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.