And so I let the water take me
this way and that but always on
always afloat
bar the odd spluttering lungful
a few stinging tears
just from the salt
trusting it will bring me somehow to the right shore
(and cold winter sun points the way)
Compass
nature
Dawnie – old wild Smoke
I hiked 18km to work this morning, crossing London NW to SE. Caught dawn on the river.
Been working in Canary Wharf this month, surrounded by the wet stuff and in sight of the docks. History and wild just under the shiny corporate surface. It gets me thinking. I give my days to my office aircon, but for the price of a coffee I could unlock enough hours to follow the water in the old way.
I leave my house in West Hampstead at 04:44, because that’s poetic and also because I promised to be at my desk by 08:15. It’s 2 days past the full moon and she stays high. A biting clear night, and I’m easy as I push familiar ground.
At 04:56 I hear the first birdsong, but it’s an insomniac, all out of whack. The second call comes from a pair of robins at 05:12. Still dark.
I’m not a nervous city dweller, but in a nod to being a lone female I resist the temptation of a nighttime stroll through the parks. I waver at pretty Primrose Hill but turn back and skirt the edges – keep common sense. Foxes playing chase at 05:19. I pass Regents Park and here I do feel exposed; unheard and unheeded. Pick up the pace, tuck blonde hair under my collar. The very first hint of lightening sky on the horizon, 05:30.
With relief I hit the main artery, Euston Road already alive with commuters, and the deserted dark roads of north London are behind me. I melt into streets that know me, passing my old student halls at 05:45. Sip scalding jasmine green tea from my Thermos.
05:50 into Soho – far from the first time, but rarely from this end of the night. Sky showing a first deep blue as I hit Covent Garden, hospitality waking to the day. Chairs scraping, aprons tying, a waft of something baked. Then at 06:12 I wind round the back of the Savoy onto the Embankment, and from now I’ll follow the river.
As I find the water, the first pre-dawn rainbow in the East sends me scrambling up a bulwark to snap photos, grinning like a child. Pause as I figure out how to get back down, fingers numb.
Walk on to Blackfriars, where the river drops away behind roadworks and places not made for people, and here I have to defy Google to stay on the banks and not be sucked up towards the City. Oh, metaphors.
I’m vindicated by the realisation that the Thames Path is long and true to its companion, and I can walk it almost all the way.
Past all the sights – Tower Bridge, the Tower’s turrets, HMS Belfast – I and a few morning joggers, plus the odd requisite Japanese tourist, even at 7am.
Google and private residence signs try to turn me away at Wapping, but I hop a small fence and am suddenly rewarded with a fireball sunrise. It catches me unawares, and I laugh out loud with the surprise of it, red over grey green blue at 07:24.
I wore trainers, and I’m limping now from pressure on my achilles. But I’m only just bang on time, so I push the pace hard to afford myself short photo and thermos breaks. It’s worth it. Ducking down algae-grown apartment steps brings me onto stretches of sandy beach, fresh green seaweed around my Nikes, for all the world a seaside morning.
It makes me laugh again, the incongruity – standing in this silent private wilderness, waves lapping, watching the sun rise over my shiny city target. 07:33. More jasmine tea and I press on fast. Past docks and cranes, warehouses and shipping containers, where the developments are fewer and old London closer. The history of river trade and industry still raw and near.
Fresh lemon light spreads through the haze, and suit-trainer combos form their own tide towards the city, matching my stride. A little less disheveled and windswept, and not obviously limping.
But my mind is brimming with the full moon, the foxes’ wild dash, fire over water and the clink of metal on the docks, the breeze on the foreshore in a rose tint dawn, sand under my feet. And when I hit the Wharf, first I hit the actual wharf, and briefly it still feels a maritime creature. I’m 4 minutes from work when corporate London finally closes around me, and I walk into aircon and stillness and coffee.
And all day I can’t shed the wild I was in out there.
Mad to Live Retreats
“…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”
– Jack Kerouac, On the Road
For a week, I joined the raddest girl gang there is. And then I didn’t write about it for a month, unsure how to pour all the blazing sun and breezy dawnies, blue surf and red cliffs, morning yoga and midnight pizza, the dancing and dreaming, all onto a blank white page.
Meet Sophie Everard, a giggling cussing firework in cutoff denim short shorts. Warm, formidable, unstoppable bombshell of free-spirited trailblazing. Aka Mama Turtle, for the care she took shepherding her brood (us) in the water, taking pride in our every baby wave (and cackling at our more epic wipeouts).
Sophie’s Mad to Live retreats bring together adventurous women for a week of the everything. The Portugal retreat has 8 of us freewheeling through a schedule of surfing, yoga, horseriding, mountainbiking, trail hiking, dam jumping, beach lazing, shopping, dancing, girls’ night movie watching and tattooing (optional). Sangria and food feature strongly.
First week of October, stiff from early flights and airport aircon, we arrive home to a colourful cobblestone Lagos street. Rooms built around the fairylight-strung courtyard where we’ll have all our meals and a fair bit of wine. We wander, we lunch, we introduce, and then we grab our new Roxy towels and hit the beach to let sunset yoga unwind us. Spanish yoga teacher Igor is a gentle soul with a voice made for Savasana. People have been known to ask for tapes, I’m told.
Meet Lucy, Sophie’s co-host; a bronzed hippy beauty with a deadpan crackshot humour that has us in fits all week. Even when it’s pre-dawn on the first Sunday morning and we’re up and out for a sunrise hike. We traipse the trails up to the high cliff paths and down to the sea caves, whooping at the views, solidly earning breakfast.
We have four full surf days, on different beaches – we start on the west coast in punchy whitewater, spend two days on the nearby balmy Meia Praia catching some lovely baby greens, and when that goes flat we head wave-hunting back west. Through forest nature reserves, windows down, car filled with sun and pine. Two trusty instructors from Lagos’ cult classic Surf Experience look after us all week, along with Sophie and Lucy, ensuring we get out in the water and don’t just succumb to sunbathing.
We paddle, we wipeout, we triumph, we flop. We sunbathe and eat picnic lunches on the beach. We pop up, we fall down, we cheer each other on and we sing at the top of our lungs the entire ride home. It’s hard to put into words the laughing tornado that is 10 feisty women thrown together 24-7.
There’s an epic mountainbiking trail ride I miss out on, as I get struck down by something for a couple of days (possibly sunstroke, we speculate after 10 hours in 33*C). Instead, I scramble gently around the clifftops at Ponta de Piedade, inhale red soil and blue water below, drink it in. Walk slowly back into town, taking care to stop regularly for pastel de nata fuel like any responsible patient.
The next day we spend on a ranch, practising technique in the pool (argh turtle rolls) and riding out. I have possibly my favourite hour of week on the lovely, impeccably trained Rubi, cantering the hill paths. On the way home we stop at a dam bridge, from which the braver few dive into the cool depths below for an adrenaline kick proper. Safe to say I keep dry here – it’s a choose-your-own-adventure kind of week.
Most of our meals are in our courtyard or on the rooftop of the Surf Experience surfhouse, all conjured by the amazing Kim – healthy, ridiculously delicious fare. Some nights we venture out for dinner and dancing – Sunday kicking things off with a live funk band beachside under a flaming sunset. No filters, truly.
Sophie – who despite her chilled nomadic ways is one of the most motivated, organised women I know – spurs us on, cracks us up and inspires us to live as we would. We go to bed each night – at wildly different times according to inclination – exhausted, salty haired and full. Of the day and of life. And probably still humming 90’s hip-hop from that afternoon’s drive.
Which is really the only thing from this retreat that I’m willing to leave behind as I come home.
Wild camp
We lug backpacks up the hill, overheavy and silly for just one night but you need the basic kit. Choose a spot at random that falls away beneath us, the coast just visible on one side, steep valley edge on the other. We’ll sleep here. It’s all we’ve come for, this mini pilgrimage on a whim.
Pad softly to the nearby trees for sunset ablutions, bare feet finding thistles. Cringe and laugh when twilight brings fat drone July bugs out of hiding and straight into our hair. Play dodgems for 10 mins, ’til it’s the bugs’ bedtime too and the buzz melts away. Gone suddenly as they came, and now only the odd satellite ticks across the sky.
I brought a torch, but the full moon blazes across the grass. Slide a bivvy bag over my sleeping bag and mat. Get annoyed at the narrowness of the bottom. Resolve yet again to get something roomier. Shut eyes against the midnight flare.
Feel the weirdly reassuring, weirdly familiar, breeze on my face as I drift. As though I always slept under the open sky and just forgot ’til now.
Dandelion wishes
Tick tock, dandelion clock, watching for wishes to carry on a generous late April breeze.
It’s whimsy and fancy and fairy lights dancing high up on the darkening hill.
It’s first star at twilight and echoing laughter, and we’re barefoot, hand in hand through the trees
The night heady with bluebells and fools’ golden dreams
And by morning, the woods sweet and still.
Winter sun
London Weather (practically a living entity unto itself) is too much of a cliché for any self-respecting blog post to give it much space.
So – it hasn’t been good, the London Weather. But it hasn’t been dramatic either, and a bit of drizzle rarely kills. Still, it doesn’t kick your spirit into get-up-and-go, nor make you feel your life brimming over with possibility.
And when London Winter delivers an actual Sunny Day, you take it and you run with it, you hear me? Now, fast, hurry. While it’s shining, go make your January hay – it’s likely to cloud over by 4pm.
I have a routine, at any hint of a sunny afternoon, through Regents Park. Tracing my steps year after year along much the same paths, watching the seasons turn, slowly and undramatically.
I start near Baker Street, by the lake, watching the herons sunbathing with their wings spread in summer, hitting the tourists up for food in winter. One bright soul was using chopsticks to steer clear of their snapping beaks. The black swans glaring a warning lest you stray too close, uninterested in what you have to offer. Further down the path, an old lady enjoying the company of chubby squirrels, so tame in Regents that they’ll scramble onto your knees to grab a snack.
Up the inner circle, through the wrought golden gates, to the island rock garden. This time of year the birds aren’t nesting, so you can cross the Monet bridge and walk around the island’s hidden little paths. In picnic weather you trade off lilac and wisteria for nesting restrictions.
Over walkways flanked by seedheads and tall grasses, glowing in the light, their beauty not just seasonal but shifting in seconds as the rays dull with cloud. Making a victory of having caught the scene at all, this hour, this day.
To the rose garden flanked with sunny benches – no blooms now but lots of thorns and promise – and onwards out to the sports fields, the formal plantings and the far exit, scattered with ordinary daffs like it’s trying to be woodland.
Feeling I’ve traversed the varied terrain of a traveller in my brisk wintry hour. All in a central London city park.
Air cold in lungs, duck calls ringing in ears, last of the sun gleaming off the fountains. Cleansed.
Slavic winter cometh
No sooner had I pressed the publish button on that last post, of course, than the arctic winds blew in from the north and the temperature plummeted instantly. There may have been frost forming on the keyboard by the time I switched off the computer.
But I cared not, for I had already committed myself to several days of guaranteed early winter with a trip to Poland.
A quick stop in the university city of Wrocław – a couple of hours’ turn through the elegantly distressed streets, which have seen both better and worse times, now foggily shrouded in November greys. The ducks still shaking off the first chill by the river. Trees bare, letting glimpses through to sculptures scattered through the city’s parks and piazzas.
A visit to the Christmas market – a relatively recent Germanic addition to the Polish festive scene – gingerbread colours breaking through the murk. Mountain craftsmen with sheepskin wares and smoked cheeses fresh off the grill, a mulled wine mist weaving between the fairy-lit huts.
This is a city for warm weather when, like most of this region, its pastels shine and the sun gleams off the river, filtered through willows. But it’s also a city well used to winter, and there’s no fuss as the nights draw in.
There are cities (I’m looking at YOU, Catalunya) where the historic architecture is merged elegantly with modern creations, in a work of delicate genius. Were that we could say the same, but the most we can perhaps give to the planners in Poland is their unabashed enthusiasm for the new, a fearless approach to colour and a certain creativity. To each his own planning laws.
My main stop of the trip is the town of Jelenia Góra near the German/Czech borders – aptly named “Stag Mountain”, it sits at the foot of the Carpathians. Its main tourist footfall comes from Germans who were relocated from these Lower Silesian lands in the post war Russo-German carve-up, although a local taxi driver pointed out that with every passing year there are fewer of those left with us.
On my first day here it snows, leaving me happy to catch snowflakes on my tongue, but rather unwilling to tackle the 25 minute walk into town from the very edge where I’m staying. Even here progress is resolute, and what used to be cornfields and woods behind the last house in the town now bears a set of shiny new homes and a ring road.
Still, it will take a few years for the last bit of wild to be tamed, and several ruined farm buildings still stand crumbling amid tangled brush, recalling the days when this was a socialist government-owned farm. Less than 30 years ago, but you wouldn’t know it now.
The next day, by magic, gleams with sunlight and blue frosty skies. I walk down the tree-lined road that borders the Pałac Paulinum (now restored to visitable historic glory, having played host to army barracks for years), past the woods on either side that still fill the edge of town and to the typically Slavic pastel town centre.
There are at least 10 banks on the Main Street, which probably testifies to the eagerness with which Poland has embraced personal lending in recent years. The irony being, of course, that they survived the financial crash unscathed exactly because that credit boom had not yet caught on.
But why dwell. There are green oxidised-copper domes on the churches, a fondant fancy set of facades in the “Rynek”, a hut of mountain folk produce (as ever, focused heavily on sheepskin), street sculptures filling every amenable space.
One iron stilt-walker emerging from a wall honours the town’s annual street arts festival held every September, when the town centre fills with street theatre, music and art for an entire month’s worth of Indian summer.
This is the under-publicised side of Poland – the incredible wealth of intellectualism, culture and art that thrive in spite of some obvious challenges. I return that afternoon to news of the Polish parliament in chaos over the latest political idiocy, but let’s not pretend that is unique to here. The ability to keep the beauty thriving in the midst of upheaval – we can all take something from that.
daysofcreature 
