23/10/25 On The River

In the world of disability modification Britain had a reputation for quite innovative solutions to the problem of elderly and disabled Britons getting in and out of their baths. In the slightly dingy hotel world I now inhabited, the bathtub came with the promise of a long hot soak to ease sore feet and weary muscles after 20 000 steps of sightseeing. Alas, there was no bath plug let alone any other innovations, and I had to make do with a scrawny shower instead. Such are a tourist's trials.

What sent me in need of a hot bath, you ask? Well, Storm Benjamin came to London town with dire warnings of flooding and risk of decapitation by flying roof tiles.  This was my last day in London and Roger and Steve could cope for a day as long as neither of them did any bending and all things dropped stayed where they landed. I went out for the day, flying roof tiles or no.

Whoever thought they could fool people into thinking a circle of paint was a roundabout?

I caught the Uber Boat from Chelsea Harbour, quickly realising that the Uber Boat ran to a schedule that only loosely followed the paper time table and my planned day out may have to be flexible.

The boat travelled up river, past Westminster and Big Ben,

past the Cleopatra's Needle

past whole tracts of industrial buildings repurposed into housing,

all the way to Greenwich.

Greenwich was a cute little place, bursting with things to do. There was the Cutty Sark and the Maritime Museum, the Queens House, and Greenwich University which was formerly the Royal Naval College.  I hadn't come for any of that though, I was there for the Royal Observatory and, more importantly, the prime meridian line. 

Grand gates and the paths to the Observatory.

These were both designed by our friend Wren. See the domes?

The prime meridian was where time began, the point from which the world's clocks were set, and where lay the demarcation line between the East and West hemispheres. I joined all the other cheapskates who didn't want to go into the Museum, fascinating as it would have been, and instead gathered on a cold and windy ledge below the museum to take selfies and jump over meridian lines. 

A cold wind blew and it started to rain: I headed back down the hill toward the old Naval College, where I had heard good things about the painted ceilings in the hall and chapel.

I stopped and put on my beanie.

I stopped and put on my puffer jacket. 

I stopped and put on my raincoat over my puffer jacket. Then I crossed my fingers that the weather didn't get any more miserable because I had donned all my defences bar a rather flimsy umbrella.

The Greenwich University had beautiful buildings, long colonnades and gracious spaces. There was a function in the hall and a funeral in the chapel. Neither the function goers nor the grieving looked  like they were leaving any time soon, so I gave up and headed back to the Uber Boat.

The next stop was Canary Wharf where the industrial dockyards had been transformed into residential and business dwellings.  Over a hundred artworks were scattered around the footpaths and walkways and I was on a mission to see some of them.

A young man told me his life story as I photographed cormorants on the water. It was a sad tail of woe, none of it his fault of course, although listening between the lines gave a suspicion of a life lived with chemical enhancement. I wished him well and went on my way back to the boat for the journey back to Chelsea Harbour.

Rain started falling as I walked home. I got out my flimsy umbrella, which promptly blew inside out. As I splashed my way homeward the rain turned to small but persistent hail so my flimsy umbrella and I gave up and sheltered in the grocery store until the rain eased to a drizzle, and then we went home.

"I think I'll have a nice hot bath " I thought,  as I hung my soggy socks on the heated towel rails to dry.

We all know how that ended, don't we?

I went to bed early. I was tired.