Yesterday I went boating. My talented photographer friend Stephen knows a lot about Hackney Wick. He loves it enough to have spent years photographing it, making books and exhibitions out of it, moving there and buying an inflatable dinghy to sail down the River Lea. The River Lea is an urban river. It flows, but it smells. It has silted over mopeds and moped tyres all along it, given the native youths' favourite pastime, which is to nick mopeds and then hurl them into the river. This makes navigation something that should be concentrated on, which is difficult when you're - or Stephen was, as he was rowing - also trying to drink a Kronenbourg 1664. (It was sundowner time.)
There was no-one else on the river, beyond us and the birds. A heron took off when we floated towards it, and was later to be seen trying to flee about 20 bullying crows. 'Oh, crows are always going after herons,” said Stephen, knowledgeably, as he has taken many marvellous pictures of birds in cities. A cormorant also took off, despite a gammy leg. Ducks flap their wings very fast while flying.
Hackney Wick has been chosen for - or cursed with - the Olympics. It's my understanding that every host city loses money on the Olympics, and the locals get turfed out of their houses, and all for a few weeks. It seems disproportionate, but at least we beat Paris. Anyway, Stephen has heard that a wall will be built around the construction site which runs along the other bank of the river, but the wall will be built on the Hackney Marshes side, so that no-one will be able to get to or onto the river. I don't think I like the Olympics.
We walked back over Hackney Marshes - a big field - to the bikes. A man was flying a kite on his own in the dark. Stephen said it looked like a flying maggot. I said a flying Wotsit. Maggot or Wotsit; it was nice, but dark. The bikes had been carefully hidden, though in a spot where men lurk. Better to tolerate cruisers than have your bike nicked. The red-headed fisherman who'd been there at our launch - an optimistic man, obviously - had also gone. But the fox was there. Stephen had met the fox before. This time, he whistled and the fox sauntered through the railings, then sat calmly for ten minutes, not scared and not moving. He lost interest after ten minutes of waiting for food we didn't have.
Just now I googled “fox” on google images. The results were pictures of foxes. Then I googled “vixen,” and got several pages of barely clad women, rock groups featuring barely clad women, and a picture of Britney Spears. There were no female foxes, but there was this:
