St. Olav and Brunel in Rotherhithe

My menfolk came home on Thursday night, which was jolly nice. By breakfast time on Friday there were stray socks everywhere and the levels in the biscuit drawer were suspiciously low. In a few days time it will be driving me potty, right now it’s still endearing.

What wasn’t endearing was coming back to the boat on Thursday evening to find that someone had been doing DIY on the pontoon outside our boat and had managed to flick impressive amounts of white paint all over our beautiful navy and turquoise trim. I was extremely annoyed and in no mood to be diplomatic, so I sent a fierce email to the marina user group which ended with me saying: ‘My boat is not your workshop and I am not cleaning up because I am not your mum.’ I was quite proud of it until I saw it on the conversation thread and it had decided that the first two sentences I typed should be sent to everyone in bafflingly large font, while everything else in the email was normal. It made me look like a psychopath. I sent another, normal sized email to the group saying: ‘Sorry about the fierce font.’ I didn’t want to look like one of those old people who texts all in caps and uses fourteen exclamation marks, but I think the damage was done.

Nobody fessed up, and then this morning when I got up, there was a man scrubbing and another man jet washing. I think they were too terrified of me last night to come and apologise then, so they waited for Jason to come back in case I killed them and threw their bodies in the marina. I don’t mind having that reputation here. I have absolutely no time for extraneous fuckwittery of any kind and the less people want to bother me about marina business, the happier I am.

It was check up day for Derek. Jason dropped me off at the vet, but just as we were about to go in a distraught woman ran in with a tiny kitten cupped in her hand. It was only two days old and it had stopped breathing on the way to the vet. Sadly, despite CPR, it didn’t pull through and we were all pretty devastated. The mother cat and the one surviving kitten followed, and they are staying at the vet’s for monitoring. I have been thinking about it all day. I really hope it pulls through.

When Derek finally got her check up, she got a gold star for being well on the way to being a hale and hearty one fanged feline and an extra one for not biting the vet. He apologised for the delay in seeing her, which he totally didn’t need to do. He looked utterly distraught and confessed to me that the job is so pressured that he has stress related colitis because of all the sadness. I couldn’t do his job even if I wasn’t cack handed and not very good around blood. It’s brutal.

Jason and I went for lunch at the greasy spoon in Poplar on our way to do a bunch of errands. This time I did not die of food poisoning so my review has been amended to five stars as long as you avoid the Turkish sausage. When we got back to the boat, Oscar confessed that he had lost his glasses while he was in Leicester. This is the second time in six months he has lost a pair of glasses, which is somewhat frustrating to say the least. It put paid to my plans for the afternoon as I spent it transferring his records from one Specsavers to the other and then taking him to Canada Water to organise getting him new glasses. They have discontinued the frames he likes, so that added another twenty minutes of fannying around while he attempted to look less like a serial killer or a bus driver and more like a teenage boy. I just looked like a broke, harassed parent.

Once we had succeeded in our mission we parted company. He was going on a recce to his new college, because term starts on Tuesday. I was going anywhere that didn’t involve cats or teenagers and was hard for people to get hold of me. This week has involved a lot of life admin and I was over it.

Canada Water is in Rotherhithe, which according to Wikipedia has its origins in the Anglo Saxon words for herding cattle. I saw no cattle on my travels, but that is not to say there aren’t any. It used to be an area of the docks which dealt largely in timber imports and on one of the hoardings showing the history of the area there were some very impressive pictures of Victorian men in bowler hats, wandering up and down on planks of wood, floating in the river. They look like they are going for a stroll, but they are just casually herding wood in hats.

I found a fantastic whole food cafe with a gorgeous shady garden where I had a reviving cup of tea. There was a fire pit by a massive stone buddha and you could lounge on carved, wooden Indian day beds covered in scatter cushions. I can’t lounge and drink tea without choking to death, so I left that to more enlightened souls, but it was a damn good cup of tea.

Rotherhithe is undergoing massive development, as is so much of the docklands area, but there are some wonderful nooks and crannies. Much of the area has a Nordic feel. Lots of Norwegians washed up with all the wood that was floating in the river. They were accompanied by the Swedes and the Finns. Lots of the road names and the buildings reflect that. I saw some fantastic Scandi style tiles on the walls of the leisure centre and an intriguing building with fierce anchors on called the Svenska Sjomanskyrkan, which I believe is the Swedish Sailor’s Church, although it didn’t look very churchy. I suspect it might be flats. I suspect everything of being flats these days.

I went into St Olav’s church, which is the hub for all things Norwegian in London and possibly the UK. That’s where I met a marvellous lady chaplain who looks after all the stray Norwegians in the UK when she’s not showing people like me round her fabulous church. She asked me where I came from and when I told her I was from Leicester she asked me if I knew Market Harborough. I said, of course I know Market Harborough. It’s very fancy. Then she told me that she does prison visiting for Norwegian convicts in the prison at Market Harborough. I said that I didn’t know there was a prison at Market Harborough and it was making me rethink my stance on how fancy Market Harborough actually is. Then I recommended the farm shop there and we talked about our shared love for fresh produce. It’s fair to say we covered a lot of ground, conversationally speaking.

After prisons and farm shop chat, she told me that when Norway was taken by the Germans in WWII, the Norwegian royal family fled to London and made the church their base. That’s why half of it looks like someone’s drawing room and the rest looks like a church. Nowadays the drawing room bit is a cafe, and if you go earlier in the day you can drink coffee and buy delicious Scandinavian snacks whilst being glared at by fierce pictures of various members of Norwegian royalty. I am absolutely going to go and do this.

Apparently St. Olav was a bit of a goer. He had a boat and a crew (I very much suspect he was a viking and played down his marauding past when he got into the sainting business). He came to London with his gang and tried to take down London Bridge, which is definitely more of a Viking than a sainting move. It turns out that his nefarious activities are the root of the song: London Bridge Is Falling Down, which pleased me enormously. Also, Tooley Street, which runs from Rotherhithe up to London Bridge, is a bastardisation of his name. He is all over London like a rash is St. Olav. Also, his stained glass windows have mad, blue gryphon like creatures which may be angels or may be strange, Scandinavian beasts. Next time I go for coffee and a hard stare with King Haakon VII I shall ask the chaplain, if she isn’t in Market Harborough visiting felons and buying organic carrots.

I didn’t get time to go to the Finnish church down the road, but I am going back to put in a good word for Tilly in Helsinki. I think that if I go and pray for her in there, it will be like a hotline. Straight to the source.

I have to go back not just for the churches, but for the Brunel museum, which was closing as I arrived but which looked excellent. Brunel is also a man who crops up a lot in this neck of the woods. Not only did he build the Rotherhithe Tunnel, but there is the remains of a shipyard across on the Isle of Dogs where he attempted to build the biggest, iron ship in the world. Perhaps he was one of St. Olav’s crew. I can imagine him being a viking in a stove pipe hat, but with horns.

Round the corner from the museum and also shut was the entirely intriguing Sands Films Studios. It houses an extensive picture and film archive and is used by the film industry for research, costume and prop hire and all kinds of stuff and things. Anyone can go and browse the picture archive and they do tours from time to time. There are also concerts and film screenings.

Given that I had washed up in the area thanks to missing spectacles, I had a surprisingly brilliant time and I have plans to go back when everything is open and make a day of it. Sometimes you do get your reward if you’re a good girl and get all your jobs done.