Tithe Barns and Tunnels

I am now officially un-poisoned and feeling a week of walking coming on, which is good. I have missed pounding the streets of my manor like some decrepit undercover detective, but even I realised the importance of slowing it down a bit when I thought about planning routes via places with good, indoor plumbing. It was all too risky and not the sort of adventure I was looking for.

Friday started quiet and fragile. There was much creeping about in an old lady manner, which, when I am in the moment always makes me think of the scary old woman lurking madly in The Yellow Wallpaper. You never see us in the same photograph.

This was followed by a journey of discovery to the nearest large supermarket that is not Waitrose. I love Waitrose but our dwindling resources do not and although it was very nice to play at being Canary Wharf rich for a bit, it was neither logical nor feasible. We discovered a big Asda in the Isle of Dogs and set forth ‘up the Asda’ as my East Midlands’ posse would say. Jason was delighted that I was too ill to be sidetracked by snacks and I was sad because there was an ice-cream van outside and I was in no position to stuff myself with a 99 and shopping be damned.

The afternoon was marred by the discovery that my regular medication was not waiting for me at my local chemist as promised, thanks to a series of errors that were not my fault but which everyone I spoke to seemed determined to lay firmly at my incompetent door. I spent a great deal of my afternoon having to very politely and firmly refute the idea that I was responsible. I feel that boat life is definitely improving my patience and temper because when in the middle of all this I was informed by the pharmacist that I had no repeat medications because ‘someone’ had taken them off, I didn’t start laying about me with a boat hook. Nor, when I rang the GP to find out why this had happened and the receptionist told me that it couldn’t have happened because ‘it’s not possible to take medications off a repeat prescription’, did I go fully berserk and burn down the building.

I am now of the opinion that boat life should be prescribed to everyone over forty who wrestles with rage, because it seems to be doing me the world of good. I also managed to get them to reinstate my medication, sort out the pharmacist and was able to pick up my meds, all within twelve hours. I can’t say what the effort has cost my blood pressure, because I refuse to take it, but I am not displeased to have a full packet of my BP meds on hand this week.

Oscar was back in Leicester for the weekend so it was just me and him over the weekend. On Saturday when I staggered forth to contemplate breakfast options with a jaded eye, Jason said: ‘Where are we going on our date?’ which made me smile. I sometimes think that the poor man just agrees to being dragged to the four corners of the earth for a quiet life, but no. It appears that I have fully infected him with my adventuring ways.

A few minutes Googling led me to the discovery of the Upminster Tithe Barn - Museum of Nostalgia. It’s only open when the volunteers who run it can get their act together and Saturday was that day, so we went.

It is a peculiarly English place in every way. Built in around 1450, it has been passed from pillar to post for 500 years before finding itself stuffed to the rafters with random objects, squashed between some playing fields, a bowls club and a housing estate and thrown open to the public. It kind of looks a bit like The Repair Shop, but if nobody had ever looked after it properly and it had been burned down at least once.

When we got there, we were greeted by three, old people in padded gilets, sitting on Seventies deckchairs and drinking tea out of a tartan thermos. I immediately loved it. There is no admission charge but they run on donations, so we emptied my purse into the adapted milk churn they use to collect cash and wandered in.

It is exactly the sort of place you would expect to be run by old people in padded gilets. Over time, every person in the local area who has had to clear out their house or shed has trotted up to the tithe barn with things they don’t want to keep and emptied them into the barn. At some point, efforts were made to organise these offerings into themed areas, but time and tide have meant that donations have started to pile up and pool around the ‘brick making’ area or the ‘school themed display’ and it is now a bonkers jumble of dusty things with no discernible purpose. There are no labels or attempts to describe what the things you’re looking at are. You just have to fossick about and find what delights you.

I was particularly taken with the Victorian version of a Portaloo which resembled an oversized hat box with a full, china toilet bowl wedged inside it. The bowl was beautifully decorated in a blue and white floral pattern which was exceptionally pleasing. I think I probably loved it because sanitation and plumbing are on my mind a lot at the moment. Also I loved how impractical it was. It looked like you’d probably have to go into serious weight training to make it ‘port’ anywhere.

One of the ladies who had greeted us when we came in, popped over to make sure we saw her favourite thing. It was an early version of a washing machine, which, along with washing clothes also made ice-cream, churned butter and extremely oddly, made sausages. I get the first two, because washing machines churn, which is what you need to turn one dairy product into many other delicious dairy products, but I was a bit concerned about the sausages.

We spent a wonderful hour excavating the dusty old barn and emerged, blinking into the sunlight, unreasonably pleased with ourselves for finding it.

By this time I was starving, so we set off into the wilds of Upminster where we discovered a chip shop next to a corner shop and decided to treat ourselves to a suitably nostalgic lunch. We bought fish and chips, two cans of pop and some cheap chocolate and took it to Thames Chase Community Forest where we sat in the sunshine and stuffed our faces while nature marched resolutely into Autumn in front of our eyes.

Jason decided we should round the day off with a trip to Gravesend to look at a house we tried to buy way back in February, but which, despite being for sale proved impossible to actually purchase. We sailed over the Dartford bridge into Gravesend and discovered that it was still not sold and looked exactly the same as it had when we attempted to purchase it. Even seeing it in the glorious August sunshine didn’t make either of us feel regretful about not owning it and we left feeling wildly relieved that we didn’t live there, which was an excellent feeling.

Jason decided that the return journey could only be improved by a trip through the Blackwall Tunnel. He has been slightly obsessed by it ever since we moved here, but when offered the opportunity to travel through it, had repeatedly refused on the grounds that he had to be ‘ready’ for it. Saturday was that day. He was ready.

Unfortunately, everyone else in Greater London was also ready, and we spent a good half an hour stuck in traffic on the approach, during which time Jason got less ‘ready’ with every moment that passed. It had not occurred to him that a tunnel that was opened in 1897 by the then Prince of Wales to help horses and carts and people on bicycles to cross the river, was probably going to struggle under the weight of 2023 levels of traffic.

I didn’t mind sitting in traffic because I’m nosy and got very interested in a huge, metal structure which looked a bit like it had been built by an extremely scary wasp. It turned out to be the Optic Cloak, which also sounds like something that has been built by an extremely scary wasp, but which was actually built by Conrad Shawcross.

It’s a cover for a 160 foot high chimney that forms part of Greenwich Peninsula’s Energy Centre. He based the design on the work of Vorticist and Futurist artists’ work along with his interest in a maritime camouflage technique pleasingly called ‘dazzle camo’. It’s made of a series of aluminium panels which are patch-worked together in a geometric pattern. Each panel is punctured with tiny holes so that the chimney inside is both hidden and revealed at the same time and looks different at every angle at which you approach it. I had a lot of time to look at it and it does exactly what Shawcross planned. I already follow him on Instagram so I was delighted to see one of his projects in real life.

On Sunday Jason had to go back to Leicester because he had been invited to a party. He was only going for the day, so I hitched a ride and went to see my mum and dad as a surprise. It was lovely. We chatted about absolute nonsense, did a bit of gardening, ate lots of food and watched some terrible telly. We had nothing to do and nowhere to go and nothing urgent assailed us. These kinds of days don’t happen to my family very often. We are hard wired for drama and life admin, so when a day of glorious nothingness hoves into view we take the time to relish it.