The Thames this morning

I like about where I live that it has a great train service, isn’t traffic-wrecked, has all the basic shops and is near the Thames. I’ve just walked down the Thames to Kingston, for non-daily shopping, for exercise and to practise the walking tecnhique demonstrated by Joanna Hall in a Guardian guide and on a video on their site.

It was dull and drizzling and the river was magical. Coming on the water when you emerge from asphalt, brick and concrete is restorative. The river was moving, not fast but not stagnant either; it was lazy and dirty-looking, and alive with slight changes -- surface, ripples, waves and strange movements. The river is broad here and the other bank seemed distant.

There were no birds in the air. The gulls were lined up on the boats, with the odd one on the water. A single swan glided in the distance. A single cormorant was nearer in. The main body of swans and geese were around the bridge where the RIver Hogsmill comes in, and where young children and their mothers throw bread for them.

There were three grebes, a pair and a single bird some way off. I stopped to watch the pair. The male, a few yards from his mate, picked up some floating weed in his beak and swam back. They then went into a courtship display, raising themselves up and waving their necks. The weed seemed to be for waving; after a while it was dropped and the two relapsed into just sitting, and keeping an eye on a gull that was getting a bit close.

You don’t see this by the garages outside my back window, though in the recent snow I did see a flock of redwings -- a first for me, calling for the bird book and a phone call to a knowledgeable friend.

Grebes

(Thanks to: http://www.biopix.com/Photo.asp?Language=en&PhotoId=18333)

There’s a pair of Great Crested Grebes on the Thames near here, among the ducks, geese, swans and coots. For me as a kid they were mythical birds in my bird book … (parenthesis about my bird book: Ward Lock? From Daly’s Bookshop on Sunbridge Road, Bradford, bought with my dad one Saturday morning in a trip into town on the bus, down the long hill from Wibsey… Later, the Observer Book of Birds, of which the other day I found a badly damaged copy left by a tramp in a lockup cupboard beneath our flats) – and (Resumption of Foregoing, as Flann O’Brien says in At Swim Two Birds) to see them I'd have to go to some equally mythical stretch of water called a mere or tarn – wild, bleak, mysterious, bull-rushed or reeded, the water black, the skies louring… Where the grebes are in that photo is far too sunny.

Later, I thought of a mere as the water in Tennyson to which the dying King Arthur was taken by Sir Bedvere, who

bore him to a chapel nigh the field,
A broken chancel with a broken cross,
That stood on a dark strait of barren land.
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one
Lay a great water, and the moon was full..

Indeed, Arthur orders

“take Excalibur,
And fling him far into the middle mere:
Watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word."

Bedivere instead hides the sword and twice lyingly reports

"I heard the ripple washing in the reeds,
And the wild water lapping on the crag."

That’s exactly a mere. I tell you where there's a mere like that: under a crag below Hadrian's Wall.

The third time Bedivere does as told and throws Excalibur:

But ere he dipped the surface, rose an arm
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
And caught him by the hilt, and brandished him
Three times, and drew him under in the mere.

Thus the meaning of the grebe for me is suffused with Celtic twilight. Finding it on the placid bourgeois southern prosaic Three Men in a Boat Thames is an instance of how in modern times the world has got disenchanted.