English Country Gardens

Recently, I have been attempting to rekindle the deep and intensely emotional bond I had with a line of Little Vietnamese Motos of varying wobble-ability with a slightly less impressive, Teen Bike, star of the little known TV series of my painfully dweeby adolescence which follows the life of Girl (me) who, no matter how much she tries (four times), cannot pass her driving test and gain independence and thus day after day reluctantly mounts image-destroying, pant-inducing Teen Bike to get her to and from part time job at leisure centre and even more fashionable extra-curricular music and church activities. 

Nowadays, I obviously couldn't give a flying fart about my image (hi, I'm a teacher) and am grateful for the middle class education that now means that I can adapt the tune of Mozart string quartets to sing homework instructions to my classes (what, pray, could be cooler than that?) but the trauma of Teen Bike still haunts me. Even two of the most romantic trips of my life - honeymooning in Japan and mini-breaking on the company in Paris - where Frenchie insisted that hiring and riding bikes would engender a sense of freedom and carefree abandon couldn't convince me. One should not be sweating, leaned over on the handle bar, forcing the peddles forward on one's honeymoon.  One should be eating cheese and drinking red wine in a silk scarf and sunglasses in Paris.

It has thus taken a lot of enlightened reasoning to convince me to spend time and energy upgrading tyres and purchasing rain covers (that definitely don't get used) and straddle Teen Bike once more. The argument was eventually won by the fact that Time is something I really don't have a great deal of, and thus Teen Bike really is my secret ally because He saves me 25 minutes on my commute to and from school every morning. No brainer. Teen Bike, I embrace you. 

Few modes of transport are more blatantly lame, proud in their utter lack of cool.  Purple frame with pink lights and jazzy 80s pattern bell?  I think, yes. 

To begin with, everything went fairly well with Teen Bike. I even managed to get away with hitching my work skirts above my hips so I was riding in just tights thanks to a coat of convenient length, which adds a bit of spice and risk to what is otherwise a very square, poker-faced working day. However, Teen Bike and I really forged our friendship one Monday morning when a pedestrian sprinted out into the middle of the road and pushed me into oncoming traffic. Now this is the type of Li Hi, near-death experience I'm talking about. Teen Bike is a keeper. 

So. Today it is the holidays, thank goodness - they were a long time coming - and new duo, Teen Bike and I, decided that a great and reckless adventure was needed. I consulted the Surrey section of my book of 1001 Gardens to See Before you Die (I know, go big or go home, right?) and did some high-technology research on Google Maps before settling on Claremont Landscape Garden, which was closer than Wimbledon Common but not as far as Wales. 

With my neighbour's blessing ('Isn't that quite a long way?') and Frenchie's belief in me ('Apparently zis eez going to be a big deal, I understand?), I set off towards Esher.  Now Esher is quite a long way away and goes through a number of more and less desirable suburbs, including a thing known in nightmares as the Kingston Bypass that looks a lot like the bits of Manila that tourists don't get to see. Shudder. You can tell when the standard of living is improving, though, by paying attention to the noise of the engines roaring past you. London buses are scary in their whale-like size, but Ferraris are much louder and more impressive when growling past you at 50mph on a road that really should have some sort of cycle lane marked out. 

After some slightly hairy moments at roundabouts and lots of sweaty referencing of Google Maps, I eventually made it to Claremont Landscape Garden where Queen Victoria used to hang out as a kid. The lady at reception was so kind to me that I recited her a sonnet that goes like this: Oh, National Trust, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways! Then I joined the National Trust because I no longer need to try to be trendy. I love this garden shit and I am not ashamed. 

Goodness, there is nothing more British than an over clouded day at a National Trust site, is there?  Most Green-and-Pleasant worthy, indeed! This place even does open air Shakespeare in the grass amphitheatre. AMAZING. 

So inspired was I by the fact that I didn't die on the way there or back and had actually done three hours of cycling without hating myself/ the bike/ the world, I decided that the next day I would visit another garden and make the most of all this 'me' time that the holidays afford. I even stood with my eyes closed in a forest full of birdsong in Claremont and breathed in deeply a few times because it's this sort of thing that the wellbeing courses tell mad teachers to do to stop themselves from throwing pens at children. 

Unfortunately, Sissinghurst Castle was 4 hours away by bike and I wasn't really up for that so I settled on the Chelsea Physic Garden to which you ALL MUST GO as it is the most amazing ever. The Li Hi nature of this escapade came more from the intense learning involved in the free (free!) guided tour than from the 30 min ride through Tooting (urgh) and Clapham Common (ah). 

I literally cannot be more excited through words about how wonderful this garden is. Every single corner is jam packed with beautiful and interesting and purposeful and historic plants and they create shapes and textures and perspective that are just so wonderful to look at and its all so organised and well thought out and loved and researched and there is a lovely gift shop and cafe, though, warning: there's a £12 minimum on cards and even I cannot spend £12 on tea and cake on my own. Bring cash y'all. 

Also, this is Chelsea: they charge £9.90 for the privilege of seeing their garden so if you come (which you definitely should), plan to spend the whooole afternoon lying on their immaculate lawns lamenting the fact that you didn't wear shorts on the one day of the half term where the sun is really making an effort. Well done, sun. Bad luck, wardrobe. 

Wandle-ing Home

Oh. And then Frenchie and I went to Putney Bridge on his lunch break because the weather was nice and reminded ourselves of the properties we will never own and remembered our proper place in the universe - tiny specks on the bottom of the soles of the riding boots of the upper classes. 

These people are so rich that as well as a river view, they also have their own personal blossom to hanami the heck out of. 

*Sigh*. One day I shall have my own hanami tree but at least for now I don't have to pay a domestic aide to hanami for me because I'm too busy with my six figure salary job.  These are the small but priceless pleasures of poverty. 

Adventurers that we are, we then decided that rather than go back to work, we would navigate our way home following old explorer methods: we would follow the River Wandle all the way home because whilst it starts off joining the Thames rather majestically like this...

...it comes out, in a somewhat less dignified manner, and significantly more scummily, underneath the Colliers Wood Sainsburys, which is near our house. Most intrepid of us. 

Whilst the walk could not always be described as beautiful, it was very interesting and reflected the diversity that has always intrigued me about London - a diversity that means that you can walk from modern glass riverside apartments down a towpath where some gentrified guppy has not yet built a gastro bar called The Sluice Gate because of the beautiful lines of this undated contraption...

...to a distastefully industrialised high street that proudly boasts 400 year old pubs next to a Currys megastore and this sun dial mounted on the wall of a row of Georgian houses...

...to a park with very pretty views surrounded by hideous council estates with car parks full of suped up Mercedes and BMWs...

... All the way home through some gritty, but geometrically pleasing urban landscapes...

Highgate Cemetery

Well, it's Bank Holiday weekend, so here are the entire backlog of exciting and cultural things that have been happening in the slightly-less-Li-Hi-but-still-culturally-enriched life of the Shepstar. 

Highgate Cemetery. John Betjamen wrote a poem about some form of deaf paternal figure having his fingers eaten by worms there; Marx is buried there (why?) and one side of it is filled with more famous people than the other (other than Marx who is on the non-famous side - go figure). Clearly we went to the cheaper, less famous side mostly because have you noticed the cost of living in London but also because we were busy eating ice cream when the daily tour departed and were actually more interested in gossiping in a peaceful setting performing hanami at our own pace than actually filling our minds with fascinating learning. Some days are just like that. 

Hanami:

Death cat:

Range of spring memorial flowers with accompanying birds and insects. I don't think admiration of these flowers counts as hanami. 

I love my sister. Most especially because we wandered around to this humble tomb...

... And she, with no qualms at all, sniffed slightly nonchalantly and asked me, 'Who's this Marx guy and why is he important?'  We spent some time agreeing that his gravestone was like, way ostentatious and vulgar and then I tried to smoosh 150 years of communist philosophy, politics and struggle into the walk home with all the Dr. Zhivago and JFK sexy bits in it (and Chairman Mao - it was, after all a Great Leap Forward and can't really be left out - it was just so great) before we got distracted by the first Shaolon Shi Temple to be built outside of China ever (tediously linked to Marx, for sure). 

Oh. And posing like rock stars against urban art. As high a cultural art form as the Socialist Revolution, I feel. 

East London

Ah, Tower Hamlets! London borough of recent Very Bad Press. What better time than Easter to reform the reading public's opinion of you through a blog post of naive discovery and curious praise!

Look!  In East London, there are llamas!

I know, man. I was as surprised as you to find you hanging out against a back drop of Canary Wharf. And let's not even mention the unseasonably warm spring weather that gave me actual sunburn in April. Blew. My. Mind. 

Sheep!

Now this is why London is the most awesome city friend: it heard my nostalgic heart mourning for the herds of cows that used to hang out outside Imperia in Vietnam against a backdrop of swamp+skyscrapers and said, 'don't be sad, little Shep - just go down to Mudchute City Farm where equally surreal farm animal compositions can be admired. You thought 'Cow with Skyscraper' was a work of urbanised art?  Check out 'Sheep with Crane'.'

'Wow,' responded I to London Town. 'Wow.'

Also, Britain in general must have heard my slightly melodramatic sighs as all my friends in Vietnam packed their bags and headed off to Japan to undertake hanami of epic proportions in the actual home of cherry blossom appreciation, because BOOM. Check out the hanami on these bad boys (disclaimer: not all from East London, but not at all from Japan). 

WOW! Absolutely not photoshopped in any way. Check out how BEAUTIFUL hat is!

So all this hanami-ing and appreciation of still life with sheep was quite overwhelming, but to make it even better, I also had a tour guide of monumental knowledge who moonlights as a Geography teacher but is really the Human Geography Oracle of all there is to know about most things and thus we got to learn all about anti-aircraft guns and the dockers and allotment waiting lists and rising damp in housing estates...

...and the social exclusion of Canary Wharf and Thatcher and the impact of the DLR and the gentrification of working class London and cranes that dip for Churchill and renovation of docking yards and the names of all the wharfs and it was so fascinating that we didn't even notice that we'd walked all the way to here and then I had cold sweats because Singapore was haunting me and please don't make me go back there I have so much more to give I wasn't made to be an expat housewife!

It does look a lot like the Esplanade, doesn't it?

Lots of glass and tall buildings. 

The East London adventure wasn't over there, though. We had more Geography to do so the Oracle took us on the DLR (which is like being in the future and also a lot like Singapore's MRT line) and took us to the Thames Barrier.

 

She tried numerous times to explain how it worked but I still don't get how the space stations detach themselves and rocket themselves into space. 'That's not what they're for!' the Oracle insisted, but we all know that she wouldn't know this much stuff about stuff if she wasn't in on the conspiracy also. She just doesn't want to risk losing her space on the Mothership that's currently disguising itself as a giant golf ball armadillo (they didn't do their proportion research properly before setting up this Earth colony). 

This part of London really is a bit like something out of a dystopian sci fi novel. The Thames Barrier park is full of beautiful silver birches - the perfect place for the eerily magical cult suicide at the end of the world...

And I don't know what the sunset and the pollution were doing in this photo but it looks like it should be the cover of the new edition of Dune. 

Maybe this will be my new bestseller?  It will star a wise Harrison Ford, the Oracle as strong female lead of ambiguous morality and me: loveable daydreaming heroine who gets foot stuck in railings at worst possible moment whilst performing end-of-the-world hanami to add tension and sublime beauty (cherry blossom, not me) around 10 minutes before everything explodes at the end and the Thames Barrier is inundated by the magma Thames.