The week has passed windily. If you find a blue sock, it’s mine.
Wednesday lunchtime saw me walking down West Norwood High Street carrying one shoe. The circumstances aren’t important – all you need to know is that yes, I was also wearing a pair on my feet. This was a surplus shoe.
In a city the size of London, carrying a single shoe isn’t weird enough behaviour to elicit even a passing glance. What would it take, I sometimes wonder, to make people emerge from their self-imposed cocoons, glance up from their screens, look at you and go ‘Oh look that’s a bit strange’? I’m not particularly keen to put this to the test. Conductors like to be watched, but context is all.
That impassivity for which the British are renowned the world over was demonstrated to me in no small measure on Friday morning, when I found myself on a train rather earlier than I might have liked. It’s a position I find myself in rarely, blessed as I am not to be in possession of what some people call a ‘proper job’.
It was full, this train. Full as I haven’t experienced for a while. We were crammed cheek by jowl by the time the doors opened at Balham. I half expected the release of pressure to fling us all out onto the platform in an ungainly heap. But no, we stood, stolidly ignoring both each other and the sheer insanity of our situation, as more passengers got on, miraculously filling the few remaining crevices like sand poured into a jar of marbles. I contracted muscles I didn’t know I had so as not to take up more space than necessary.
It was hell. For this little snowflake, twenty-five minutes rubbing shoulders and other body parts with my fellow humans was enough to send me screaming into the void.
‘I am on a commuter train OHMYGODHOWDOYOUPEOPLEDOTHISEVERYDAY’ I tweeted, once I’d restored circulation to my fingers.
Nothing if not dry, my followers came back with some apt responses: ‘It’s why we are perpetually on the edge of murder’; ‘This is why in our spare time we play in orchestras, to drown out the sound of our souls dying’; and, most succinctly, ‘Gin’.
The reason for my self-inflicted torture was my keenness to be among the first to visit Walthamstow Wetlands. It’s Europe’s largest urban wetland, home of London’s largest heronry, and it opened on Friday morning.
As I made my way round the site (211 hectares, 10 reservoirs, 8 islands, 13 miles of footpath and cycle track, most of which I think I covered in the course of the day) I found myself envying my Walthamstow friends. Imagine having this slice of countryside on your doorstep in the middle of London.
The birds seemed excited to see me. A cetti’s warbler gave its explosive call from the depths of the reeds; four little egrets and a pair of herons eyed me beadily from a tree. Further on there were cormorants galore; grey wagtails, busily strutting around the water’s edge, then ‘zi-zi!’ and off across the water; a sole common sandpiper rummaging around the edge of one of the reservoirs, keeping me in its sight and making sure I didn’t get close enough to take anything like a proper picture; grebes, ducks and gulls, all enduring the brisk wind with their usual stoicism, looking as if they were suffering tea with a boring relative in an unheated room and only stale rich tea biscuits on offer.
There was this greylag, noble and tame as your cat, which, having slaked its thirst in a nearby puddle, came over to me with the purpose of a bore at a party, and proceeded to woo me with a series of quiet gabbling and jibbling noises.
As I returned to the visitor centre, a gathering of long-tailed tits greeted me with tseeps and peeps from the undergrowth. They’re always active, these little balls of cotton wool on an ice lolly stick. These ones seemed even busier than usual, though. Assuming they were alarmed by my presence, I tried as hard as I could to exude non-killy vibes. It was then that the true reason for their perturbation flew over, low, silent, menacing, its lightly barred underside discernible even in the dull light, the shape of its flexed wings distinctive at any distance.
Peregrine.
No matter that they’ve become relatively commonplace in our cities in recent years. The dangerous grace of the sight is still enough to take the breath away, even if you’re not a long-tailed tit. I watched as it circled once then flew off with lazy beats of its angled wings. I hung around with the long-tailed tits for a few more minutes. They’re good company, but so is a flapjack when you’ve just walked the best part of ten miles in a steady and tiring wind.
Bravo to Thames Water, the Heritage Lottery Fund and Waltham Forest Borough, who have funded the regeneration of this site. Anyone can walk around it now, free of charge, not just the permit-holding birders and anglers to whom access was limited until last Friday. It’s important, this place, a large tract of nearly-central London devoted to wildlife, a breathing space in the heart of the city. I shall return.
I might even give my spare shoe a nice day out. It will make a change from the mean streets of West Norwood.
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A lung for the city. May it set a precedent. Berlin (have you been? Most likely) is full of parks and green spaces…I loved living there.
Fabulous! I’ve been ogling stuff as I drive between those reservoirs for years now, ducking when the swifts swoop over in the summer and driving into the kerb to catch a glimpse of the herons. Now we can go in legimately!
We are still left with the mystery of the missing shoe and distracting us with bird stories!!