Listening to the Isle of Dogs

My plan on Saturday was to spend the entire day on the boat, just me and the cat. I had planned reading, writing and eating. She had plans to pull her fur out all over the cream carpet, do noxious shits and moan.

She enjoys all these things. It’s not a sign of displeasure. She is, for the most part, thriving on the boat and doubling down on all the things that make her a cat only we can love. We had noticed however that she was washing more than usual. It’s not difficult. She has always been a desultory bather thanks to being abandoned as a kitten and nobody teaching her how to wash properly. Unlike Anorak, who when he over grooms has to go to the vet for steroid jabs, we just thought she had finally found her washing mojo. Turns out she had not.

She came for a cuddle on Friday night. This is unusual. Derek does not cuddle. She does not sit on laps. She hates being touched except on the exceedingly rare occasions where she taps you with her paw and demands attention. Friday night was one of those times and I was ordered to fuss her. As I was scritching her I noticed that she had welts all round her neck where she had scratched herself. She has no fleas but it was clear that her skin was bothering her, hence the washing.

I did some research and it appears that she might possibly have ear mites, which do not always hang about in ears, which is annoying when you are trying to diagnose a cat who is now sick of all the attention she wanted thirty minutes ago and is actively trying to kill/avoid you in equal measures.

Saturday morning therefore, was an early rise with a phone call to the vet. I enrolled us in a vet which has a sub branch a five minute walk from the boat. It’s closed on Saturday but the main branch, which is a 25 minute walk away was open. I was quietly relieved when they said that they had no appointments and would I like to see a vet five minutes walk away on Monday morning. I want her to be well as quickly as possible. I also want to not have to pay an Uber soiling charge for bloodstains that won’t come out of upholstery.

So it is that Derek and I will be taking a walk together very soon. I would love to have the kind of relaxed cat who I could pop into a backpack, like the woman I saw at Columbia Road market a few weeks ago. I do not have that kind of cat. By the time me, Derek and the cat basket have walked five yards together, it will probably be the stuff of local legend for years to come.

Once the vet situation was sorted, Derek and I got on with our respective days. The weather was fierce and uncompromising, so it was a good day to nest. We hunkered down as the rain drummed on the roof and the skylight afforded views of epic amounts of weather hurling itself about. When I was small, my mum told me that thunderstorms were the sound of sky giants rearranging their furniture. Although there was no thunder yesterday it felt like they were at least repainting the lounge.

By four o’clock, the wind had gusted the worst of the rain away and I was feeling restless. My legs needed to walk even if the rest of me was reluctant. I wandered into the bedroom to get dressed. As I turned the light on there was an indignant meep from the bed where Derek, who doesn’t sleep on beds, was curled up like a burrito in my duvet. I obediently turned the light off and got dressed in the dark while she fussed and prumped herself back to sleep.

The lady from the marina who I met on her way to feed pelicans, had told me that every morning she does a walk which takes in the loop of the river through the Isle of Dogs and back to the marina through Canary Wharf. I decided that I would do that myself.

Walking over the swing bridge at Wood Wharf, the tide was high and surging against the enormous lock gates. You could only just see the tops of the gates as they were licked by the water trying to push through. On the river side the water was a latte coloured heave of foam and force. Beyond the lock gates, up into the many basins that make up Canary Wharf the water was glass still and reflecting the Constable clouds that scudded overhead. The occasional squall of rain skewed past. The roar of the traffic and the roar of the water wound together and you were suddenly in a wild and elemental world that made me think of King Lear challenging the storm on the heath.

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench'd our steeples, drown'd the cocks!

I found the Thames Path and set off into the unknown. En route I passed people walking dogs, families attempting to run their children’s legs off so they could have peace at home and some foolhardy children swimming off a jetty in the Thames. I admired their courage and thought about their immune systems as I walked onwards.

The Isle of Dogs has always been one of the poorest areas of London. Once ship building started to decline it became poorer. So many of the areas I walk through here are rich in history and riddled with poverty. There are signs everywhere that tell you what once stood here before war, neglect and carelessness had their way. The word that keeps repeating is ‘forgotten’. These are the lands of the forgotten, the isolated, the people left behind, water bound and ignored in the vision of the future that dogs their heels and casts its long shadows.

There are worlds within worlds here. The vertical worlds of wealth, bound by glass and steel, shiny with marble and exclusivity. Endlessly reaching cranes build towers made of sky and steel, reflecting the sun’s rays, dazzling and out of reach. These cluster at the epicentre of Canary Wharf, but there is a ring of wealth that follows the Thames Path, pulling back to land, gathering the land in against the relentless onslaught of the water. Ribbons of exclusive development snag the best views and access to the water. These are the reason you can’t follow the Thames Path all the way. It dips back to earth for a fee.

Lower down in the dark are the squat, concrete estates, the poor man’s high rise. Mile after mile of them, each one a separate fiefdom. Boards at the roadside proclaim the name of the estate, complete with a map for the uninitiated. Stark reminders of territories. You might map them, but you don’t know them. You are not invited. People who have been ignored for so long find ways to make their own worlds, bound by ties stronger than wealth. It has never been truer that the map is not the territory.

Then there’s the world of the past, which is always intimately present here. I once saw some photos of London where old images had been superimposed onto new. Walking these streets is like a living embodiment of that. You walk deep into time as well as geography here. Wharves and streets holds the name of the countries and things that linked them to a lost empire. Walls sprout plaques and sculptures, memorials to moments in time that nail the past to the present. Ghost signs hover above new developments. Great knouts of iron litter the path where you can tie up ships that have long sailed. The past whispers across the water and washes up relics on the slipways.

Walking the curve of the Thames Path I discover it has a name. It’s called Saunders Ness. Ness is from the old English for promontory. Nobody knows who or what Saunders was. You could be tempted, by the number of fried chicken shops you encounter, to attribute it to the landing place of the Colonel, coming from the New World to spread Kentucky Fried goodness through the land. It seems unlikely but not impossible in a place like this.

Across the river sits Greenwich, looking noble, its palaces and colonnades white against the rich blue of the sky. The spindles of the Cutty Sark’s masts, spider up and wave at the dingier towers across the water. Two worlds, sliced by the river and connected by a Victorian foot tunnel under the water. I decide not to walk it today. I’ve done it before and it’s dank and dark and drips with old river water. I need sky and breath to fill my lungs. I walk on and find myself at Great Eastern. Now flats, of course, there is a wedge of park between the wharves and the water. In amongst the grass and wildflowers are great ribs of wooden sleepers, all that remains of an ill-fated project by Isambard Kingdom Brunel to build the largest ship in the world.

Between all these worlds thread roads of water and tarmac. The water whorls its fingers into everything, ebbing and flowing. The streets do the same. So many times on this walk, having to move away from the path, I find myself spiralling into roads that curl me further in to places I don’t need to be before simply coming to a dead stop. Retracing the path adds a good few thousand steps to an already long walk. Every time this happens I have the weirdest sense that I am walking the path of an ear as it tucks into itself, coiling into my head. Certainly as I walk I am not just looking, I am listening, listening to my thoughts, to the river, to the past, to the voices of the people that pass by. This place immerses me.