Janet Gogerty's Blog: Sandscript - Posts Tagged "the-thames"
Sandscript
Thursday 3rd October is National Poetry Day, the theme this year is water.
The books I have been reading and reviewing made me think how many of us write about the River Thames or use it as our setting. Starting as a spring in a field, 215 miles later it has become a wide estuary at the mercy of North Sea storms and tidal surges.
Charles Dickens' characters picnic by it, live by it, work on it and sometimes drown in it.
On a jollier note Jerome K Jerome wrote 'Three Men In A Boat' in 1889, unaware he was capturing for ever the innocence of a world before The Great War. His story of a trip for pleasure is still very amusing to modern readers. A few years later H.G. Wells' time traveller found the Thames still in existence 800,000 years later, though it's course had altered!
Our greatest living London writer, Peter Ackroyd, has written a book in tribute - 'Thames Sacred River'.
People are drawn to the Thames. They drive, walk, cycle and travel in underground trains through its many tunnels, but love to walk across, boat along, hover above it in the Millenium Wheel and now also cross by ski lift to the Greenwich Peninsular.
But The Thames has its own dramas, the land is sinking, the sea rising. In January 1953 300 people drowned in the estuary area during North Sea storms and tidal surges. Whatever happens in the future there will always be stories to write about The Thames.
The books I have been reading and reviewing made me think how many of us write about the River Thames or use it as our setting. Starting as a spring in a field, 215 miles later it has become a wide estuary at the mercy of North Sea storms and tidal surges.
Charles Dickens' characters picnic by it, live by it, work on it and sometimes drown in it.
On a jollier note Jerome K Jerome wrote 'Three Men In A Boat' in 1889, unaware he was capturing for ever the innocence of a world before The Great War. His story of a trip for pleasure is still very amusing to modern readers. A few years later H.G. Wells' time traveller found the Thames still in existence 800,000 years later, though it's course had altered!
Our greatest living London writer, Peter Ackroyd, has written a book in tribute - 'Thames Sacred River'.
People are drawn to the Thames. They drive, walk, cycle and travel in underground trains through its many tunnels, but love to walk across, boat along, hover above it in the Millenium Wheel and now also cross by ski lift to the Greenwich Peninsular.
But The Thames has its own dramas, the land is sinking, the sea rising. In January 1953 300 people drowned in the estuary area during North Sea storms and tidal surges. Whatever happens in the future there will always be stories to write about The Thames.
Sandscript
I like to write first drafts with pen and paper; at home, in busy cafes, in the garden, at our beach hut... even sitting in a sea front car park waiting for the rain to stop I get my note book out. We
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