Going Swimmingly

My Nicholsons guide tells me that Lee Valley Leisure Pool is a ‘fine facility offering fitness suites, saunas and steam baths’.  Moored in Broxbourne I trot off to get a time-table and find it gone.  In its place is a landscaped area of paths and grassland.  I’m used to Nicholsons singing the praises of pubs which are now empty, boarded up or converted to flats but I would have thought leisure centres would have the decency to hang around a bit longer.  As well as not doing swimming pools Broxbourne doesn’t seem to do food shops so I move back to Cheshunt alongside another part of the lovely Lea Valley Park where wooden sculptures lurk amongst the trees.  Cheshunt has food shops and a leisure centre and a very useful railway station with trains to where I want to go.

At Ware where the charming 18^th Century gazebos line the river there is a 1930’s Lido.  In this weather an open air swimming pool is a delight. I plough up and down the pool as the sun glitters on the water.

Onto Hertford. We are told from Ware onwards that one of the paddles on the lock into Hertford is broken and C&RT are coming to fix it and the lock may be closed for a few days.  As I want to leave the boat for a few days prior to picking up a new crew member I don’t mind. I’m given the information so many times, asked if I have seen the C&RT boat coming up from Enfield, helped at the lock by windlass waving men that I’m beginning to think that a broken lock is the most exciting thing to happen in Hertford for a long time.

The good thing about the lock being liable for closure was that visiting boaters left while they could and we had a choice of moorings alongside the allotments a few minutes walk from the town centre and parks of Hertford.

This morning in Hertford swimming pool resting between lengths I listen to a conversation.

”He said, they said he could speak at the planning meeting but he was only allowed to speak for three minutes.  ‘I’ll be speaking for two minutes’ he said

Well I timed him and I said ‘Do you know Jim that was exactly two minutes’

‘Yes I know’ he said 'I’ve spent days standing in front of the microwave getting the timing right’”

In my survey of the swimming pools along the Lee Navigation I have to, unsurprisingly, give the award for the best to the Olympic Pool. Big and beautiful enhanced by the knowledge of the record breaking sporting feats achieved there and with the added bonus of pausing for breath between lengths and being able to watch the perfectly honed body of Tom Daley twisting and turning as he dived repeatedly from the springboard into the diving pool.

Summer Nights

I love warm and muzzy summer nights but it does get a bit hot on the boat so I've opened all the windows and the side hatch and the back door and the front door. There is a cooling breeze passing through and on the breeze is a battalion of mosquitos.  I can hear that zzzzzzzzzzzzz as they home in on me, they've bitten my toes and they're doing laps in my wine glass. I've spent most of the last hour slapping myself and clapping my hands together to try and squash them and I've just squished one on my computer screen.  It's left a big puddle of blood. I'm the only person here so that means it must be my blood.

Sodding insects.

Summer in The City .... Part Three

 

An evening in Limehouse standing on a pub balcony watching the river while trying to shelter from the rain.  Another Anthony Gormley statue stands on a plinth watching the trip boats, ferries and police launches speed passed. I have seen so many of the naked replicas of Anthony Gormley, in Cambridge, St Ives and Liverpool that I must know his body better than my own. The inhabitants of Liverpool must have got fed-up of looking at his private parts as well because they painted underpants on him.

 

They don't respect art in Liverpool

The tour boats have been converted to Party Boats for the evening.  Sometimes the beat of the music drifts across to us sometimes the dancers just seem to be gyrating to their own silent rhythm.

Wake the following morning to the sound of a church clock striking, count the strikes to see if its time to get up. Six, seven, eight, nine ….. surely not that late…… thirteen, fourteen…….. a pause ….. then it starts again one, two.  There are obviously three unsynchronised church clocks in the vicinity.

We watch a narrowboat and a cruiser go out of Limehouse  Lock along The Thames.  The cruiser zooms off ahead, the narrowboat bobs after him, when he hits the wake left by one of the fast taxi boat he ploughs through the waves with his bow lifting.  He looks very small against the wide expanse of the river. Do I want to do this later in the month?  Of course I do.  Really I do. All experienced crew welcome bring your own lifejackets.

Leave the basin via the Limehouse Cut, need to be near an underground station to get back into Central London for a theatrical experience but don’t fancy paying twenty five pounds for the privilege of an extra night in Limehouse.

Limehouse Cut is packed with boats then interspersed with stretches where nobody moors.  If nobody moors there then there must be a reason so we won’t moor there either.  Three Mills looks interesting and there is a space but I encounter the usual problem that sixty foot won’t fit into a fifty five foot space.

Move on passed an endless variety of boats: smart: Dutch: painted: graffitied: on the point of sinking. Passed the canal entrance to the loop around the Olympic Park which is still closed to navigation.

 

 

 

 

A C&RT weed cutter passes by ‘What’s the mooring situation around here’ asks the crew member ‘Dire’ they reply.

Just as we’re about to accept that we will be travelling all day and getting a train in from somewhere in Hertfordshire a boat ahead leaves and we get a space. It turns out it is a very useful space, near to Hackney Wick station and a stones throw from Stratford so to get to Central London is easy.  To the Rose Theatre a strange small theatre under huge girders that hold up the high rise above and protect the archaeological remains of an Elizabethan theatre underneath. It sells drinks but has no toilets which makes the second half of the performance a bit uncomfortable. A friend of a friend is giving a one woman performance alongside another one woman performance.  The theatre holds fifty but is only half full.  Afterwards we all go to the local pub, cast and audience and spend another evening standing, with drink in hand, watching The Thames float passed.

We are moored alongside the Olympic Park so the following day I take the opportunity to go for a swim in the Olympic Pool.  It’s beautiful. I swim leisurely up and down the lanes were two years ago the swimmers of nations gave their all.  It’s busy in the pool so this time I refrain from diving in from the podium and doing racing turns, I’ll leave that for another time.

The flower beds around the stadiums are stunning, masses of wild flowers, holly hocks, red hot pokers and lots of flowers I should know the names of but don’t. Pity I didn’t bring my camera.  Next time I will.

Summer In The City ..... Part Two

 

Considering I’m in the centre of a very large city, it’s quiet in Little Venice.  In the early morning the first sounds are the thump, thump of joggers on the towpath.

Time to move away, go up the canal to stock the fridge at Sainsburys, turn and then stop to fill with water. A Black Prince hire boat pulls alongside.  It’s crew are seven ladies from Boston on a weeks cruise.  They’re seven nervous ladies because they’ve never done this before and ahead are unknown locks and long tunnels. We impart words of wisdom and encouragement and then leave them to it.  They are heading down to Limehouse Basin where a pilot is meeting them to take them up The Thames

At Camden Locks lots of legs hang over the edge of the lock mooring.  If they were my legs and sixteen ton of steel was about to squash them against a wall I’d move but the lock side drinkers and grazers are made of sterner stuff and it’s me and Rea that have to get out of the way.  I wonder how the ladies from Boston will cope with crowds and heavy locks and nowhere to tie up because of moored boats.

Through St Pancras and Kings Cross were the development is rife.  Sometimes London seems to be one big building site.  Cranes loom, buildings under construction, old commercial warehouses being renovated. There are no signs of recession here London is booming, is the country going to tilting southwards because of all this development. Is The North quiet?

 

Through Islington Tunnel hoping to find a space on the visitor moorings.  Just outside the tunnel there is one space and we double berth against a shiny new boat inhabited by a shiny young man. He tells us we are in a quiet zone (confirmed by notices) where we can’t run engines for more than an hour, must keep noise to a minimum and not burn wood. ‘Boris lives up there’ he says pointing up towards a row of smart white houses, ‘so I suppose he makes the rules’.  I can see Boris’s point, who wants to pay over a million for a house and be constantly reminded of the presence of the riff-raff living on the ditch below you.

Late at night there is the sound of a crowd singing and shouting. It gets louder as the mob approaches, then just as I start to worry about being caught up in crowd violence a narrow boat emerges from the tunnel with three lads on the back singing their hearts out. The tunnel and the deep cut it emerges into amplify the sound .

The next day it’s the sound of bicycle bells that mingle with the rhythmic feet of the joggers that act as the alarm clock. Then it’s onwards towards Limehouse, a fascinating journey passed new build housing, old warehouses, smart offices derelict buildings and graffiti.  Flotillas of children in canoes.  Canary Wharf looms ahead. 

 

Lock gates are stiff and leaky. There seems to be a laissez-faire attitude from the boaters in these parts with boats double moored, sticking out, on lock landings and at water points and the gates on the locks left open. It just wouldn’t do on the Grand Union but then London is another country.