Windy

I like it now with the wind blowing through the house, through open doors and windows, slamming them shut before someone has time to close it. I couldn’t sleep in the heat. The heat which gets all the more trapped in red brick houses, felt like being in a stone oven. I tried to sleep naked on the cold wooden floor, but the floorboards just heated up from my body temperature. I opened the door to the back garden and drowsed on the white pleather sofa, but a mosquito came screeching in my ear, so I slapped my head and went back to bed.

 

Today the wind is whipping everything about. Watching out of the garden door as the red tree on the left-hand side meets branches with the tall bamboo grasses on the right-hand side. Swaying like they’re drunk and shaking their leaves off. I had to prop up the tomato plants, which have shot up and tried to grow too many fruits. The ambition of all of Annina’s tomato plants she left in our care is hard to contend with, but I’ll do my best to help them along. I pruned their boisterous bottom branches and used twine to hold their necks up on sticks. I had to pull three snails off our flowerpots – both impressed and grossed out by their sucker-strength.

 

We have gained a new housemate and a spider recently. The spider (whom I have named Serafina) hovers above the kitchen stairwell and has her web in the window, which is finely constructed and equally distributed across the pane. She sits in the middle of it waiting for prey, but every time I’ve passed her abode, I’ve not seen any flies or insects caught in her net, but on my side of the house at the top of the stairs there are loads of midges. I wonder if she’s made a fool’s choice building it out there, but we shall see.

 

I open the double-doors to my bedroom (purpose built to be a sitting room) and the wind rushes past, scattering papers across my desk. It’s so breezy and blustery in here, like being on the prow of a ship – a Post-it stuck to my ugly work monitor flapping like a sail. I unfurl my sleeping-bag onto the floor and lie down, listening to the whooshes of the wind outside.

 

There is an enormous bush outside my bedroom window, which is very noisy – for a bush. A flutter of sparrows descend onto it every day and chirrup for ages, like a full theatre audience chattering loudly amongst themselves. At night, usually after midnight a family of foxes eat take-away under the bush, ripping open treated cardboard and crunching through discarded chicken bones, falafels and chips. Occasionally a group of people hang out in front of the bush, between 2-3am with drinks. I overhear everything they’re saying, as if we were in conversation because they don’t realise that the bush they’re cotching in front of is actually hiding my open bedroom window. I’ve heard of scandals about stolen money and loved ones who’ve moved away. It’s sad come to think of it and lying awake I’ve wished that I were dreaming and not hearing the real life tales of strangers in a bind.

 

The gusts of wind continue to rock my boat/sleeping-bag, gently from side to side, drifting me off to sleep.

House of Abundance

 

I live in a house of abundance and to say farewell to one of our housemates I made this video for her. 

Thames River Time

When we started walking the sun was up. I got us toasted sandwiches from the main coffee shop in the town centre. There’s something provincial about Woolwich and I want to be part of it. I’m gazing across the central square – while I wait for my coffee – that got done up for the Olympics, a forum with a huge television screen overlooking the concrete steps, where people are sitting. A child is creeping up behind pigeons, afraid he might actually catch one, so changes tact mid-way and runs at them screaming. Two women are chatting over a bag of corn snacks. Tracksuit bottom boy strides by flaunting a Gucci strap-bag on his hip.

You can glimpse all the movement of Woolwich, in one swoop of the eyes because of this central square. I’ve never really noticed it before because London doesn’t have town squares – apart from Trafalgar – the levelling of everyone on the same plain, people passing from side to side, like a game of tennis.

We walk towards the Thames. There is a farmer’s market in the new Woolwich Arsenal development, lined with stalls with striped tarpaulin roofs. People milling about with their dogs on leashes and holding coffee in cardboard cups; it’s not too crowded and could easily be pleasant. I notice more dogs away from the town centre, where all the city commuters live. The price of coffee steadily rises with each step you take towards the river.

There are so many un-built, part-filled flats on the riverside. There is a water-feature that’s worthy of any contemporary housing development - invisible spouts spurt water up and down in time to silent music. At night they light up in fuchsia glows, to give it an East Asian shopping mall feel. Kitsch and modern, also a deterrent for crime and rough sleepers, to cover a whole area with colourful water. Two big Alsatians play-fight amongst the spritz and look like they’re enjoying it.

If you keep walking the Thames footpath stops and you have to skirt around a warehouse complex. We made the wrong turning and found a climbing wall at a dead end. A woman in skin-tight leggings re-directs us and on the way out, we step into a gallery being set up for two artists. I'm won over by their mixed-media art – acrylic paint sandwiched between two sheets of Perspex then hung from a wooden frame by thick chains. Black ink applied with a palette knife over powdery Instagram filter backgrounds. The artists were setting up their Dark Silo exhibition, wearing pandemic face shields. One of them looked like David Hockney crossed with Garth from Wayne’s World.

The sky is filled with drizzle. We press on through streets flanked by enormous boarded-up warehouses and dilapidated civic buildings, and on to the Thames Barriers. The barriers were built in the 1970’s with an intended life-span of up to 2030. That’s only ten years from now. I wonder what the people who constructed the Thames Barriers thought life would be like today. It was a time of retro-futurism and Star Wars and that sci-fi ideal is definitely reflected in the giant curved stainless-steel structures, rising up from the riverbed like the optimistic past, which I have little connection to except through the nostalgia effect.

It’s properly raining now and we’re almost at Greenwich. There's a well-situated pub in between called the Anchor & Hope, where we stop off to have a half-pint and shandy. Music plays from a jukebox. Next to the pub is a seafood van with W-I-N-K-L-E-S painted on the side in royal blue, in old-style signage lettering. The catchy pop-beat of Maria by Blondie pulsates through the pub. Outside on the grey horizon, I can see the strange shape of the Millennium Dome with its toothpick yellow stilts, piercing up through the ground. 

The Thames is a good place to walk, it's like moving through vignettes of bygone eras, and it’s nice to forget sometimes what the day is like.

Tanabata 七夕

I celebrated Tanabata at home in South London, with my new housemates.

This is a traditional Japanese summer festival which is connected to the stars. Legend goes that there is a weaver and a cowherd up in the Heavens who fall in love. But because they fall in love so deeply, they abandon their duties. The sacred silk stops being woven and the cattle wander all over the place. The god who oversees Heaven is pretty angry, so he splits the lovers apart by the Milky Way. Now, only once a year on Tanabata are the couple allowed to meet at the stellar river. To aid them, a flock of magpies appear to create a bridge for them to cross and meet.

It’s a pretty sweet story and has a relation to the stars in our actual galaxy: Altair and Vega. These are part of the summer triangle, which are the brightest stars you can see in the northern hemisphere at this time of year. When the two stars become brightest it means that it is the height of summer, and if you are able to look at them during a dark night sky – in between Vega (the brightest of the two stars and the weaver) and Altair (cowherd) you can distinguish the Milky Way.

On Tanabata, one of the things we do is write wishes on colourful strips of paper called tanzaku, then hang them from a bamboo tree. Here is the emoji to prove it 🎋 You can wish for anything really, like passing your driving test or world peace. Whatever you want. I made somen noodles for dinner, which are thin and white and symbolise the Milky Way, while Simon fried tempura. The best combination is the crunchy fried-ness of the vegetables, dipped in the light noodle broth.

I told Obaachan about me celebrating Tanabata with friends in London. She told me that when she was a girl, she remembers her father going out on Tanabata to gather very long reeds from the river. He would sit on their front porch and wind the reeds around each other. She remembers he would weave out of the reeds two horses, then face them towards each other and bind them together with bamboo. On Tanabata he would release the two horses on to the river for them to be carried away by the water.

‘Why did he do that?’ I asked.

Obaachan makes a hmmmm sort of noise, as if both recalling and trying to work it out.

‘I wonder? It was probably something to do with the region.’ She grins, ‘They were really good horses though.’

The Creature

Moonlight

It started with moonlight. It shone so brightly that it woke me while the night was in full swing. I opened my eyes and waited to get sleepy again but decided instead to go to the bathroom. It was still a novelty to walk upstairs to the white tiled bathroom, which I think is beautiful, in the way hotels in foreign cities are. I had only just moved in. This was my third night’s sleep in clean sheets, in a room no longer filled with dust bunnies. Even though it was night – like I say – the moon was bright, pouring in through the windowpanes like muted floodlights. Outside was still; the days had been hot, and the grass had been scorched.

I stood on the staircase and looked out of the window on to our back garden. There was a small creature, sitting in an upright position on the lawn, peering back at me. At first, I thought it was a squirrel. Its coat was the right colour, grey and dusty looking. But my eyesight is very bad. Also, it was before dawn, so it was difficult to make out defining features. I thought the creature was too large for a squirrel. It may have been a tiny cat. I went back to bed.

Compost

Holly received plants from her parents. Lush basil, tender thyme, spindly mint which she planted in the wooden trough next to the rosemary bush. Annina re-planted the mint into pots of their own, because apparently, they hog water. Over the coming days I would don gardening gloves and rip out the vines, which were threatening the tomatoes and had already strangulated the lavender. I would also make compost from old soil, dead leaves, eggshells and used coffee grains.

We all had seeds to plant. I had shiso. A herb that’s used in Japanese cuisine, which taste a bit like basil and plum – the seed packet told me they were ‘erratic and unreliable’. Simon had unidentified seeds, which he scattered into free pots. Holly planted sunflowers.

Hole

The plants were growing exceedingly well. All this sunlight and humidity was sublime weather for a seed, it seemed. I had my morning coffee black, sat at the blue table in the garden in my string vest and shorts. The sunbeams drenched me at the start of the day, it was like being on holiday. We can all close our eyes and imagine we’re abroad – I remembered a friend saying during peak-lockdown. Then I noticed this hole in the lawn. A dusty puncture where yellow shoots of grass should have been.

Something had been digging!

I noticed a fallen flower head next to it. A white rose had been pulled apart, its petals strewn about, like feathers of a pigeon attack.

‘Oh my god it’s the squirrel.’

‘I thought you said it was a cat,’ Annina said from behind her book.

‘Whatever it is it’s digging holes.’

I totally believed it was doing this because of our stare-off at moonlight. My not reacting to its presence, probably gave it some perverse confidence to go ahead and dig up our garden.

The next day it was worse. The creature had only gone and dug up our basil plant! It had really gone to town and shifted all the soil back and forth, so that black earth covered the remaining herbs.

‘Fucking squirrel.’

I got the hoe and filled in the holes. I did not find any buried nuts in the process. I asked my surrogate mum Susan what to do. She gave me a gardener’s tip: spray diluted washing up liquid around the affected area because squirrels don’t like the taste of it, apparently. I didn’t do that.

The final straw was on a sunny Tuesday morning when I came out for my morning coffee. On the lawn, next to the original hole was a pile of shit.

‘Oh my god! Look what it’s done!’ I was abhorred.

‘This is definitely not a squirrel, or a cat’, Annina said. Of course, she was right, it was a fox.

Monster

‘At first it was a big squirrel, then a tiny cat and now it’s a fox?’ Simon laughs at me, ‘I just don’t trust your eyesight.’ I am now too offended by the chimera to care. Each day I go back to the trough and cover up the holes with more soil. Holly has been doing the same furtively, and so has Annina. We are fighting a losing battle. Twigs of rosemary are being snapped off in the fox’s digging routine, all of which I throw into my compost pot, dejected.

“If you can remove temptations or create an atmosphere that causes a fox to feel nervous about coming into your garden, you’re on the right track to stopping the digging and other problems that the fox is causing.”

My phone lights up with this message sent from Annina upstairs. She knows I am wildly plotting against this fox. I had the idea of putting chilli flakes into the hole, scattering them around the lawn, so maybe it would sting the fox, but Simon pointed out it would be a waste of good chilli flakes.

Showdown

The eve before Genevieve’s birthday the whole household had mysteriously, simultaneously, woken up in the early hours. I recollect hearing blood-curdling screeching from outside and turning over in my bed, so that the duvet gripped me uncomfortably. Caught in a daze, Annina had stopped on the way to the bathroom and was looking out of the window at the erratic movements of a fox.

‘She was running around in circles,’ she recounts bewildered. ‘I don’t think it was a dream. Going from here to there with wild energy, digging frantically. I saw her jump onto the trough and start digging again.’

‘I knew it.’

‘So, I opened the window and she stopped. We looked at each other for a while and I stared at her. Slowly, she retreated to the garage and climbed on to the roof and slinked away.’

‘Oh my god Annina. You did it. You won!’

I hoped the fox would be too disturbed to return to the garden. Maybe she would think twice, now that she knew there was someone here who was a worthy match, who wouldn’t let them get away with murdering our basil.

It was a glorious summer’s day. The air was pregnant with humidity, but the thunderclouds stayed away. Simon inflated two gold balloons in the shape of a number ‘3’ and ‘0’ and attached them to weights, so they could float freely in the garden. We all pitched-in to make Genevieve’s birthday magical, even under the restrictions. Annina commandeered the kitchen and whipped up a banquet. We had two equally complicated and delicious cakes. At the end of the night, after candles had been blown out and all the prosecco drunk, we placed the big shiny balloons on to the lawn next to the original hole.

‘I think this should work,’ I said firmly.

‘I hope so.’

‘Well surely. Anyway, you’ve done the hard part by scaring her off. The balloons are just extra.’

‘Good night.’

‘Night.’

 Epilogue: The fox has not been back since.

Packing and Moving

I am starting to pack up my room. A lovely, homely room I have lived in for about five years – on and off – I went to Japan for 6 months in between, but the room didn’t mind and welcomed me back. There are books on the shelves I never read on philosophy, sociology and political theory. They’re like standing heroes who oversaw my move in and now my move out.

Top tips for movers

·       Test your appliances, wires and devices. When you’ve been in a place for a while, you accumulate a lot of stuff, namely things that supply power to other things. It’s likely some of this tech has given up the ghost. I don’t need to take this mini-USB charger with me when the world i.e. port-sockets have moved on.

·       Close the lid. Find the lid and close all open containers and bottles you have in your possession.

·       Bags in bags. I’m a huge fan of putting small bags within slightly larger bags, and that within even larger bags. Like a Russian doll of your own stuff. I want to compartmentalise my life, to give it an ordered effect, so that I know things can’t escape and get mixed-up with the wrong things. It’s all nonsense but I want it to make sense. Sometimes it’s just about fittings things together. The end result is that it takes up less space, like this small brown leather pouch with an ipod and a wine-aerator in.

·       Get rid of old cards and vouchers.

·       There will be a lot of dust. Be prepared to sneeze.

·       If you have a massive vine – like my overgrown ivy – then unfurl it from the stand it has become attached to. Wrap itself around itself, so that it looks like a sleeping fox in a nest, then gently place it into a plastic bag for transportation.

·       No pain, no gain. Be prepared to stub your toe, scrape your arm, get splinters, etc.

·       Make sure you understand the importance of some things, in other words, “You don’t miss something until it gets smashed.” If you have a framed print you care about then wrap it in scarves.

·       Coats and bags take up the most room. Literally, they’re padding and baggage.

·       Get everything out of your drawers and pile them high on your bed, or the floor. A space where you may survey it, like a lord over his hobbits. This will allow you take stock of all you have, and give rise to discoveries like, oh I had a wad of facemasks my hygiene conscious aunt gave me in Japan – these are actually really useful in a pandemic. Thanks auntie!

·       Use bags for clothes and cases for books. It works with their shapes and consistencies.

During the move, it honestly helps to have friends cook meals for you, so that you can eat at regular intervals and not fall down with exhaustion.

Once you have arrived, hug your friends even if there are social distancing rules in place, because they are now part of your household.

Carefully unwrap the paintings, dust the floors, put the vine back on a pedestal, take a nap and then unpack.

London Wildlife

I went walking with a friend after Lockdown lifted, ever so slightly.

We met in Clapham because of the promise of a fresh gelato ice-cream. Yes. A double dark chocolate dream, but when we arrived at the front of the queue in the gelato place, it turned out my friend had eaten the last scoop the night before. So, I made do with a raspberry sorbet – still delicious and not something I could make at home, or crucially, get delivered to my door. It still counted as a pure #Lockdown experience.  

I walked with Georgia across Clapham Common where everyone was meeting again for the first time after Coronavirus hit the shores of the UK. We both stood in amazement at the park-scape. People enjoying themselves in groups, real people – not lagging behind tech, actually affecting the space surrounding one another. It was amazing.

‘This is so much better than television.’ Georgia said staring, eating her ice-cream.

‘Yeah. SO much more interesting.’

We were starved of human interaction and frozen stiff from too much screen-time. It took us a while to defrost.

The sun was bright and the common was green. It looked like paradise.

We walked through scrubby woodland in the middle of Clapham Common. There were little dens made of folded down twigs and so many wet wipes strewn across the branches. Then we ambled around to the lake to see the ducks and some geezers fishing. Rows of wildflowers had been planted on the Common, but it was mainly dandelions and they’re sort of weeds, aren’t they?

The finale was the urban heron.

A bunch of pigeons were pecking at a pile of chicken pasta salad somebody had thrown over the grass. A stealthy, very lean heron was approaching it, looking pretty awesome in an outfit David Bowie could have worn on stage. Feathery tassels, azure patterns down its razor thin neck.

A brown cocker spaniel bounded onto the scene – scattering the pigeons – screaming infants ran in the opposite direction – the heron swung its legs into the air, like when you get off a bar stool and retreated to a pond.

There were joggers, cyclists, runners, fitness pros live streaming workouts, skaters, cars, shirtless picnics, hampers: London wildlife.