How the other half live

I didn’t see very many people for months before we moved here. A combination of work, the onerous task of squeezing a large house into a small boat and family upset kept me busy. Doing all that with soul crushing depression and stress levels so high I burst into tears every time the phone rang meant that I wasn’t exactly the funnest person to be around. For the most part I simply retreated, put my head down and got on with putting one foot in front of the other.

Now though, there is room for play of all kinds.

Mostly in these early days and weeks I am still keeping very much to myself. That’s because it is what I most crave. I need room to breathe and to think. I need to reacquaint myself with who I am and adjust to fit the space I want to take up. In the hours of walking and looking, feeling and shaking myself out, I am making my world large again. I am also making the world mine again. I have been piecing it out to others for too long and it wasn’t until I got to this space of fast flowing water, tall buildings and wide skies that I saw how narrow my life had become.

Now I am beginning to feel I can share a bit of myself again. I am looking forward to seeing friends instead of worrying about how much energy I will have left to do what I need to do when they’re gone, or what terrible things will happen if I relax for a second and look after myself.

My friend Claire came to see me on Thursday. It has been a long time and it was so nice to show her my new world. We did nothing remarkable. We ate lunch, we hung out on the boat, we went for a walk, we went for a drink. It was easy and fun and stress free.

Well, I say stress free. I did have a small heart attack when one beer and a double Pimms and lemonade came to £27. I don’t really drink any more so I think my idea of an acceptable price was not only stuck in the East Midlands but also in about 1990. I was also quite traumatised when the barman handed over my drink and it looked nothing like Pimms. I assumed that in the thousand years since I last bought a drink in a bar, things had moved on and took it back to the table, but when I tasted it, it also tasted nothing like Pimms. It tasted like gone wrong Tizer, which for the price I paid for it, was really not on.

I marched back to the bar and got quite loudly grumpy. It was a very busy bar on a sort of glamorous roundabout in Canary Wharf. It was full of business men in too tight trousers and tasselled loafers having after work drinks and sounding like a group of braying donkeys. And then there was me. Short, dumpy, grey haired me in a pair of ludicrous hippy dungarees and platform trainers giving the barman earache about my drink.

The barman patiently explained that he had given me Pimms. I impatiently pointed out the whole not looking or tasting like Pimms thing. He got the bottle and showed it to me. It was a new flavour of Pimms, new and for kids which was called something like Pimms aftersun or shocker or something alcopopish. I looked at him and said: ‘Do I look like the sort of person who would drink this? Do I even look like the sort of person who would know this drink is even a thing? I’m fifty years old. I don’t have time for this stuff. I’m too old for the new.’

To shut me up he apologised, pulled out a dusty bottle of Pimms No. 1 and made me a proper drink as long as I promised to go away and drink it quietly and not come back.

After waving Claire off on her travels, I wandered back through a part of Canary Wharf I hadn’t seen before. It’s a funny place. For somewhere that is geographically small, it is full of tiny, hidden places that have a habit of creeping up and surprising you. I found a park full of rippling pools and sculptures where people were enjoying the cooler evening air. Further along there was a brightly coloured crazy golf course in the middle of a square. Next to it was a tent that proclaimed it was part of a comedy festival happening that evening. I turned another corner and found a boardwalk down by the river where a bunch of people were in another tent doing something unspeakable to Dolly Parton’s Jolene.

Walking away from them as quickly as I could, I found an indoor food market where you could have everything from Indian street food to ice cream burgers. Downstairs there was a jazz club and a poster announced that on the weekend there would be a free dance music event. Outside the food market there were lawns with people lounging on big, brightly coloured cushions, drinking wine and pretending they were on holiday. I ordered some dim sum to go and took it back to the boat where I feasted on tiny, jewel coloured packages of deliciousness and Derek sniffed the air, sensing possible snacks.

I have mixed feelings about Canary Wharf. It doesn’t feel real a lot of the time. Walking up there is like walking from the set of Eastenders to the set of Selling Sunset. It’s not just the luxury apartments and endless ways to entertain yourself. It’s walking along knowing that there is another city beneath you. The shopping centre under your feet is vast and sprawling. You can go into offices and apartment blocks from it, you can catch trains. You can do everything without actually ever having to come out for air. It’s quite surreal. It’s a playground for the rich and whenever I go there, I wait for a hand on my shoulder and someone to kindly but firmly escort me out.

Those are the things I find unnerving but there is a lot to like. You can rubberneck the rich, which is always fun. You can take advantage of all the green spaces, which are multitudinous and always impeccably kept. In the many, many parks are free gyms and endless pieces of public art. There are playgrounds that have such fancy play equipment it’s tempting to push the kids off and have a go yourself. I was particularly enamoured of the sound park, where you can ring and stomp and jangle things to your heart’s content. There is a botanic garden on the roof of the Elizabeth Line station, which is lovely and often quite deserted so you can have it all to yourself. There are concerts and festivals, films and happenings, some ticketed, some free. It’s not all out of reach, even if you are fifty years old and wearing hippy dungarees.