The Bells of Stepney

Oscar came home from Leicester on Monday night. He is currently spending most of his summer there, given that he has no friends here yet and it seemed unreasonable to make a sixteen year old boy spend eight weeks cooped up on a boat with his aged parents.

He is getting to experience the rite of passage that is the joy of long distance coach travel. I don’t think it’s possible to call yourself a teenager if you haven’t been stuck in an airless coach on a motorway for several hours with cut moquette etching a pattern into your thighs and the overwhelming smell of warm urine wafting from a malfunctioning toilet with a door that swings open every time you go round a bend.

When he arrived home, travel weary and crumpled, he said: ‘Do you fancy doing something tomorrow, mum?’

This may seem inconsequential to you, but perhaps you are not the owner of a teenage boy. Particularly a teenage boy who has had such a horrendous couple of years that he now spends most of his time at home mute and sad. Since we got here, apart from the times he has been allowed to go back to his friends, he has had to be dragged to even the nicest things. Food is always a big motivator, but even then he has been known to actively pass on a free meal in favour of staring miserably out from his duvet.

I jest, but it is truly pretty heart breaking.

This sentence then, was a wonderful sentence. One of the best sentences I’ve heard in an age. Of course I said yes.

All that was required on Tuesday was for us to find somewhere nice to have lunch. It’s all he wanted to do. I didn’t care. I didn’t care because he wanted to do it with me and if he’d said: ‘Let’s go and watch people punch each other in the face,’ or ‘Let’s learn to water ski,’ I’d have said yes and yes.

I suggested the Yurt Cafe at Limehouse Cut for lunch, because he hadn’t been and who wouldn’t want to eat food in a yurt? Telling people you eat in a yurt is a great conversation starter. Almost as good as telling people you live on a boat. When you are offered the chance to experience something that is probably going to be fun and will also provide you with material should you get trapped in a lift or be ordered in a team building exercise to share something interesting about yourself, you should seize the moment. It’s why I always tell people about my Blue Peter badge, even though I was only a runner up.

We got to the yurt and he decided that he didn’t fancy any of the food on offer. The fool. Still, he can always tell the story about his mum dragging him to a promising yurt which then turned out to be wildly unpalatable. What kind of mother even does that? Me. That’s who.

By this time we were starving and boiling. We decided to keep going in the hope of being amazed. As we were walking up Commercial Road with juggernauts whizzing past our ears and the taste of exhaust on our tongue, we were increasingly depressed. Then we found the Two Magpies Cafe, which looked like a tiny oasis in the urban desert. It tasted like one, too.

The service was fantastic. The food was delicious and they had somehow, mysteriously etched the face of a slightly bewildered looking girl in my coffee foam, which hands down beat the cock and balls I got stencilled on my coffee at Wanstead. She looked a bit like she had just seen a cock and balls and wasn’t terribly impressed. My friend said she looked haunted. As I drank her, I may now be possessed by the ghost of a girl who died after seeing a particularly upsetting cock and balls. Who even knows at this stage? I don’t care. They served me a great halloumi salad and chips and they gave my son a fried breakfast at three in the afternoon that made him so happy he kept pointing out all the good bits to me before he ate them. Ten out of ten. Would eat again.

I wanted to walk some more. Oscar did not. He hopped on a bus and I continued on my merry way. I walked up to Shadwell to visit my favourite charity shop, which turned out to be closed for renovations. This was unfortunate a) because it was closed and b) because it will probably be renovated into a terrible charity shop, which is what usually happens.

I walked across the Commercial Road with no particular plan in mind after that. Wandering around, I came across an enormous bust of who I initially thought was Trotsky, but on closer inspection turned out to be Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, father of the Bangladeshi nation. Apparently there were complaints when it was first erected. I can see why. It’s ruddy massive and it’s plonked in the front garden of a tiny council house. It would, as my granny used to say, frighten the horses.

The houses where the bust is have large, beautiful names on what are old, tired and very ordinary buildings. I looked them up and I think they were named for people in the local area who were killed in the Blitz. The houses stand in their memory, which is rather lovely for a very unlovely place.

I realised, as I walked further that I was not very far from Rinkoff’s Bakery and as we had guests coming for dinner, I decided to stop in and pick up some cakes for dessert. I left with a large, cardboard box full of assorted flavours of cronuts. It was a brilliant idea to buy them, but I hadn’t finished my walk and spent the entire of the rest of it attempting to juggle the box from hand to hand and regretting my life choices.

I walked by Stepney Green park and the City Farm. I really wanted to go into the farm and it was free, but I felt weird without the kids and with a box of cake and lost my nerve in case people thought I was a wrongun, so I went onwards. I curved round into St. Dunstan’s and All Saints church, which was sadly shut, but had an excellent church yard and some great stone carving on the outside. I was particularly taken with a cheeky looking devil clutching some tongs over the door. I also got very excited that I had found another church whose bells feature in the song, Oranges and Lemons. It’s the small things.

I walked past a row of Georgian cottages where one owner had an old stained glass window covering the whole of the inside of their regular window. I thought that was a terrific idea, because it removed the need for curtains and stopped people seeing in, but you must be able to sit in such brilliant, jewelled light when you’re inside. I wanted to knock on the door and congratulate them, but I felt they might want to steal my cake, so I didn’t.

I saw some great almshouses. The poshest ones I’ve ever seen. They were endowed by Lady Mico in 1657 and were to be given to ten, poor widows of London. They got knocked about a bit in the war, so much so that three were flattened entirely. The GLC couldn’t be bothered with the upkeep and moved the almshouses to somewhere dull and modern. The buildings that stand there now are privately owned, of course. You couldn’t let ten, poor widows have grade two listed houses with beautiful views in London when you could sell them to the highest bidder and put the widows in a forty storey block of flats with a broken lift.

As I walked I was keeping track with the Commercial Road for a bit and then orienting homeward by the fact that my boat basically sits under the huge HSBC tower at Canary Wharf so I can see it from pretty much everywhere. Once I started hitting bits of canal, I knew I was back on home turf, although bits I’d never visited before.

Coming up one road I had a perfect, London experience. I was walking down a road of Victorian terraces. Coming down another road which was mostly Georgian, I saw a tiny, Indian lady in a pink and gold sari making her way home. She shimmered in the afternoon heat like a mirage, with the sun glinting off the gold embroidery on her dress. She almost looked like she was floating. We intersected at a corner where there was a shabby, old pub, which was of indeterminate age and which seemed to have been cobbled together from the many pubs that came before it. A bunch of workmen were doing some lengthy excavations outside it, while other men stood, drinking beer in the shade of what could generously be called a pub garden, but which was a lean to over a bit of pavement, held together with string. Next to it was a weedy lot, broken up with concrete and fenced in mismatched bits of yellow corrugated iron. This sat next to an ultra modern house in turquoise render, which sat across from a very old wall with brick niches in it, ringed about with scaffolding to stop it falling over. There was nothing to identify if the wall was a good wall. There are so many dilapidated old walls in London, whoever is in charge of them must be weary of making plaques by now.

It was nothing special, but it was everything I love about living here. Different people, living different lives in roads and buildings of different ages, all going about their business and rubbing along beautifully. It made me so happy, but not as happy as being able to put my bloody cakes down when I got home.