The Bumper Edition

It is Friday morning. The rain is teeming down out of a low, grey sky. Jason has a stinking summer cold. Oscar says he has the same thing. It’s hard to tell as he is a creature of the night and always looks slightly vampiric/consumptive but I will take his word for it. I am also unwell, more of which anon. It is a day for boat snuggling and soup. All our guests have now gone and I thought I’d sneak on here and catch up with the week.

There have been no new walks because guests. I have been in tour guide/hostess mode, which has required local things for not local people. I do love exploring but there is also a solid pleasure to be had from beating the bounds of your patch and feeling increasingly like a local rather than a visitor passing through.

On Tuesday, my friend Zak came for lunch. Zak and I used to work together at Waterstones in Leicester, but Zak, who had been to university in London, wanted to move back here. She is now working at the Waterstones in Islington, which is very fancy indeed. We spent a wonderful few hours catching up on all the work related news and I pumped her mercilessly for celebrity gossip. Islington is a good place for star spotting and even though she has only been there for a few weeks she had suitably starry customer news to impart. She is decades younger than me so a large part of the conversation was me nodding and then saying; ‘What do they do?’ but even I didn’t need to look up Paul Whitehouse and Dolly Alderton.

I feel a trip to visit her coming on where I will browse intensively for a good hour or so in the hope of spotting someone glamorous and critiquing their book choices after they’ve left the shop. I can also use it as an excuse to go and buy cakes from Ottolenghi. Or, I can go hunting on Archway Road and see if the African/Portuguese cafe I used to frequent back in the day is still there. Delicious curries with custard tarts for pudding is something you never knew your tastebuds needed until you experience them and then, like me, you will be haunted by the need to return.

On Wednesday I got up crazy early to go to a stretch class that my neighbour, Martin runs for free in the marina lounge. I hate exercise but a side effect of all this walking is that I am getting fitter by accident. I am, however, also getting stiffer and I need to be able to bend, so I agreed that I would try out a half hour, gentle class. I had agreed before he told me it started at 6.30 a.m. If it wasn’t for the fact that Derek came screaming up to wake me I would have feigned death and not bothered, but I went. It was actually a nice way to start the day, although I can’t say I was entirely there in spirit. Physically I was too present. Mentally I was largely vacant.

Jason and Oscar came home mid-morning, bringing Tilly with them. Tilly was hitching a lift to Stanstead in the early hours of Thursday morning en route to a year studying art in Helsinki. Her friend Bella cycled over to see her and we spent a fabulous afternoon walking and shopping for ingredients for dinner. We talked about everything, ships and strings and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. There was a uniquely London conversation which pleased me greatly.

Tilly: ‘I can’t believe you cycled to see me. Did you come from work?’

Bella: ‘No. I came from home.’

Tilly: ‘Peckham, right? That’s a long way.’

Bella: ‘Dulwich actually. But yes, a long way.’

Me: ‘Dulwich is very fancy, Bella. You’re moving up in the world.’

Bella: ‘Well, technically it’s Lower Dulwich/Peckham borders.’

After which there was a very complicated conversation about the exact geographical location of a friend who has just started renting an artist’s studio before he starts at Goldsmiths in the Autumn. It started with the possibility that it was in Dalston, it wiggled around Hackney, and dipped into Haggerston borders before leaping over the river to Catford only to find that it is actually in Poplar, somewhere near me. There was nearly an argument about whether the weirdly communist vibes, Egg Store kosher supermarket is in Stoke Newington or Dalston. It is, in case you were wondering, firmly in Stoke Newington. It’s on my list of places to visit when I head back that way.

London is so very, very large and you don’t really ever get to grips with it even if you live here. Even the areas you know bleed into other areas and how you judge what goes where is mutable. Borders are hotly contested and deeply tribal. Everyone has their favourite patch which is either somewhere aspirational they wished they lived but can’t afford or where they actually live and have become deeply attached to, even if it is full of murderers and pound shops. Any discussion of place inevitably leads to the airing of strong opinions both for and against, some of which can be entirely reasonable and others which are deeply personal and/or bonkers. You can tell a lot about a person from their London affiliations.

Jason did the airport run on Thursday morning, which involved him getting up at 4.00 a.m. I had said my goodbyes the night before. I am already planning a hop to Helsinki. Our world is infinitely poorer without a Tilly to hug in the flesh so we will travel to get our fix. We thought we’d let her get settled first though. She is very bad at texting and answering her phone but we do know that she got there safely and word on the street is she has already found a good place to eat vegan banana split, so I am not unduly worried.

Andrea, who had an appointment at Moorfields’ was in town, so she popped over for a visit later in the day. I took her and Oscar to the greasy spoon on Poplar High Street that has been recommended by countless people since we moved here.

It is a proper caff. Not a cafe. Definitely and absolutely a caff. There is no website. It’s just called Poplar Cafe. There is nothing else like it and it is most definitely a local place for local people, they don’t need to go hard on the advertising front.

There are so many things you can eat that they ran out of money to buy more illuminated menu light boxes and have just started using neon cardboard, laminated and cut into shapes to advertise new dishes. These are stuck up in a strangely haphazard way on all available surfaces, so if you want to read the whole menu you have to keep wandering back and forth, tilting your head and hoping that there isn’t another wall of posters next door that you’ve missed. Gordon Ramsay would lose his mind. There is nothing minimal or pared back about this place.

I had the Turkish breakfast. Oscar had the ‘mega’ breakfast and Andrea had steak and kidney pie with chips and peas. With drinks it came to thirty two quid. This may seem a lot for a greasy spoon but that was until you saw the portions. Each plate was basically an oval serving platter that I would use to plate up a main meal for four. Oscar asked if he could swap his mushrooms for chips which they happily agreed to without charging me extra. When the chips came they were stacked about four inches high and spilling off the side of the plate there were so many.

It was intense. There was a lot in every sense of the word. Hot, bright, busy and noisy. The telly was blaring over our heads, music was playing somewhere. At no point was it restful. The food was tasty, but old school. Andrea’s peas gave us primary school PTSD because they were tinned. Probably the contents of an entire tin, grey and watery and frankly terrible. But as she said, you don’t come to a caff for vitamins, so it’s ok not to eat them and move swiftly on.

My Turkish breakfast consisted of two fried eggs, a big handful of green and black olives, cucumber and tomato, two hash browns, half a dozen slices of halloumi and a lot of Turkish sausage. The hash browns are clearly an import as were the two rounds of toast that accompanied it. You also got free tea or coffee. I asked for coffee, but having the measure of the place also ordered myself a soft drink.

I love a greasy spoon but I do not love a traditional caff coffee and I knew what was coming. As expected, he whipped out a mug, half filled it with hot milk and water, frothed it to death and then stirred in a heaped teaspoon of instant coffee grounds, which started blooming across the top of the bubbling milk mixture. He slapped it on the counter and pointed to a giant Pyrex bowl of sugar with a spoon stuck in the top like an avant garde sandcastle. I declined the sugar and gingerly took my unappealing potion back to the table where I studiously avoided it for the rest of the meal. I did not want a Mellow Birds flashback for my pains.

The food was great, but on returning to the boat it became rapidly apparent that something I ate profoundly disagreed with me and I spent most of the afternoon and evening frequenting the toilet and sweating like a bastard. Everyone else was fine, including Jason who has a notoriously sensitive gut and who we brought back a giant breakfast, so it was something only I ate. My bets are on the Turkish sausage. I’m still not quite right today, hence the confinement. It will be a while before I can venture back to the caff.

I was talking to Andrea yesterday about the pros and cons of boat life, and one of the biggest cons for me is the need to discuss the toilet arrangements with every person who visits. Tending to the toilet tank is a bit like looking after a very nervous race horse. It’s important that it runs and you must pander to its whims so as not to spook it. There are several buttons by which the loo operates and which must be explained to every newcomer. Then you have to give a small Ted Talk on not using much toilet paper and no chemical cleaners etc so they don’t block/upset the ecosystem.

If that wasn’t bad enough, we have to pay forensic attention to the dial which shows when the tank is reaching capacity, because that’s when we have to pay the trawler man to take our boat to the pump out station and empty it. That can only be done when a) he is at the marina and b) the weather is good. It is a very stressful operation so we try to go as long as possible before we have to set the pump out day wheels in motion.

This has to be explained to guests, so that if they feel they have big toilet business on hand, they can grab a fob and let themselves into the marina toilets which do not require pumping out. Jason is particularly hot on policing this, so if someone even looks like they’re thinking of using the loo he shouts: ‘Wee or poo?’ and frogmarches them off to do the pontoon walk of shame.

I have not had to spend so much time talking or thinking about bowel movements since the children were little and frankly, I am not here for it. It is the biggest downside of boat life for me. As for Jason, when I was dying yesterday afternoon it was quite entertaining in between bouts of agony to watch the conflict play out on his face. He wanted to be a sympathetic, supportive husband but was also panicking about how much shit I was producing and what my gastric noxiousness was doing to his beloved dial. On my third speed walk to the bathroom I could see him thinking about pushing me off the pontoon into the water to take my chances. It is a measure of his love for me, or his fear of me when I had pulled myself back out, that he didn’t do it. This time at least.