The Coast is clear

The missus and I shot down to the coast yesterday.  Don't get excited; it was only the coast of the Thames Estuary in Essex.  The weather has taken a turn for the better over the last couple of days, so we thought we'd make the best of it buying staring at oil tankers entering Canvey and Tilbury.

While this might not sound too glam, the light yesterday was spectacular - worthy of the Pacific coast of California.  Everything, from the most dangerous-looking and prosaic pub to the morbidly-obese locals, looked fabulous.  We had a good old 3-hour march, stopping only for a lunch of pumpernickel bread and cheese on the beach.  Lovely.

From there it was home on the train through Essex to east London.  The light maintained its peerless form all the way.  I swear to Christ that Benfleet looked like Providence, Rhode Island when the train rolled in there.  There were dozen of brightly-coloured fishing boats all lined up along the sea wall next to the station.  All bobbing along in jolly harmony.  It was wonderful.

How do you like your brandy, sir? - In a glass.

It's been humid for a few days in old London town, not humid in a traditional summer sense, just a little damper than we're used to.  Despite the discomfort this brings, I welcome it.  It's June, for the love of Jesus, it's supposed to be humid.  When I was a boy (here we go...), summers were excruciating in their humidity.  Not now though - something happened to the jet stream or something in 2006 and the weather went to heck in a handcart.

At least when it's hot and humid, you feel like you've lived every moment, even if you've actually spent the entire day playing Tetris on your computer at work.  Typing-up vanilla meeting minutes is autumnal work, like putting semi-conscious tortoises into garden sheds or eating roasted tubers.  No, humidity is good.  It's difficult to sleep, but you can pretend you're Philip Marlowe whilst you toss and turn.  If it's too hot to sleep, I'll sometimes get up and sit alone in the kitchen until the small hours, wearing nothing but a trilby and sipping cold tea from a highball tumbler.  It's just as well summers in the UK are short, or I'd crack due to lack of sleep.

As it's not too miserable out, I took a wander down to the river at Westferry at lunchtime.  There is nothing more soothing than the sound of The Thames at slack water.  It lulls me in seconds, my mood notwithstanding.  You can take the boy out of London....

Begorrah, which way to the station?

The wife and I have just returned from a weekend in Dublin.  It's been a few years since we darkened its door, and, as I was there on Friday for work anyhoos, we decided to extend the visit.

Dublin has a special place in my heart.  I spent a lot of time there in my late teens and early twenties - an impressionable time for anyone of course.  But Dublin is an easy city for a easily-led fop to become enamoured of.  It delights in its artists rather than its buildings, which is unusual for a capital city.  This is probably a function of its having been built by the British.  It is *full* of striking Georgian terraces, making it look very unlike the rest of Ireland.  Dubliners, therefore, don't take massive pride in the city's aesthetic qualities.  No, it's their wordsmiths that get the praise.

Take for example Davy Byrne's pub.  Leopold Bloom stopped for his lunch there in Joyce's Ulysses, and acolytes still call in to replicate the scene with a Gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy.  Compare this with The Grapes in London's Limehouse.  As a child, Dickens used regularly to visit Limehouse to call on his uncle who lived there.  His uncle would take the boy to the pub and place him on a table in to sing ballads for the entertainment of the regulars.  The pub is still largely as it was in Dickens' age.  It's a wonderfully atmospheric place, with its dark smoke-stained wood panelling and the sound of The Thames lapping up outside the rear windows.  But how many Londoners are aware of this place?  Hundreds maybe.  London is so busy hoicking-up its petticoats to attract tourists with a bit of architectural leg that it rather overlooks its gems like this.