do this? Lower themselves and worship these surgically enhanced people as if they are somehow better than they are? Jeez, “celebrities” shit, sleep and shag just like the rest of us – they just do a bit of acting for a living. It’s not as if they save lives, or anything.

Art is important. Without drama, song, painting, dance, our lives would hardly be worth living, but there is no need to prostrate yourself on the floor in front of the people who do these things. Especially Jude bloody Law!

Still, there has never been any accounting for the taste of the screaming masses.

Good work, Wyebird

CRITICAL MASS

Tidy and I met up with about 400 other bikers by the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. It was all very exciting. A sea of bright jackets, blinking lights and the pinging of bells.

At 7pm we were off with our police escort. I wonder if they were the same cops who were learning how to jump up and down kerbs outside my flat the other month.

We toured round the Imax cinema and over Waterloo Bridge. For some reason Tidy and I found ourselves leading the mass (mainly to get away from the fella blasting out reggae music from his bike trailer as we wanted to hear our conversation) and headed down Aldwych (after the Old Bill blocked off the entrance to the Kingsland Tunnel to stop us heading up north).

A mass ‘old timer’ soon came up front and gently steered us off our route (we were going to go to Buck House) and the ride headed up to Old Street and around Hoxton, where we had fun holding up the traffic.

We fell back a bit – I think we finally got the idea, that it was a gentle ride rather than a charge through London Town – and saw that the group was made up of people from all walks of life.

There was a guy on a rather cool recumbant tricycle with a puppy dog tucked inside his jacket which was chewing on a sprig of lavender.

There was a woman dressed as an enormous pink butterfly on a tricycle decorated with flags and garlands of flowers, who was handing out the lavender.

There was an old couple on a tandem – he had grey hair and big moustache, she was dressed all in red with a matching bandana tied round her hair 50s-style.

After about an hour-and-a-half, Tidy and I dropped out and went for a curry in Brick Lane.

GREENPEACE

My dedication to saving the environment was tested on Saturday. I met the Greenpeace posse at The London Dungeon prior to our photoshoot on Tower Bridge.

As we stood there posing with campaign banners, the police turned up and started to question us. Apparently, a bus had broken down on the other side of the bridge and they were trying to find out if it was a diversion because we were going to do something exciting, or whether we were a diversion and the bus was going to … to what? Explode?

It didn’t seem to cross their minds that it was just a coincidence. Bless their counter terrorism brains.

We were given a record of our ‘little chat’. The Other Half and I chose to remain anonymous and didn’t give officer R7730 CP5 our names.

On my slip, he had described me as slim. Hurrah! An official government body recognises me as being slim!

After all that kerfuffle, the day turned very cold, rainy and miserable. I was standing down at the GLA building trying to coax people into signing the petition to turn parts of the North Sea into marine reserves to protect what’s left of the flora and fauna.

Most people were not interested.

“Would you like to sign a petition to protect the North Sea?”

“Not today, thank you”, or “I’m sorry, I don’t speak English” were the most common replies.

Still I got about 20 signatures in about three hours (!). The most interested signees were a Canadian man and a homeless, who put down his postcode as SW1.

As I cycled home, frozen to the bone, I noticed the Old Bill were hiding on Tower Bridge filming the Greenpeacers down by the GLA. Have they really got nothing better to do?

Son of a gun!

It was not the first time that I wished I still lived on my boat last night.

The mouldy old pub down the road from the marina has been transformed into a beautiful, sophisticated waterside drinking establishment, complete with ‘gastro-pub’ eatery.

Gone are the garish Axminster carpets and in are dark brown floorboards. Gone are the ripped leatherette bench seats and in are carved wooden pews and soft chairs.

The riverside terrace overlooks the Dome and there are plenty of outdoor heaters for winter drinking.

It’s the perfect place to take a date, meet friends or even read a book.

And, goddammit, it is too far from our flat to call it my local!

But luckily, it is tucked away in a remote corner of the Isle of Dogs so hopefully the braying London types will never find it.

Tonight, Tidy and I are fufilling the ambition of about ten months and joining the Critical Mass bike ride. Tomorrow it’s Greenpeace.

I am becoming Millie Tant!

Much ado in my office

Apologies for the gap in the blog – my work colleague is on holiday and I am sooooo busy!

On Tuesday night, we went to Shakespeare's Globe again. You really can't keep us out of the place.



This time we saw the all-woman production of Much Ado About Nothing, and despite what they said in the papers when it opened, it was brilliant.

The cast played the script for laughs but managed to draw a tear from my eye during the scene where Hero’s dad disowns her for being a tart (although she was falsely accused).

The girls playing boys were very convincing, especially Hero’s father Leonato (I am too lazy to look up her name) and Josie Lawrence, who was fantastic as Benedick (although from where I was sitting, her blonde moustache looked like cat’s whiskers and the passion between her/him and Beatrice was fairly unconvincing).

The show stealer was definitely the girl who played Dogberry (the constable).

If you fancy going to see it, you'd better hurry – it closes on Sept 25.

Sun, sea, sand and ...

We had a surprisingly good night’s sleep. Our sleeping bags and roll mats proved to be the buy of the year – we were all snuggley and warm all night.

Mind you it was quite late when we climbed into them after going for a starlit walk along the beach after the pub. The sky by that time had cleared enough to reveal the Milky Way.

After a breakfast of coffee, croissants and pain au chocolat we headed down to the beach for a walk.

It was a beautiful day – the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the air was fresh.



The beach was mostly clay and mud covered with a light sprinkling of sand and shells.

It was lined with ‘cliffs’ of about 2m high at the most, but that did not deter Essex County Council from putting a sign saying: "Danger! Cliffs" on top of them.



We looked at the boats, fantasising about buying sailing boats and dinghies, and spotted relatively rare birds.

And too soon it was time to head back to the smoke.

We wrestled the tent to the floor and folded it roughly into the back of the car. It will have to be squeezed back into its bag at home.

The bells, the bells

It was a big weekend in London – there was the Thames Festival with stalls, bands, entertainment and fireworks. And it was also Open House weekend where the public were granted access to famous buildings across the capital, such as the Gherkin.

So The Other Half and I decided it would be a great time to go camping in Essex.

We met Andrew and Cheryl at the campsite in East Mersea, on the island of Mersea, which is south of Colchester.

While it is an island, it is only separated from the mainland by a river, which at low tide is about two metres wide. But at high tide, the water spills over the causeway and cuts it off properly.

We pitched out tents in sunshine and headed off to Flatford Mill to check out Constable Country.

The area is absolutely beautiful. There are about eight sites along the river Stroud where Constable painted. But none of them looked much like his pictures – apart from the fact everything had changed in the past few hundred years, I think he painted his interpretation of the scene.

Consider the Haywain – this is the picture:


and this is the actual place:


As it began to cloud over, we hired a rowing boat, which I rowed as I was the only one who knew how to use the oars! The others had paddles though, and when we were under full steam, we sped along.

We drove back to the campsite via a very interesting old church, St Mary the Virgin.

The building looked like it was started in about 1200 and added to over the years.

Most curiously, the bell tower was not a tower at all but a shed with the bells suspended from the floor in a wooden frame. It looked like the ringers operated them with a windlass. Must be very noisy. I wonder if they all have tinnitus.



Inside they were selling Holy Socks and a plaque on the wall showed that it now had its first female vicar. Back in the 1400s there was a vicar with the excellent name of William Fleshmonger.

As the organist began piping Deutschland Uber Alles we returned to the tent and cracked open a couple of bottles of wine before heading down the pub. By this time the weather had turned into a bit of a hurricane. I was fearing we would be sleeping in a soggy pile of tent but it stood up to the wind and resisted the rain.

The pub was called The Dog And Pheasant, and it rather nice it was too.

At about 9pm our waitress turned into two lads of about 13 and 14. While I am all for children getting used to earning money, I’m afraid I had to report the landlord for allowing them to serve us alcohol.

Call that art?

It’s nice to see the ‘ancient art of painting’ is alive and well.

The Other Half and I went to the Lexmark European Art Prize UK finalists’ exhibition last night for some free wine and food. Oh and to see exciting new works by the cream of British artists!

Mostly, the pictures were bollocks but there was three I liked. My favourite was mostly orange with what looked liked a shed shelf sketched across the middle.

The rest looked like GCSE projects. It’s amazing what passes for talent these days.

When we got home we tuned into our new favourite TV channel Ftn.

Last night it was Most Haunted with Derek Corah but my particular favourite is Sixth Sense with Colin Fry.

Derek wanders round haunted sites with Yvette Fielding talking to ghosts (last night he was particularly upset by some evil bastards in former prison The House Of Detention).

Colin’s show is more emotional. He converses with the spirit world to pass on messages to his studio audience – cue lots of real tears and reliving private grief in public.

Funny how the dead are always really concerned about their old tea services and the like, rather than passing on any information which is actually of some use!

Greenpiece?

I took the second step towards saving the planet last night by attending my first Greenpeace meeting.

The Other Half and I arrived at the Royal Festival Hall in good time for the 7.30pm start. The only problem was we had no idea what the people we were supposed to meeting looked like.

I had a very amusing half-hour, or so, wandering round the foyer bar asking likely-looking candidates if they "were Greenpeace". You know the types – people wearing badges and outdoorsy clothes, with mumsie hair. (Just like me and the Other Half! not.)

When I asked a security guard if he knew who they were (there is a meeting every month, you see) he looked at me like I was mad and said: "Green piece. Naaaa, I ain’t never heard of nuffin like that."

Eventually, a rather glamorous woman walked in (late!) and another girl called out her name and lo! we had found our contact.

It was very interesting. We discussed the issues of the day – mainly the campaign to get parts of the North Sea designated as a marine reserve - and decided what events the group was going to do in the coming months.

In two weeks we are having a stall near the GLA building to promote the oceans campaign and next month we are going to leaflet Esso customers about the evils of E$$o.

I also got volunteered to work out a pub-crawl route round the South Bank area for a fundraising Christmas night in December. Any suggestions welcome.

It felt very good to finally be getting involved with trying to make a change instead of just sitting about talking about it. It is small-scale work but really, when it comes to things like this, every little helps.

All this on the day when hunting with dogs was banned after a scuffle in the House of Commons.

What a good day for nature!

Sky rockets in flight, afternoon delight.

Is the new advert for Chanel Mademoiselle, the one with the white-suited girl who looks like she wants to be slapped about by a Premiership football player, the pikey-est advert ever? Chav-nel Mademoiselle, more like. Poor old Coco is probably turning in her grave.

The Other Half and I went to see Anchorman – The Legend Of Ron Burgundy last night.

We literally laughed our socks off. Well, we would have if our shoes weren’t in the way.

Burgundy and his gang of newshounds are, frankly, 70s sexist pigs, but with natty suits and great wing collars.

Life is good – they are top of the ratings and have throw the kind of parties where women throw themselves at them.

All women, except Veronica Corningstone. She wants, ha ha, to be , ha ha ha, the first, aha, woman news reader!

Burgundy falls in love and woos her with some classic lines, such as "I want to be in you".

But what’s it like, Ron, this thing called love, his boys ask. It’s like Starland’s Afternoon Delight, apparently.

Packed with one liners and great visual gags, cameos from Rip Torn and Ben Stiller (is he ever off the screen?) and even a Two Ronnies-style newscasters’ rumble, it’s worth a squint.

Bloody cars

I love my Puma, probably more than is appropriate considering it is just a lump of metal, but yesterday he wasn’t quite the good kitty he usually is.

Although there is just 19,000 miles on the clock he needed a new clutch.

The first signs came when I accelerated up a hill in fourth and the engine revved but we didn’t go any faster. The second sign was when the garage took him apart and found the clutch plate worn down to the rivets.

I couldn’t believe it. Nor could the mechanic – these things are supposed to last about 80,000 miles.

The previous owner (a middle-aged woman who only ever “went down the shops” in him) must have thought she was Nigel Mansell, or something.

And, predictably, once work had started, another bit needed replacing, bringing the bill to £320.

Just what I needed when I am still struggling to flog my old Polo!

But now he goes even faster, and the clutch pedal is much lighter, which is nice.

Lessons learnt:
never drive with your foot resting on the clutch pedal
garages are money-grabbing bastards.

Taxi for Mr Spielberg

After the truly awful AI I vowed never to see another Speilberg film but, due to an oversight, I saw The Terminal yesterday.

It stars Tom Hanks, is based on some guy who actually lived in an airport – that much I did know up front. It is also terminally boring and overly sentimental.

I always thought that if I became homeless, Heathrow would be a good place to live. You could be there 24 hours a day, with all your stuff in a case and no-one would notice.

But in The Terminal, Viktor (Hanks) is living in the airport with the full knowledge of the authorities. He arrives from some Russian state which is having a war and his passport is invalid and he can’t go into New York, or something.

Most of the film was just blah-di-blah-di-blah-di-blah-blah.

Whole scenes went by which I can’t remember, especially the ones where the female lead (Catherine Zeta Jones) was whinging on about a married man she was in love with.

Anyway, some remarkable DIY projects, some matchmaking and some hanging out with the guys later, we find out why Viktor is happy to wait 10 months to leave the airport and go to NYC, only to turn round and promptly go home.

Cheese, cheese, cheese. From the man who made Jaws!

One interesting thing though, Viktor doesn’t speak much English (and sounds a lot like Borat!) and we don’t really get to know him.

It made me think – when you make friends with a Johnny Foreigner, you never do really get to know them; there is always a small part of them (and presumably you) obscured by cultural and language differences.

Congratulations to CZJ – she managed to look enough unlike herself to make me think Hollywood had found a CZJ look-alike and how that poor actress will always be compared to the real CZJ.

Except it was the real CZJ. Like I said, I didn’t do enough research before getting a ticket!

And congratulations to Kumar Pallana, an 85-year-old Indian actor/performer/yoga guru who manages to steal the whole show.

Homer: "I'm not handicapped. I'm just lazy."

I went to the factory gym this lunchtime for the first time in about six months.

This crazy behaviour was prompted by the fact I no longer fit into my Marge Simpson fancy-dress costume!

As if being a tubster wasn’t stressful enough, I now have the problem of what to wear to Jenny’s "film and TV characters" theme party.

So I hit the treadmill for half an hour (walking) and did some sit-ups.

To alleviate the boredom, I watched a crappy game show on Channel 5. If the adverts were anything to go by, the only other people watching it must have been clumsy spendthrifts – there were only ads for no-win no-fee accident claims firms and debt services.

I hate the gym. It really is dull as.

Maybe I should modify the Marge costume and go as her fat sisters Selma and Patty.

Welcome home, baby

The Other Half returned from Poland this morning. The first thing he did when he got to his office was to email me to let me know he was back safely despite there being "some trouble" at the game last night.

How sweet, you might think. But no, it was only to take the piss out of my inability to grasp the concepts of LEFT and RIGHT.

Pah! This from the man who washes the floor with Jif and needs me to check the oil in his car!

The left/right thing is genetical anyway. My mum couldn't do it either. If we were driving somewhere, she’d say turn left, and I would turn right. But it was OK as she meant right in the first place!

The Other Half also asked me to settle an argument: "Can you click here, scroll down and tell me if you think Eileen Kinnear is wearing glasses or not?"

What do you think?

You're fattist. No, I said, you're fattest.

I had an evening of extreme-light entertainment last night.

First I went to see Dodgeball.

The Other Half is in Poland for the football, so I took the opportunity to go and see a super-cheesy film at the flicktures.

The laughs were cheap and plentiful, the visual gags spot on. Unusually for disposable Hollywood nonsense, it was also well aimed at British audiences.

There were also hilarious cameos by David Hasslehof (genius!) and Lance Armstrong.

Tip: if you go and see it, make sure you stick around until the very end of the credits.

Dodgeball was followed by Channel 5’s quite incredible Cosmetic Surgery Live, hosted by Vanessa Feltz and “Hollywood surgeon to the stars” Dr Jan Adams.

You have to see it to believe it. The whole show was celebrating the joys and benefits of liposuction, in graphic, close up detail.

Cue US doctors laughing and rubbing their hands together every time a fat woman walks into their waiting room. Ker-ching!

One woman had the fat sucked out of her belly and injected into her arse so she looked like J-Lo.

Another, who was introduced scoffing burgers and pizzas, had several stones of lard hoovered out of her entire body by a quack using a very long needle thing which he inserted under her skin through an incision between her arse cheeks.

Meanwhile, back in the UK Daniella “The Septum” Westbrook was chatting live to a woman who was having her two-year-old defrosted arse fat injected into her face. Honestly!

Check out Channel 5 tonight – 11pm. It’s face lifts …

It IS coz I is past it!

As I have been threatening to do for the past few weeks, I ventured into 'clubland' on Saturday to say bon voyage to Sarah as she heads off into the sunset for a six-month jolly.

I met her and Jo and a bunch of their mates in Dean Street.

You can tell how little I go into London Town these days – all the shops and cafes had changed. Literally every one of them, except Quo Vadis. Oh, and All Bar One, where we met.

The drink was flowing, laughter was drowning out the music (or was there any?) and at one point, a police woman arrived. For once I kept my big mouth shut: she wasn't a gay stripper but an authentic officer of the law.

At chucking out time, we went on to Freedom, in Wardour Street, for more drinking and … gasp … dancing.

I’m not sure what Metro writers would have made of the music there but through my vodka-haze it sounded something like nu-repetitive-threestep-plinky-plonk-speed-handbag.

It certainly made everyone inside dance like those mentalists in the Fat Boy Slim video to Praise You.

Even Steve stood in a baffled manner on the edge of the dance floor, clutching a John Lewis carrier bag, looking for all the world like a pensioner who had just been dropped off by a Sunshine bus and knew he lived nearby, but couldn’t quite remember where.

As the night passed 3am, I found myself in journeying into a world of my own, thinking about how past it I am at a mere 32. I am getting married, losing touch with what young people do at weekends, had to sit out the dancing because of me back, and generally turning into a suburban drudge.

At which point, as if I needed that fact underlining, a girl came up to me and said: "I hope you don’t think I’m being rude, but we’ve noticed you sitting there alone. You can come and dance with us if you’d like," and pointed to a young skeletal freak-boy.

Great. What ever happened to the vibrant, essential, exciting TY?

Arachnophobia

A girl from Scotland was supposed to be staying on my boat for the next three weeks while she did work experience with a publisher in London.

I should have known it wasn't going to work when she said she was bringing her mum with her help her "to settle in" even though she was about 20 years old.

They arrived frazzled after spending all day on the coach, with a ridiculous amount of luggage. Her suitcase was big enough to sleep in and took two of us to lift it. She also had three other bags of stuff. Good lord! She had more stuff with her for three weeks than I owned as a student.

Anyway, they ignored my explicit instructions on how to get to Canary Wharf and ended up lugging all this stuff round Tower Gateway DLR, up stairs and across platforms. They really did not seem very excited to be in London at all.

We took a cab to the boat. I showed them around – the girl was nodding in a vacant manner as I explained where everything was.

But to be honest, her mum was such an appalling dullard that I shouldn't have been surprised that her offspring had no gumption.

I told their blank faces about all the cool things they could do in town, all the museums and galleries, the shows, the cinema, the parks, the sights but all her mum was interested in was where the nearest boot fair was.

Boot fairs? Jesus!

Apparently they go all the time and fill their bags with crap. And, apparently, there is a really good boot fair in Windsor on a Sunday. I explained to them they were quite a long way from Windsor – they were in the East End.

At last, some reaction on their 10-watt faces. "Really?" Mum said (did they not look on a map at where they were going?) "I had no idea. Are there any boot fairs around here?"

When I explained the East End is full of professional types who kit their flats out from John Lewis or old families who probably have nothing they'd want, their faces fell and that was the end of the conversation.

So, as I was leaving, I thought I'd make a joke about hoping they like spiders. I have a couple living on the boat. They are my friends. They spin webs and catch the flies and midges, which are naturally drawn to water.

Ooops. It turns out they HATE spiders.

I asked them not to kill the eight-legged insects and left them to it.

The next morning, the mum rang me up to tell me they were going back to Scotland because "we are terrified of the spiders. We stayed in a hotel last night, which we couldn’t really afford, because we were too scared of the spiders. What would happen if they decided to crawl down my throat in the night!

"We went camping once but we had to go home straight away because there were grasshoppers."

Unbelievable. To come all this way. To lug all that stuff. To give up the opportunity to be in the capital for three weeks (a blessed escape from that insipid, feeble-headed mother) and work in a publishers doing your dream job all because of a couple of spiders. What a twat.

Her mum also said she wanted to go to New York but was afraid of something which I didn’t quite hear, but whatever it was also prevents her from watching anything about the place on television. Maybe it was hot dog stands or the Statue Of Liberty, or something.

Or maybe she was scared of her shadow.

Cripes! What's that? Oh, it's me!

Master and Commander - The Far Side Of The Lea

MONDAY
The trip to Waltham Abbey was certainly easier with all the extra hands. Steve took the opportunity to delegate some of his lock duties to Jo and Sarah and decided to supervise from the bow.



We arrived back at the Old English Gentleman pub in time to join in with the beer festival and meet Bellen.

It was a typical English Bank Holiday event – we were huddled under an umbrella in a pub car park filling our faces with pig-in-a-roll (although The Other Half and I only had onions and stuffing) as the weather cycled through rain, sun, wind and more rain.



But the landlord had made a good effort. Hundreds of people were enjoying a BBQ, kids’ games and a folk band lead by a woman accordionist with the most unfortunate bowl-inspired hairstyle. She clearly needed a trip to Bishop’s Stortford!

After a few pints, it was time for the duck race. About 200 rubber ducks were chucked in the river while hundreds of grown adults screamed their numbers at them while they floated downstream. OK, it wasn’t very rock n roll but it was funny and all for charity.

The highlight of the day for me though, was The Other Half attempting to down a yard of ale. He didn’t stand a chance. The fellas who managed to quaff three pints of beer, some in less than 45 seconds, could well have been carrying twins. I have never seen such gross stretch-marked fat bastards. They must have had at least five bellies.



As you can see, The Other Half is a slim young thing but he did manage a respectable pint-and-a-half.

About 5pm, the excitement was too much for us. We wandered back to the boat and crashed out.

TUESDAY
The Other Half headed off to work about at 7.30am. The rest of the crew slept until 10am. After all, we were on holiday!

We cruised down the Lea. It looked like an entirely different river on the way back and the water was so clear. In places I felt like I was gliding across a gin-clear sea, looking down at kelp forests and the hundreds of fish darting in and out of the fronds. Apart from all the little perch and minnows, or whatever, we saw some HUGE carp.

Jo and Sarah got off at Tottenham Hale as they had to prepare for a pub-crawl. Steve and I continued on to Springfield Marina where we moored up overnight.



It is lovely there. I think I might try and move my boat there but, as with all moorings in London, the chances of getting a berth are thinner than slim.

We wandered into Clapton to find a supermarket. What a curious place! It appears to be populated entirely by Hasidic Jews. Hundreds of men with top hats, long black coats and ringletted sideburns were strolling around while the women dressed like 1920s flappers – calf length skirts with matching jackets, twin-sets and pearls and, more oddly, hats which came down and covered their bobbed hair. And when I say women, most of them were only in their early 20s.

I assume the people of a religious group prefer to marry someone who shares their beliefs, which in Clapton probably doesn’t give you much choice as the population is relatively small. What I guess I am trying to say is everyone looked the same, you know, local features and all that.

The Other Half arrived in time for tea. We played triv after but he got all Paula Radcliffe – when he realised he wasn’t going to win, he gave up!

WEDNESDAY
A chilling start to the day. We were woken by the sound of a woman screaming for help. Steve burst through the back of the boat and ran out on to the towpath. I followed, dialling 999.

We found a woman clinging onto the railings along the bottom of the park which runs along the river. She was very distressed and had been attacked by a man who ran off with her handbag.

I was trying to explain to the call centre where we were but the woman on the end of the phone was being extremely thick and eventually I handed the phone over to Steve. It was then I realised I was standing there in my knickers at 5.30am!

I went back to the boat to make the girl a cup of tea and put some clothes on and by the time The Other Half and I got back to her, she was standing by a car with Steve and another girl who was staying on a boat.

The old bill eventually arrived and it transpired the woman was a prostitute and had picked up a punter but he turned violent. The man actually came back to pick up his car but was arrested.

God knows what actually happened between them but it was clearly not a normal transaction as the girl was so clearly frightened.

What a horrible thing to happen. It is also such a sad story all round. Sad that she said she is ‘addicted’ to working like that as it is so easy – if you need money you can just go out and get it. Sad (probably in a slightly different way) that the man was scouring the streets for sex at five in the morning and felt he could abuse her. Sad that such a nice part of town is the scene of such unpleasant goings on.

The river was beautiful at that time, with a mist rising from the water and the sun just coming up, signalling to the swans and geese to start their day.



When it seemed the police had everything under control we all went back to bed. The Other Half went to work and Steve and I got up at 11am to finish the trip down to Limehouse.

The trip back round the Thames to Poplar was a bit hairy, which is normal when you pilot a bathtub on choppy water! We got back to the berth safely.

It was a great week. I didn’t want it to end.

Stop Storting, eh

SATURDAY
After a bit of a false start, ie getting on the Central Line going the wrong way, I met Steve at Liverpool St to catch the train back to Sawbridgeworth and resume the trip. When we arrived, he discovered he had left his sunglasses on the seat.

We found Ganges as we’d left her – 40ft long and ready to go – but first there was the less glamorous side of boating to attend to. The chemical loo needed emptying and the water tanks filling. I only gagged twice emptying the toilet, which wasn’t bad considering the foulness of the job.

But then we were on our way to Bishop’s Stortford. It was good to be back on the river. The feeling of freedom from deadlines and demands and phones and life in general.

Only an old man in a plastic boat to bother us – he wouldn’t let us share the locks with him as he feared we would squash him. Ha! With my steering and Steve’s ropework there was no chance of that. Still, old men will be old men.

Bishop’s Stortford is the end of the road, as it were, for boaters. The river continues but it is not navigable. We moored up and went into town looking for food.

We must have passed about 12 hairdressers within 20 metres of each other, all of them with a queue of people. The townsfolk didn't have noticeably well-coiffed hair so the queues were either down to sudden communal bad hair day or it was the back-to-school hair cut rush.

We found a café for lunch run by the ubiquitous Saturday girl. Our waitress actually wrote down each individual ingredient of the sandwiches we ordered. I had the spinach special. "That’s bread with butter, cheese, roast mushrooms and roast peppers and spinach for you then," she said (and wrote).

And just as we were thinking there was a spare lockside for her when she retired, we went into Sainsbury’s and were served by a hysterical half-wit who had to "put this pineapple through as a coconut" and only charged us for a third of our shopping. Great for us, a bit of a blow for Lord Sainsbury.

After our little town sojourn, we got back on the boat headed down the Stort where I found my dream property sitting quietly in the sun. I would absolutely love to live here – it was a cute cottage and an all-river sided garden with a place to tie up the Ganges.



We moored up in Sawbridgeworth for the night. We had a game of Triv. Steve won as all my questions came from the hard box.

SUNDAY
We were late waking up this morning – 9am. We set off after a breakfast of croissants and jam and met The Other Half at Harlow Mill lock.

It was handy to have an extra pair of hands although he did insist on leaping across lock gates, and at one point threatened to leap off a bridge onto the moving boat.

We stopped at lunchtime to watch Amir Kahn win the silver medal in the Olympic boxing final on the snowy black-and-white television I have that runs off the batteries.

We continued on to Broxbourne, passing a herd of piglets splashing about in the river. Unfortunately, my camera was not to hand. All along the river we saw flashes of bright blue as kingfishers dived in and out of the water.

We moored up outside a pub at about 7pm, when we discovered it had stopped serving food. As had every pub we came to. After finding the only restaurant near the river was holding some sort of Cher party, we continued walking until we found an Italian place about three miles away. By then we were starving Marvin.

For regular diners there was a programme of entertainment for Tuesday nights consisting mostly of impersonators of singers from the 80s.

One guy, Richard "Listen For Careless Whispers" Carter, was singing as George Michael. Two weeks later, he was billed as Wham bam the dynamic man – Richard Carter is George Michael. I rather think he wasn’t. He was probably still just Richard Carter no matter how many pairs of leather trousers he owned.

We took a cab back to the boat. By the time we got there Jo and Sarah had arrived after an all-day drive down from Scotland and we discovered you can sleep five on the boat.

To be continued ...