We tripped along down to Deptford yesterday for a craft show on Creekside, passing Watergate St, a byway off the Thames Path. It isn't really a street at all: more of an alley with an old iron gate at the end and steps, chipped and muddy, into the river. And it isn't even that now, because the adjacent wharf is being developed and the alley has been divided lengthwise and boarded up so that just a 3ft 6in passage runs to the end. The warehouse facade is encased in a frame of girders on which billboards advertise its future as an enclave for living and leisure.
Mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it will speed the transformation of a slightly dingy area (although the immediate streets in a 100-yard radius are fine, with handsome 1930s council blocks, more modern and settled mews and the delighting Twinkle Park). On the other, it breaks another link with the working river; it is more of the same old same old - a water frontage dominated by leasehold residential blocks; and it heightens the divisions between the haves and the have-nots, of whom there are plenty nearby.
Yet what else is to be done? Deptford is historically interesting and vibrant, and part of the vibrancy comes from this rubbing up of old and new, of almost well-to-do and poor. I would hate to think of it being a new Chelsea - a slightly unfair comparison, perhaps. However, better that than the warehouses and workshops by the water staying empty and with weeds sprouting in the gutters and oil slopped around everywhere.
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A relaxed and relaxing summer to look forward to: exchange contracts on house tomorrow with completion pencilled in for Friday fortnight. One more trip to Cambridgeshire this week to collect a few bits and hand keys over to the agent. A chapter closed, except for monies owed by tenant, though I suspect there is little hope that I shall ever be paid properly and in full.
Going to Scotland for a few days next month. The place we are staying at is so tiny that when its name is tapped into Google, a totally different location 80 miles away in the West Highlands comes up. Spent an hour the other day looking for a suitable map since the standard Ordnance Survey sheets don't really do it justice. Then discovered that it is possible to customise the sheets, using a postcode or address as the map's centre. So, for £16.99, I shall shortly receive a folded 1:25,000 map with the cottage at the centre and all the paths and little roads to the nearest place of any consequence - Kirriemuir - shown in splendid detail. Very pleased with self.
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Planted a pumpkin on the back balcony yesterday and fussed over the rhubarb while My Love put tomatoes, courgettes and French beans in various containers. Hours of fun for the outlay of a tenner. Going outside to chat to the pumpkin, exhorting growth and fecundity, when I have finished this.
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Pressing on with two biographies of Il Duce - Richard Bosworth's and Denis Mack Smith's. The first is sheer pleasure to read, the second marvellously instructive with the info diced into nice little chunks and eminently quotable. All has been digested and laid out in a 3,000-word essay for the current module. I finished it yesterday and could hand it in tomorrow but want to spend a week or so just thinking about further points and redoing some of the passages. Seldom enjoyed writing anything as much, though it remains to be seen if it is any good.
The on-the-Tube and bedtime book is Alan Bennett's Writing Home, which I think is actually better than Untold Stories, although much less candid about sodomy etc. Great stuff on how he went about writing The Madness of King George III for the stage (the III being omitted for the film versions for fear that American audiences would wonder why they had missed I and II). He is insightful on the 18th century, often overlooked because if has less of the tumult of the 17th or 19th and 20th. Books on Pitt, Charles James Fox and the Hanovarians added to reading list.
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Just a final point about the craft show. It was held in some sort of converted office or factory which has been divided into little work spaces on three floors. One of the spaces was home to a weaver turning out wonderful woollen blankets in muted colours. Animated conversation between the weaver and a man with a beard that stretched to his belly-button. I half expected it - and him - to be drawn into the loom, like in some engraving of a factory accident, a victim of his very singular fashion.
