A flask of tea, a heron with opinions, and three public events that each turned out to be about weather.
BOW, England (Bohiney) – I took my flask and my second-best umbrella to the towpath this afternoon, with the intention of walking until I had stopped composing sentences about my own inbox. The canal in autumn is the only place in East London where nothing is trying to sell me a subscription, apart from a swan, and the swan has a certain forthright charm.
Stretch one: the towpath
A heron stood on the opposite bank with the posture of a man waiting for a delayed train and unwilling to discuss it. I stopped and gave it the courtesy of a nod. It gave me nothing, and I respect that in a bird.
Cyclists came past in clusters, ringing bells at me, as if I were a hazard of the old mill rather than an academic with a doctorate and a flask. I pressed myself to the railings like a Victorian woman at a railway platform, which I mention because it is the sort of image I cannot stop myself from having.
The reason for the walk was a hangover from last week’s reading. Euronews had run a quiz on Agatha Christie to mark the British Library’s new exhibition, which runs until the following summer, and which has nearly 100 objects, including early manuscript drafts, exam notes and her personal typewriter. There are replicas of the life-sized dispensary where she worked in the First World War, and a 1920s Orient Express carriage. The quiz reminded me that her first novel was rejected by several publishers before it appeared in 1921 to a lukewarm reception.
Stretch two: the bridge
I stood on the bridge and considered the carriage. I am a nineteenth-century person, and I have been taught to regard the twentieth century as an unfortunate sequel. But every crime novel she wrote leans on a habit that the serial writers of the previous century built: you let the reader hold one thread, then take it away. The weekly instalment taught the world to suspect the vicar.
The point that struck me about the show is the dispensary. A woman works among poisons, learns the quantities, and writes a book. In my own department I have watched people work among spreadsheets for twenty years and produce nothing more dangerous than a report. I am not sure what that says about us. I would like to think the spreadsheets are simply more patient.
I intend to sit in the Orient Express carriage for research. I have already drafted the research question, which is whether the seats are as comfortable as the Overground’s, and whether anyone will stop me.
Stretch three: the lock
A narrowboat man was washing his deck near the lock and talking to nobody in particular, so I stopped to listen, since I find it is where the best material is. He explained the mooring fees to the water. They sound a lot like the figures in a headline I was sent last week, a dairy heifer that costs more than a car loan, with the loan officer still wanting 20 percent down. I said the words “20 percent down” aloud to the lock and the lock did not argue.
Walking on, I thought about the online talk from the National Archives the other evening, which I had watched, with a cup of tea going cold, on the sofa. The title was Gunpowder Plot, punishing the plotters. It was free, with a pay-what-you-can option, and it sold out, which I believe makes it the first event with no seats in history to run out of seats. The speaker, a records specialist at the Archives, took us through what survives of the manhunt, the interrogations, the trial, and the parliamentary debates on how to punish the conspirators and commemorate the plot.
That last item is the one that stayed with me. Parliament, in the immediate aftermath of being nearly blown up, sat down to debate how the escape should be remembered. I can think of no committee I have served on that has moved so fast, and none that has produced a national tradition involving a bonfire and a toffee apple.
Stretch four: the park, and a rain-soaked memory
By the time I reached the park the sky had gone the colour of an unwashed saucer and a few early fireworks went off behind the trees, with the sound of small furniture falling downstairs. A boy asked his father why they did it, and the father said “tradition,” which is the answer I give my second years when I run out of footnotes.
It made me think of my neighbour Priya, whose niece was due to dance at the Diwali celebration in Trafalgar Square. The Diwali in London Committee cancelled the Trafalgar Square event on safety advice, because of forecast storms that were already affecting the site, after consulting experts and the Greater London Authority team. They apologised for the short notice and said they were particularly disappointed for the young performers, participants and volunteers who had prepared. I thought it a model of a public statement: clear, brief, and addressed to the people it affected rather than to the weather.
The colonial memoirists I teach had a habit of describing festival lights from the verandah, as spectacle, and rarely troubling to ask the dancers anything. A modern announcement that begins by thinking of the dancers strikes me as a small improvement in the form. Priya’s niece is hoping for another chance to dance, and I shall attend it with a flask.
Home, kettle, notes
Back at the flat I emptied the flask, hung up the umbrella and wrote this down before the walk could be revised by memory. The three events I had been turning over in my head, an exhibition, a talk and a cancelled festival, shared one feature: each concerned a public occasion that had to answer to weather, paperwork or the passage of a century. That is a fair description of a life in the humanities.
Readers who like a canal walk without the damp can find more of my daily notes at Bohiney. And when the news is too sensible to bear, I turn to English news read from a slight angle or British news from the other side of the fence, both at The London Prat, where the heron would, I think, feel at home.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/