I Meant To Write

I meant to write.

Since the new year

The days and weeks have disappeared.

There isn’t much to tell you.

We've stayed warm with gathered wood;

Offcuts from the new Deptford Cinema site

And a house on Albyn Rd.

And with coal from Aldi, Wickes

And Terry’s on the High Street.

Those heavy duty Lidl bags

Still come in useful.

The back plays up a bit.

I must admit

I don’t gaze and gaze along the creek,

Like last year.

But then I’m here more than before.

The herons haven’t been around,

They must have other places in the winter.

I saw a cormorant snapping at a roach;

Too big, it got away.

A few times, I’ve looked up, half anticipating,

And seen the darting blue flight of a kingfisher

Along the river,

As if conjoured up from my imagination.

It didn’t snow, again.

And now the spring is rising,

Faltering, yet certain and  necessary.

It’s one day warmer, the next cold,

Then wet, then warmer again.

Today is cold and cloudy;

Tomorrow too?

Will clouds smudge out the eclipse and supermoon?

How soon before the sprouts of short green weed

Begin to cover the creek mud?

Before the male mallards get rapey?

No, nobody’s been here.

Not really, just us.

Just me and little C.

I meant to write.

How are you?

Where have you been?

Staying afloat

Atlantic grey seal in Deptford Creek - Oct 2014

23 November 2014

It is over a year now I’ve been living on the boat, and since the beginning of this month, I’ve been living on it more; I've been able to quit my job. For the last 13 years the Department for Work and Pensions have been paying me to turn up and work for them; now they have paid me to leave.  I now have money in the bank after having lived hand to mouth for the last ten years since losing my home when my relationship with my daughter's mother broke down. 

Anyway, since moving to the boat a year ago things things had already started to improve for me, financially. Leaving my job, I now have what is equivalent in money terms to a quite healthy advance to concentrate of music and writing projects. At some point next year, if or when I see the money draining away too alarmingly, I can always look around for temporary work to keep me going, but right now, I can use my time creatively.

I have been, in any case, more than usually productive on the songwriting front over this last year. Without doubt, living on the creek has helped to inspire this. In the last couple of weeks I have been busy demoing and rehearsing new songs written over the past year for the next Rockingbirds album; and it is proving to be a very promising harvest of songs and lyrics. It will be a few months yet before we can get everyone together to record, so in the meantime I intend to press on with writing what I can. There is also my “Alan Tyler Show” project – me, Patrick Ralla and Fiddling Jim Morrison, an economy size gigging unit which we are recording an acoustic album for (work in progress) and hope to get working next year. Closer to my chest, I recently finished writing tunes for William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, which I plan to record and put on youtube. I now call this Project “Oh Dear”, after the two word response I received from Andy Hackett when I mentioned what I was up to.

Leaving your job, “retiring”, being in your fifties – it focuses the mind marvellously; you know you can’t rest on your laurels – the opportunities that now present themselves will not forever be there – they have to be seized without unnecessary delay. Of course, some of my contemporaries have already achieved much of what they want to do, and have been suitably rewarded; houses bought, families growing up, etc, and can perhaps take their foot off the gas; this is certainly not how it is for me. Purely in money terms, my “advance” won’t last forever; I need to make a viable living out of music and writing if I can.

It’s been a bleak, wet week on the creek. As I write this Sunday morning, the patter of rain on the roof of the boat is unrelenting and cheerless. The weather forecast offers no prospect of it stopping until the evening*. At least the tide appears to be coming in; to have the boat lifted afloat from the mud will,bouy my spirits as well as body, just a little. Or perhaps the tide isn’t coming in yet – in rainy weather the river swells and can mislead. No – it’s definitely coming in, I can hear the clicking and clunking from the hull and see the back of the boat begin to bob a little next to the big barge next door.

When the tide comes in there is generally less wildlife to look at, because then the shoreline disappears under water. So the herons, and moorhen, and the grey wagtails (to give three for instances), who make a living scouring the the mud and shallow water, take their leave. But with the tide in you might see grebe  and cormorants ducking and diving on the water. More spectacularly, last month, our neighbour spotted an atlantic grey seal catching flounder a little further out on the creek, and posted photographs of it on the @Creekside_Trust twitterfeed.

So for those who know how to catch them when the tide is in, there are flounder to be had in the creek. There are eel too. I spent an amusing ten minutes a while back, watching a seagull grapple with a dead eel on the shore. The tide was coming in. The gull wanted to hang on to its prize, but unable or unwilling to eat any of it there and then, it kept picking it up and putting it down just on the edge of the advancing tide-line. It seemed to lack the wit or ability to pick the whole thing up and remove it entirely from the encroaching water.

I think I have mentioned in an earlier post that my friend on the next boat, an experienced fisherman, had expressed scepticisim at the viability of fishing the creek. Obviously at low tide there can only be tiddlers. At high tide, the water can often come in so mucky and murky that successful fishing looks dubious. Nevertheless, I did discover a very large dead bream down alongside my boat in the late summer. Too big I think to have come downriver along the shallow Ravensbourne, I theorised that it had swum in off the Thames at high tide, and then perhaps not found things to its liking, and gave up the ghost.

*It turned out that later in the day Loambit Vale in Lewisham, less than a mile away, was flooded as the River Ravensbourne burst its banks.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-30171327

Rising Tide

Friday evening coming home on the DLR. As it passes over the creek a group of four kids shriek and giggle with their fingers pinched firmly over their noses. There’s a mild whiff – have one of them farted or is the smell coming from the creek?

Closer to home and it’s clearly the latter. I’ve never known the creek to pong particularly before, but on a long hot day like today, with the water drained to its lowest point at low tide for the best part of the afternoon, the smell like that of drains is pretty rank. Not overpowering by a long chalk, but sufficient to make you close the doors and windows after a bit, despite the heat. As expected, the rising tide flushes the smell away later in the evening.

Saturday brings a bright fresh sunny morning. Through the spring and summer the creek mud has grown a mat of short green weed, like water cress, in many places. A month or so ago the creek walls under the APT studios (old Evelyn Wharf) got a haircut: two guys with ladders and high power spray equipment cleared the plant growth growing out of the cracks between the bricks. Destructive of a few little habitats perhaps, (including the one where I’ve seen kingfishers?) but I suppose plants left to overgrow here will gradually break up the brickwork as they put in deeper roots. Around the same time, a little scaffolding platform was placed on the shore and someone began skilfully to lay some lighter covered bricks in a hole in the brickwork. The job has been abandoned with the scaffolding now sinking unevenly into the mud and the brickwork remaining only half repaired.

Late morning I’m washing some clothes (a little machine is on the boat), C is making something on her sewing machine, Test Match Special is chuntering away in the background. C is particularly amused by Geoff Boycott’s Yorkshire humour: “’a pork pie’s got more brains than ‘ee ‘as”. She’s unconcerned when I explain what an un-reconstructed male chauvinist he is. The roof of the bedroom in the front of the boat is pulled back and I hang up the washing on a broom-handle placed across the opening. Hanging things out and putting things away seem to take hours in the confined spaces of the boat but it’s a pleasant place to do it so I just take my time.

The morning tide starts coming in at about 11. The water moves in clean and clear. It is not always so; sometimes the tide comes in with a filthy scum on the top along with the usual rubbish (cans, plastic bottles, take-away boxes and so on). I love to watch the water creep across the mud in uneven flows and rivulets towards and under the boat, and then hear the creaks and clunks from the hull of the boat as the water separates us from the mud and lifts us afloat.

In the afternoon I head out to buy the ingredients for a jerk chicken recipe which is painted up in large black letters on the yellow shutters of a barber’s shop in New Cross Road. Returned, I marinate the chicken legs and then I check to see how much Calor gas is left in the bottle for the cooker  - I haven’t changed the bottle in a few months. I disconnect the bottle and gauge the weight of it against the weight of the empty spare to see how we are doing. Satisfied there is still a fair bit in there, I reconnect the bottle, only to sniff gas, which is leaking out from the joint between the bottle and the hose. Bother! Gas cooker out of action (new hose needed) we get a greedy takeaway from The Orient in Deptford High Street in the evening

Before retiring for bed, I sit outside on the front of the boat to watch the bats, which can usually be spotted flitting about under the DLR bridge at night. It’s only recently I’ve noticed them, or rather, had them pointed out to me by a friend who stayed over recently. It’s easy not to notice them in the dim light of night, you have to “tune-in” to them as they make their swooping, momentary arcs over the water, feeding on midges and mosquitos. Impossible to photograph, they come often quite close, in front of and sometimes alongside your head. They don’t come that close though; they know their way around, these sightless bats. The mosquitos they feed on come into the boat to fly around the lights. This worried me at first, as I have long been susceptible to bad reactions from insect bites. Fortunately, for some reason, the creek mosquitos leave me alone, or their bites don’t affect me. A couple of weeks ago I went on a canal boat trip with a boat dwelling friend and was badly bitten. Not here.

Swans and cygnets

Our delight at the hatching of 8 cygnets in the middle of the month has, in the space of a week or two, made way for disappointment, with all the chicks now gone. The swan nesting platform is abandoned except for the odd rook, picking over the unkempt remains of what was once a crisp, warm, downy nest of clean straw. Three of the cygnets have made it to the Swan Sanctuary, the rest are lost. The two adult swans have gone back to the unsentimental business of eking out a living along the creek on their own; and life goes on.

A couple of weeks ago one sunny afternoon (Friday 16 May), while I was waiting for the van to arrive to take me to a gig in Brighton, I got to have a proper chat at last with Alf, who had built the swans’ nesting platform. We shared a beer and he told me how he and a pal of his had built the raft over two days after seeing the swans vainly trying to make a nest upstream. Last year they had tried the same and it had all come to nought, so this year Alf had a plan for them. Standing on our gangplank and gazing up the creek in the direction of the nest, Alf had all the appearance of a proud father (or at least, proud foster father) and I described to him how I had watched the swans’ regal procession rounding the bend towards my boat, with 8 cygnets in tow, one on the mother’s back, just a couple of days before. He reckoned the eggs and now cygnets were safe from the mangy foxes that hunt around the creek at low tide, with the platform positioned on mud too deep for a fox to step across. I wondered.

By early the following week there were only four cygnets left. An account, and some excellent pictures, showing how three of those now lost had been rescued from the little weir near our boats and taken to the Swan Sanctuary, is in a local online newspaper. Then, by the end of the week, the swans were appearing on the creek with no cygnets at all, and I feared the worst. The @creekside_trust tweeted on 27 May that the remaining four chicks were gone, presumed washed away in rain the previous Thursday.

So the creek has proven to be too harsh an environment for the cygnets to survive, at least this time round. This is not unusual; I’m told surviving cygnets are always, by and large, the exception. It was pretty obvious not all eight would make it to adulthood, but still we had thought one or two should make it; we will have to wait another year.

It is easy to map human emotions onto the swans, especially as their physical bearing is so expressive. I had perceived maternal protectiveness mingled with pride as the mother paraded her young around the creek, and now see dejection and despair as the two bereaved parents preen themselves in the pouring rain, white feathers plucked and discarded on the mud as if in self-mortification. There is no clear way of separating anthropomorphism from reality. We and the swans are in the same place, but must see and experience quite different worlds.

Creek walk

I’ve been meaning to get my wellingtons on and have a wander down the creek; a low tide mid-morning on May Bank Holiday Monday presents an opportunity. The “wader invaders” we have visiting us on low tide walks from the Creekside centre come with long sticks to steady themselves, so I arm myself with a mop handle and slide down the side of the boat. The stick is useful not just for steadying but for judging the depth of the mud and the water. Step by step I make my way to the water’s edge and then ford the stream - the name Deptford was formerly Depeford – “deep ford”.  On the other side, standing under the DLR, I look back at the boats from a new vantage point – my efforts last week to clean ours did not extend below the gunnels, and the lower front and sides are as mucky as before, and so they will remain.

This opposite side of the river is much less muddy – rocks, pebbles, driftwood and detritus. I look across at the old Evelyn Wharf, now art studios, the wharf wall itself is imposing and impressive. In times past these were busy docks and a place of constant activity.

After a while you get to realise it is easier to walk in the shallow flow of water; it’s more consistently firm underfoot, less slippery.

Going round the bend to the right is a cluster of boats which are only accessible on foot or by boat along the creek itself.  In front of these boats, in the tranquil morning sunshine, sits one of the swans, enthroned upon its nest raft, ingeniously built by one of the boat residents.  I keep a respectful distance as I walk past. I’m hoping one of the people who live here might appear to say hi to, but there is no-one about.

I cross back over the stream as the river bends to the left. The Halfpenny Hatch lifting railway bridge is ahead. The other swan is taking a nap by the water’s edge. It rouses itself indifferently as I go past, and then snuggles its head back into its wing. Evidently the swans’ nest is not made for sharing. Or perhaps this swan is stealing a nap while on guard duty?

Next to the Hatch on the left is a pathway which leads up to the Creekside Centre through green vegetation and wild flowers.

 I sit down for a while and watch people coming and going over the bridge.

I venture under the Hatch; the water is deeper through the narrowed channel, and it is tricky walking through the mud and litter on the sides. I turn over a few bits of wood, looking for crabs; I only find a dead one. Beyond the Hatch, a couple more boats are on the east side, including the old minesweeper, home to the Minesweeper arts project. The Laban Dance Centre is on the other side.

On the way back, I stop and sit on a stump along the wharf wall where last year I saw a kingfisher catch a stickleback. The water is clear enough but there are no fish to be seen. I give myself 10 minutes to spot one. Nothing.  Kingfishers must be patient creatures. Or maybe not, maybe that’s why I haven’t seen one here in a while.

Swans

These days swans have an urban reputation for thuggishness. There are a pair of them living on the creek, who have elsewhere been described as resembling “lemon-faced geezers outside a dodgy pub”. C is rather frightened of them, and so perhaps am I, a little bit, so we don’t usually feed them or encourage them. They will still make a b-line for you if they see you when you are standing outside on the boat for any length of time, especially when the tide is in and they can swim up. This avails them little, especially if you are standing at the front of the boat, where their hungry heads disappear under the gunnels when they get right up to the side.

Two Saturday mornings ago I spent an idle half-hour watching one these neighbourhood mute swans making life difficult for a couple of canada geese. There had been some swan/goose-like honking in the night, C tells me, so perhaps this waterfowl face-off had been going for some time.

I've noticed the swans have been getting up to a fair bit of other-bird-bullying in the last month. When they arch their necks back and heads forward in an exaggerated S-shape, bristling and fanning out their wings at other waterfowl in attempts to see them off, they quickly forfeit their graceful air and start to look rather daft. As for the impression this makes on the geese, I’d say the geese don't look terribly worried. They take it in turns to be chased and hassled, and do just sufficient to keep their distance from the arsy swan, seemingly in their own good time, with what looks to me like a fairly "not bothered" demeanour.

But the swan is as persistent as the geese seem to be heedless. When the swan waddles too close behind a goose on the shore, the goose takes to the water. When in the water, the pursued will take to brief flight whenever the swan launches itself in its direction, but will come back down in the water and attempt to continue its “minding me own business” business. Each swan attack is a "shot across the bows"; no earnest attempt seems to be made to make any direct strike, with aerial attacks alongside rather than directly at the geese.

At one point, the bothersome swan follows a long suffering goose out of the water and onto the muddy bank near the front of our boat, while I sit watching close by. These swans are never more awkward looking than when making the transition from water to land, as their flappy web footed undercarriage appears from beneath them and engages mechanically with the not so dry land, tails swishing from side to side. Now the swan squares up to the goose and flaps its wings menacingly, with the goose backed up in the corner of the creek wall. But despite the swan's aggressive showboating, it makes no move to stop the goose when it steps quickly past it and heads back into the water and upstream, off and out of sight, swan following.

Of course I have wondered a bit about all this recent swan aggro. Does it serve a useful purpose? Are they so half-starved at the meanness of the scavangeable food around here (and the meanness of us, not feeding them) that they must try to scare off the competition? I am not sure what state of health the two birds are in. The yellow discolouration and muddiness of the feathers on their breasts, necks and the tops of their heads had suggested to me that they were in poor nick. But perhaps a bit of grunge is inevitable on a white bird in so muddy a habitat; they appear robust in health in all other respects.

More likely their aggressiveness is down to nesting behaviour. I read swans lay their eggs around this time of year, with the male sharing nesting and incubating duties with the female until the eggs hatch around May. So it’s understandable that they may be trying to see off other large birds who might pose a threat to their nest. But here’s the thing: where do these swans nest? I can’t see how it can be on the creek, because the tide rises each day high up the sides of the walls that completely enclose the creek, leaving no plausible nesting place for them. Although not the case today, with only one swan around, the swans appear constantly to be “on the road” together, sleeping where and whenever they find an opportunity, as the mood takes them, heads tucked into their wings, usually standing somewhere along the shore. Seeing one swan without the other nearby is unusual. Perhaps their nest is further upstream on the Ravensbourne, past Deptford Bridge? But that seems too far from here, where they spend so much of their time. Perhaps they have yet to build a nest. Or perhaps nesting and parenthood simply isn’t a viable option for this grubby vagabond pair, and their bullying and shoo-ing of other birds is an instinctive but, sadly, neurotic and redundant pattern.

Back comes one of the geese, swimming downstream, just near the boat. A few metres behind it, yet again, comes the swan, arching and bristling – closing in. Then, simultaneously, they both take to flight, and this time, with the swan pursuing more closely and directly, the goose continues through the air in a low, accellerating arch until it disappears around the creek bend and out of sight. A moment later, the goose’s companion gives chase, with clamourous honks, flying straight up and over the distant railway line towards the Thames to find its mate in the wider creek beyond.

The swan has won. Boo! Hurrah!

A couple of days later, looking down on the creek from my DLR train carriage travelling between Greenwich and Deptford Bridge, I discover the answer to my speculations about a swan nesting place. Next to the cluster of boats, the General being the largest, moored downstream from us is a floating wooden platform; an anchored raft a couple of metres square, with a stepped ramp along the side, covered in straw. There was a swan sleeping in the middle of it. The swans have a home after all. 

Stuck in the mud

 I got stuck in the mud. Inspired by the Discovery Centre collection of curious objects retrieved from the creek, along with some cheap daffodils purchased from Sainsburys, I went after a vase lying half submerged in mud next to the yacht between us and the mooring. Lowering myself slowly from the gunnel at the back, both my wellies slid easily into the silt up to their ankles, making me immediately aware of my folly. There was no way I was going to wade even the few yards to where the vase was, so deep and yielding is the mud that accumulates at the high bank of the creek by the boats. Once in the proverbial shit, my almost immediate objective shifted from obtaining mucky bric-a-brac to hoisting myself back onto the boat. This was quite difficult. I vainly tried to lift each boot back up onto the gunnel, which was well above waist level now, and each attempt to do this just made the remaining foot sink further. C was on hand, to express her sympathy and concern if nothing else, and my main worry for the few minutes it took me to maneouvre and haul myself back on with the assistance of the available ropes was that nobody else would come past to enjoy with my daughter the spectacle of my silly predicament.

 

A little wander around Deptford St Nicholas church yesterday. We happened to bump into the vicar in the churchyard who let us in to have a look around. C was impressed by the clergywoman’s interesting hairstyle, a mixture of long braids and dreadlocks, and also impressed by the famous skull and crossbones stone carvings on the churchyard gateposts. Inside however, she was somewhat spooked by Grinling Gibbons' Valley of the Dry Bones woodcarving. Presumably the small children who play with the toys, trikes and suchlike piled up under the carving (not in my picture) are less bothered by Ezekiel's vision of a valley full of dry bones brought back to life by God.

A full list of all the ships built in Deptford is on display. The famous Mary Rose (1623) is near the top of the list. Other ship names raised a few chuckles. 1797 was a particularly good year and we wondered what became of BLAZER, CLINKER, CRACKER, CRASH and SPITEFUL?  In 1804, the year before the Battle of Trafalgar, the dockyard begat, among others, MANLY, PLUMPER and TEAZER (none of these, it would appear, saw action in said battle). ICARUS (1858) is a beautiful name but we wondered whether that one was doomed to end up a sinker. Ditto INCONSTANT (1804). I also liked WRANGLER (1864) of course, and C  the Star Trek fan was pleased to discover the ENTERPRISE was built that same year.