Stormy North Sea Sky

So where have I been this last fortnight? Away in Copenhagen visiting our friend Sonja at the Distortion Festival, and it’s taken me about the same amount of time to recover. R and I decided a while ago that if we were going to do any short haul European travel we wouldn’t fly. It’s not just for environmental reasons either – making the travel part of the fun is a huge reason too. Ferries and trains in Europe are a lovely way to travel. Hint: always carry a bit of root ginger, crystallised ginger, ginger ale or whatnot, as ginger calms travel sickness like nothing else can and makes a rough voyage as comfy as can be.  Anyway, our love of slow travel is what enabled me to get this picture of a stormy evening sky over the North Sea. You can’t see it in the picture but there was quite a swell already; by nightfall it was raining and there were huge waves too.

The ferry was vast and incredibly comfortable, so much nicer than being cramped in an aeroplane. However the bar was terrifyingly expensive;  we got some beer anyway and sat watching the “floorshow” – a hard bitten Glasgwegian wedding singer who plainly had cabin fever and couldn’t wait for his last show to end. His jokes probably hadn’t been funny when he began his tour and he wasn’t even pretending any more – at one point he walked off mid song and disappeared for about five minutes, presumably to take a big slug of Dutch Courage. Seriously, I could write a novel about this guy, but before I am tempted to do so I should describe the rest of the journey. The waves were pretty huge by the time we went back to our cabin, but thanks to my root ginger habit (see above) I was not feeling in the least seasick. However I was disconcerted when, once in bed, the ship was lurching and swaying so much that my head was hitting the headboard and I was sliding up and down the bed at irregular intervals. Luckily I was tired enough to sleep well once accustomed to the movement.

The train Journey across Denmark to Copenhagen was breathtaking – the countryside in gloriously sunny early summer (just a couple of weeks behind GB) was mesmerising and I longed to walk in the meadows and woods I saw speeding by. The huge bridge and tunnel that takes you across to the island of Zealand is an extra excitement. And the train its-self was comfortable, spacious, and fast. I love train travel – it accustoms you a little to the new place you are in. So much better than having to fly.

For more beautiful and fascinating images of the sky around the world, visit Skywatch Friday!

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Beneath the pavement, the Beach

This weekend we felt giddy with summer and took a spontaneous day trip along the South Bank. There is usually something entertaining happening there; this time it outdid itself. It was the day of the Coin Street festival, an intimate, quirky event that saw Polish experimental musicians rubbing shoulders with riotous gypsy bands and local heavy metal kids. The Meltdown festival hosted by Massive Attack was opening at the Royal Festival Hall, there was a wacky architecture event on at the Hayward gallery, plus a glorious exhibition about coral reefs, impossible mathematical objects and crochet. The sun was out, the sky was a riot of restless cloud, the pavements full of happy, strolling, culture guzzling people.

But what lies below the thronged pavements of the Thames Embankment? On this particular Saturday old lady Thames was having a particularly low tide, so a glance over the embankment railings revealed a pocket of golden sandy beach. It’s true that most of the wide and neglected Thames beach is shingle and quite a bit is mud, but it seems strange to me that aside from the work of these sculptors even the sandy parts lie utterly deserted. I have always loved walking along this secret shore, but the tide has never been out as far as this on the other occasions I’ve come to explore it.

We raced down the stone steps to beach level and walked the relatively short stretch from Waterloo bridge to the Tate Modern, revelling in the unique views to be had from this unusual angle. The tide must have gone out by about twenty or thirty metres, revealing bridge supports and hidden structures built below street and river level, invisible to the oblivious crowds on the busy pavements above. A pier which normally juts out into deep water was completely exposed, and St Paul’s Cathedral and the glass towers of the city could be glimpsed through its massive legs.

One of the fun things about such low tides (if you are like me) is the chance to examine the strand line. The Thames is no longer the filthy stinking river it once was; it is home once more to (reintroduced) salmon, and quite fabulously, a rare colony of seahorses has been found in deepest industrial Dagenham. Even in the very centre of this great Metropolis the water is reasonably clean. Lady Thames is grand enough to be, to some extent, still untamed. A serious beachcomber on the Thames is supposed to obtain a license – the swift tides and estuarine mud further downriver can be treacherous and if you are to spend long hours gleaning the shores you need to understand the dangers. Just as important, many items of historical significance can be found and it is important that such discoveries are recorded. Those licensed to search the shores are known as Mudlarks. As well as antique bottles, ceramic shards and old clay pipes, Roman coins have been known to get washed up on the strand.

I’ve never been that lucky but I don’t care; it’s all interesting to me. True, there is as on any shore in the world now, a certain amount of plastic rubbish (I have helped with the clearing up after a Reclaim the Beach festival in the past but sadly I rarely remember to take a bin bag for litter picking on my solo jaunts) but the items stranded are fascinating in themselves. Why are there so many ceramic shards in one particular place – was there a china factory there? The pub a couple of hundred metres upstream could explain why there is a large amount of brown and green glass below their establishment, but I doubt that they’d know anything about the large quantities of delicately coloured art glass that is to be found all along the stretch we walked. One part of the shore is littered with eroded but still distinctive yellow London clay bricks – a spoil heap for a building site, or was there once a brickworks in the area? Are the clam and oyster shells a tip off that these creatures are living somewhere in the river, or were they simply dumped here by a local restaurant?

We gleaned a few pretty ceramic fragments and some interesting bits of old glass, watched the cormorants and herring gulls and feral pigeons squabble and wheel, idly turned over a few stones, then climbed the steps back up into the other world, the world of busy crowds and conventional city views.

After exploring all the good clean civilized fun to be had in the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall, we re-emerged to find the sun had gone down. In a mere two hours the tide had turned, the water having risen almost to the level of the pavements, and the buildings and bridges were lit up and shining as if gilded. The places where we had stood in sunny daylight were now under twenty metres of black water, the mysteries that the river had briefly shared now taken back into its depths.

In this built up and heavily populated place, below the inky ripples gaudily lit by street lights, over my footsteps from this day, the fishes are now swimming.

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