Thames crossings cycle ride day 2

The second day of this ride did not start very auspiciously. I was awake most of the night with toothache – another story – and at 8 in the morning it was pouring with rain. As agreed though we walked up through the puddles to the cycle repair shop cum cafe  Look Mum No Hands and had breakfast of coffee croissant and some of their porridge which is never quite sweet enough for me but graced with fruit.

Mercifully by the time we had finished the rain had all but stopped, so with a supply of Ibuprufen along with a puncture repair kit we set off. We decided to delay the central London bridges for a sunday when the traffic would be quieter and start instead on nearby London Bridge going over south
then back north over Tower bridge

Once on the north bank going East you are slightly confused with a string of expensive estates butting onto the river and blocking a riverside path. You end up snaking through cobbled streets lined with impressive new buildings, beautifully restored wharfs and more estate agents offices than you could shake a stick at. Ah, so this is where Wapping is kept. Our plan was to take the scary (just do it to tick the box) Rotherhithe tunnel back south but somehow we missed it, heading towards Canary Wharf then going down the enjoyable Greenwich foot tunnel




These tunnels and lifts remind me of the Myst computer game, especially the domed entrances


I need to include a photo of Brompton:

So from the Cutty Sark its down by the Naval College to the Trafalgar pub that we’ve visited before. The drinks are ok but food is unremarkable.
After a light lunch of some meat, chunks of bread and a dish of mayonnaise we kept on eastwards toward the O2 dome near where we could catch the cable car over to the north bank.

Near where this ship was pouring concrete across a huge shute into a vast sandy building site

we came upon a man (from the north east) driving a mini. We asked how he managed to find himself in that impossible space where the only way in or out is via narrow footpaths. He said he arrived by boat and was looking for the way home. We did not think to ask him ‘which boat?’ After we left him we heard him ask someone on the building site the way out. They seemed as puzzled as we were. And as far as I know he may still be there, with his family back in Newcastle making the best of life without him.
Here’s the cable car:

It felt very cool just waving an Oyster card onto the gates to get into this exciting way of crossing the river. Usually I sleepily slam an Oyster card on the machine on those mornings when I go to work by tube. Warning for those who are afraid of heights! The cable cars are a long way off the ground. Strangely I hadn’t expected this so experienced some stomach-tightening moments of terror on the way up.

Here’s a view of the O2 and the Thames clipper that we caught home.
On the north bank again we crossed over the DLR and past the Tate and Lyle factory

to the Woolwich ferry. There are two boats constantly gong to and fro carrying a few foot passengers and mostly trucks and we saw three empty double deck busses queuing to go back north. One of the men working on the ferry showed us early morning pictures he’d taken of the Shard lit by a single shaft of light. Once back on the south we cycled around the corner to the entrance to the second foot tunnel, as the guide says, a longer and rather leaky crossing.



Because we weren’t going further down the river we redoubled our steps in the tunnel and set off on the Thames path back toward the O2 where we planned to jump on the river bus back to London Bridge and go home. Unfortunately the riverside path comes to an abrupt end half a mile from Woolwich and you are directed onto some busy roads on what’s labelled as the ‘interim’ path. You have to work out yourself how to get back down to the river which you can at the interesting Thames barrier.

By the highly visiterised barrier site is an interesting map of the complete course of the Thames which you can walk

Finally we caught the Thames Clipper home, with some dedicated bicycle racks (for only 4 or 6 bikes in total I think) at the back.
To state the obvious, the eastern stretches of the river feel very different to the area around Teddington and Richmond. its much more of a working river and you witness the huge amount of development still going on, particularly east of Greenwich.
The crossing we didn’t do was the Tilbury ferry. I think that will need its own trip, getting out there by train, perhaps by c2c from Fenchurch Street and then back from Gravesend station to St. Pancras. From Tilbury there are freight services to Gothenburg, one of the dwindling number of ferries to northern Europe. It even says they take passengers on special request – interesting.

London Thames crossings by bicycle – Day 1

On Wednesday I took the day off to try the first part of this challenge, described in loving detail here.
An attempt to catch the Thames Clipper to move ourselves to the start failed (one day I will work out how this service works) so as recommended we caught the train from Waterloo down to Teddington, a pretty place I’d never visited. From there, once over the footbridge, it is a gravelly path by the river to the second and most interesting crossing by foot ferry ‘on demand’ meaning you shout across to the boatman when you want him.
Then its Richmond bridge. I had forgotten how beautiful Richmond is. As recommended we had coffee and Portuguese cakes in Tide Tables Cafe

The guide says the clientele is made up of young mothers telling eachother how gifted their child is. And believe it or not, that’s exactly right. The next bridge is Twickenham
then the enjoyable Richmond Lock Footbridge (by the way the sun is shining)
Kew and Chiswick are unremarkable
but there are some lovely river fronting cottages on the way.
Barnes railway bridge follows next which is fun and we are moving into rowing territory on the river, with boathouses first on the north bank and then at Putney on the south, both very un-London.
Then after a not very exciting lunch at The Old Ship, we crossed Hammersmith bridge, using the footpath to avoid the narrow lanes and wide busses
Our last crossing for the day was Putney Bridge. I’d never been along the south bank between Hammersmith and Putney. It reminded me of Cambridge. Next Wednesday is our Day 2. The plan is to start at the opposite end which is the Tilbury-Gravesend Ferry – a long way out. The plan is to save the Central London bridges for a quieter Sunday.

Gone Girl

This acclaimed film adaptation of an already acclaimed book of the same name is billed as a tense plot-twisting success. We watch a marriage go stale and the wife fake her own disappearance in a meticulously planned attempt to frame her husband (whom she has grown to hate) for her murder. In the book the story is told by unreliable witnesses and the film takes this approach but with rather a jolting split about two thirds in when we see the story from Amy Dunne’s devastating angle. Amy is the product, literally, of her parents’ media manipulations and works of fiction based on her girlhood so it it plausible that she is revealed as a psychopath who blurs reality and play-acting, or rather knows only too well the difference. The film is a nice, but rather obvious, critique of the effect of American media fantasy about marriage, motherhood, etc. But for me the central scene of Amy’s blood soaked murder of a creepy male lover in mid-orgasm seemed to refer to a deeply misogynistic fantasy about women. It made me try to think of all the other plots in which women kill their lovers in the act of making love. The only one that comes to mind is the very different in mood, Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. But there must be others. A review of Gone Girl is here.

Coffee in Berlin at the Cambridge Film Festival

I’ve just seen ‘Oh boy’, apparently originally called ‘Coffee in Berlin’. Of the films I’ve seen so far at the 2014 Festival, I have enjoyed this the most. Both director and lead actor are new arrivals. Visually the film’s grainy black and white reminded me of Wings of Desire (of course). There are some beautiful moments of absurd comedy and, for the most part, a lightness of touch. It soon emerges that everyone the protagonist Niko comes across is in a mess of some kind, some realising it and some not. His non-committal stance turns out to be the most prized attribute of the film. There is a scene near the end of the film where Niko walks in to a late night bar and encounters an old man with an Ancient Mariner feel, compelled to tell his painful and poetic story. Its a strong part of the film but, for me it never quite became the key to the film in the way that I was expecting it might and when, later that night the man dies in hospital, I felt a touch of a rather unnecessary and perhaps sentimental narrative. There’s little about either the film or the director on IMDB but I have found this summary and not much else save that it won awards when shown at the German Film Academy Awards.

Thursday 14th August

Today was successful. Breakfast was a rather pretentious version of hotel breakfasts, personal service offering guests a platter of meat or cheeses and everything is presented in highly designed glass bowls, with a fake candle light and pissing boy statue. But I was so hot, it must be the male menopause. I had the feeling that the hotel ‘team’ were a little suspicious of me on arrival, dripping wet and not one of the well dressed elderly people that seemed to make up all the other guests. In fact last night on my return from parking the bike, they had put up a hotel full notice, maybe because they definitely didn’t want another one of me turning up. So I made a point of behaving in the most gracious way I could to show them I wasn’t a wet criminal biker. On reflection I should have done the opposite. In the night I have just remembered I was awoken as was half the street by the sound of what I think was an extremely drunk elderly man shouting unintelligible noises down on the street, echoing off the tall buildings. He seemed far gone. Nearly all his utterances had one syllable while only a few had two. It had only very little resemblance to human speech. Eventually someone that I couldn’t see came and took him in to a van and drove him off. This seemed to take them an hour and in the meantime it had started pouring with rain and I remember not for the first time loving being in a soft bed in a building rather than lying on the ground with a thin piece of nylon between me and total exposure to the elements. At no point did I hear him communicating in other than this simple fashion.

I ought to say that there is a better account of this trip, along with more photographs at http://www.obliquepanic.co.uk/life/germany-2014/germany-1.html

I managed to clutch slip my way out of the car park and pack up efficiently and be on the road shortly after nine. I had debated whether to gear up for wet weather and decided not to, the right decision as the sun was even shining as I headed north towards Bitburg, where the beer comes from. I relaxed once I was riding as I usually do and asked myself what all the fuss was about. After an hour I stopped and it started to rain though not heavily. A little later I stopped somewhere just off the motorway to Antwerp for petrol and had a tasty salad roll made by the hand of a heavily tattooed young woman who spoke English. I had no idea what language would be spoken in this corner of Belgium with its French road signs. I bought two packs of Camel for 5€ each and the yellow variety you can’t seem to get in the UK so all in all a successful stop. But as I went to stash my fags on the bike the heavens opened along with thunder and under the grateful shelter of the forecourt I struggled into my wet weather thing and had to get half out of it again twice, once because I had left the keys in a pocket that was inaccessible and then again to fish out the GPS in another pocket. I watched it pour for about half an hour and with slightly clearing skies I set off for the remaining 120 miles. There is so much traffic and much of it big trucks around the city ring roads, first Antwerp then Rotterdam. It needs real concentration to ride and after not too long the rain gratefully stopped and things got warm again, up to 22 degrees and wrapped up in my many layers I began to get incredibly uncomfortable with nowhere to stop until about ten miles out of HvH. Road works just outside Hoek van Holland completely defeated my GPS which even took us along a bicycle path for a mile or so. I tried to pretend to everyone that Bertha was a little moped which seem to be allowed to use those cycle paths.
Trier to HvH at EveryTrail

There is always a huge sense of relief and achievement of one kind arriving at a ferry port, so now I am sitting in the huge always empty Stenna terminal building. As ever I am looking forward to a shower on the boat and some cooked food with a glass of wine.

Although I find bikers in groups a bit of a turn off, individual people on bikes are usually interesting to talk to. For instance in the queue for the ferry I chatted to a German guy on his way to Swansea (I did warn him not to have high expectations) for a Suzuki Katana meeting (it’s a 1980s bike I think). He said he lived in the Ruhr and had worked down a coal mine for ten years before the mine had closed. Did the mines run out of coal I asked, no he said the health and safety requirements have priced European coal out of the market. The barges of coal I saw going down the Rhein were imported from China, he told me where the life of coal miners is cheap.

A second conversation was briefer, with a Polish guy riding a Buel. He told me he had got up at midnight that day to ride 1500 kilometres to catch the ferry and then from Harwich he was riding over to Holyhead to catch the boat to Ireland where he was living. He said he had to stop for petrol every 100 miles. Weren’t you tempted just to fly, I asked. No, he replied, I have been preparing for this journey for three years and always something has got in the way until now.

My journey today was 246 miles in 3 hours 42 minutes.

I slept well on the boat with no sensation at all that we were at sea or moving. Perhaps towards 4am I did feel some juddering and wondered if we were changing direction mid North Sea but in fact when I got up ( we ere awoken at 5.30) I could see we had already docked. Some ferries you spend contemplative time on deck watching the ship leave or arrive, but the timing of this one means you can be asleep the whole time the ship is at sea and never see it moving.
Harwich to Home at EveryTrail

Reflections: the new tent was a mixed blessing. It was great to have the room to bring everything inside without having to crouch around it and a few times I did stand up in it, but I never contemplated bringing Bertha inside it. At one site I would have had to drive her up a flight of stairs. The tent also has doors everywhere which helps privacy. It did not take much longer to put up than my other smaller tent. On the negative side, it is big and heavy. It needs an extra bag on the bike, so any slow speed manoeuvres are extra tricky. Park on a slight slope and it’s sometimes really hard to haul the bike upright. And most of the time I seemed to carry it around completely wet which must’ve add to its weight. So all in all I am not sure it was such a clever buy. But I have had enough of sleeping under canvass for a while. At it’s very best, you camp in a beautiful site, with lots of space around your tent, with warm sunny weather with few people using the facilities and with a sense of camaraderie with other travellers in tents. You cook food that you’ve bought locally in the outside air with suitable wine (chilled if you are lucky) and life doesn’t get much better. My trip to Spain last year scored pretty well in that regard. But it’s the lack of privacy that gets me down at its worst and throw in some iffy weather then it can rapidly turn into a bit of a nightmare and the bubble bursts. The two stays I had in hotels on this trip I really appreciated the privacy and the comfort. So I am not sure what next. I think I need to move on from this model.