I have to finish this script! So excuse me while I am stuck in the 1970s.
That’s my excuse for not posting, but I do have a lot on as well….What’s that? I hear you say, weeeeell, I’ve started as a Royal Literary Fund fellow at the University of East London, which you’d think, since I live in East London, would be on my doorstep, but is, in fact a forty minute train ride away.
I’ve been in a couple of times already to get my new swipe card (why do I always look hideous on swipe card photos?) and sort out emails, and the journey’s not bad at all. I go a few stops on the brand new East London overground, which has beautiful stations with massive lovely murals and lovely lovely trains and then change at Shadwell to get on the Docklands Light Railway. Let me tell you about the DLR. It is not a real railway at all. It is like a bus on a monorail that chugs along by the Thames until the end of the world (I think I get off at Cyprus) you see the river, the horrid new buildings, Canary Wharf, Limehouse Basin, the Olympic stadium on the horizon. If you’re lucky when the tide is out there are loads of herons. Last week I got on the train and it was bursting at the seams with business men from all over the world. Men, no women. They were all en route to the massive arms fair in Docklands, There were also millions of police at nearly every station, in case someone wanted to protest about sales of cluster bombs and torture equipment.
On the way there they were all greeting each other warmly, comparing i phones and sunglasses, and on the way back they were comparing those fluffy bugs you get free at exhibitions along with other trinkets such as bullet holders and stuff I had no idea about. Fluffy bugs. Advertising guns.
The world is a strange place.
One more thing. Limehouse basin. My boyfriend who is now (after 27 years) my husband, lived in a squat in Limehouse about a million years ago. We used to walk down to the basin, then when there were no shiny flats or boats, and I remember, one summer, seeing kids climb up the railway viaduct so they could jump in. I put that in a book, STELLA, a ghost-ish story set in late Victorian London. These kids were in their pants jumping, I don’t know,, from twenty foot up into the filthy, rat infested waters. It was amazing nobody got hurt, I thought. So in my book, somebody did.