Wanstead Flats Are Actually Flat

I woke up on Sunday feeling grim. The day before my head had been kicking around the idea that I might want a migraine. It never gets the message. If there was an anti Julie Andrews song, migraines would be at the top of a few of my least favourite things. Even if it came in a brown paper package, wrapped up with string.

Like the seaweed on top of the Met Office, my head is a fairly good barometer for an incoming low front. It really doesn’t like any form of humidity either, so this daily swinging from warm to cold, wet to dry presents unique challenges to my facial regions that I throw drugs at on the regular. I thought I’d got shot of it with my epic walk the day before, but with a new day came a new dawn and a renewed interest in my head trying to fold in on itself.

It’s sometimes difficult with these post menopausal migraines to distinguish between one and the onset of a cold or flu. Tired of my head ruling the roost for so long, my body now feels the need to join in, so I had a headache, a sore throat and that weird achey feeling that could be anything from too much walking to la grippe. Or a weird migraine.

I moped about a bit in the morning doing a lot of picking things up and putting them down again. I ate lunch. I got annoyed with myself when I started on the post lunch picking things up and putting them down again. I decided I would go out. I changed my mind so many times about where to go that even picking things up and putting them down again seemed fun.

In the end I clambered aboard the DLR at Blackwall and headed for the end of the line at Beckton. One of the things on my bucket list is to travel all the tube lines from end to end. Not consecutively, or with a bunch of Boy Scouts drinking milkshake and screaming in a weird, television wish fulfilment way, just to tick them off in my head. It feels neat and achievable and it will have nothing to do with dolphins or going to Disneyland.

After you leave Canning Town, all the stops until Beckton head out into the heart of industrial waste ground and water that is gradually being taken over by things like cable cars and water sport centres. The stops have exciting names like Gallion’s Reach. When you look out the window expecting Jack Sparrow and a hail of doubloons, it’s all acres of cleared land waiting to be developed. There may be wonders there but they’re places I need to go to with a purpose and a plan to avoid disappointment or being co-opted onto a women’s rowing team.

In Beckton’s defence, it had more going for it than West Ham. I got off the train and walked straight into a retail park where I could have gone up the Asda, had my ears pierced at Claire’s Accessories or bought myself a Big Mac. I was not in the mood for any of these things and there was a bus loop nearby. I wandered over and saw a bus that was going to Wanstead. The name pinged a vague memory of reading about something called Wanstead Flats, so I got on the bus and got out of Beckton.

The bus wound through the edge of Plaistow and into East Ham. We went sailing past the Hindu temple with the giant Hanuman statue and on to pastures new. In the bits of East Ham I hadn’t managed to see before were a lot of South Indian restaurants and a Tamil community centre which signalled Sri Lankan dinners and deep, belly based joy. Leicester has some fine Indian food, so good in fact that eating in most other towns’ Indian restaurants is usually a disappointment. The Indian food in Leicester tends to come from the Punjab though, and South Indian and Sri Lankan food is thin on the ground, which is a shame because I love it. As the bus sped on I got more and more excited about the future of my dinners.

There were some great shop names as we trundled by. Two of my favourite were; ‘Rock, Vaper, Scissors,’ and ‘Mesmer Eyes Threading Salon.’ Someone should start an awards ceremony for the bestworst (so terrible they’re good) shop names. I’d go.

Leaving East Ham, the houses started thinning out and after we passed Manor Park, which I have to come back to because it sounds like a walk worthy place to go, we were in the country. Right on the edge between the sprawl of town and fields sits the City of London Cemetery. Two hundred acres of Grade Two Listed bodies for me to go at, including two of the victims of Jack the Ripper. You’re damn right I’m going back for a proper expedition.

Wanstead it turns out, is right on the edge of Epping Forest and the Flats of my rusty memory are actually a part of it that more resembles a common and are indeed quite flat and not as I sadly surmised en route, blocks of flats. Yer actual 100% nature type flats. By the time I arrived, the weather had picked up and with the tall grasses baking in the heat and blue, blue skies streaming off into the distance it felt more like I had accidentally taken the bus to East Anglia.

Wanstead High Street is very cute. It reminds me a bit of Hampstead. There’s lots of greens and little parks on one side of the road and lots of fancy boutique shops and bistros on the other. A small craft market was beginning to pack down for the day as I arrived, but people were still thronging the bars and cafes. I poked around a few charity shops but my batteries were running low so I plonked myself down in a Gails’ because I needed a cinnamon bun and theirs are hands down the best I’ve tasted outside of Scandinavia. I’m always up for a good recommendation if anyone believes they have found the best cinnamon bun, by the way. Constant testing is required. The bun was magnificent. My flat white was pretty good but the barista had obviously had a tiring day and his foam art was not on point. Instead of some charming heart shaped froth, I got something that looked like an ejaculating cock and balls. I think I preferred it to the heart to be honest. It certainly perked me up a bit.

I really wanted to go and explore Wanstead Park, which like the forest and the flats and the cemetery is bloody massive and has grottoes and statues and all kinds of wonderful things to see, but after staggering on gamely for a bit, fortified largely by sugar and caffeine, I had to admit defeat. I found the bus stop and came home where at least I was too exhausted to pick things up and put them down again.

Not every day can be a jewel in the crown. Even intrepid Victorian women who traversed the Andes with only a divided skirt and a lacrosse stick had days where they just had to give up and have a little lie down in a hammock until they regained their fighting spirt.

It was good to find new places I can go back to with proper energy levels and an enquiring mind. Sometimes you have to get on a bus at Beckton to find treasure and sometimes you have to leave the treasure and hope nobody has nicked it by the time you get back. The consolation is that Wanstead Flats was far too big to get in a burglar’s sack.