Along by the river Thames...

...on a June morning...the tide was out, revealing wide stretches of foreshore, sandy and inviting, and with more than a thousand years of well recorded history all tossed around in there...the flotsam and jetsam of a great city, with so much happening along its banks down the centuries...

I stayed on the Embankment high above, relishing the walk and the breeze and the sudden bonus of some free spare time.  I had set off for Mass early, but the Sunday buses and trains were unexpectedly efficient, and I had half an hour in which to enjoy the riverside.  I'll be bring a group along this way soon... History Walk later this week...there's always more to explore and ponder...but this wasn't a research-and-study time, just a Sunday morning, and the riverside, and me.

The great reassuring dome of St Paul's is still a landmark as you look across the river from the south bank, but there are horrors as the gaze moves further east, with the vile "walkie-talkie" hideous giant block dominating all the other concrete slabs, and all beauty vanishing. You have to look at smaller things, in the immediate front-space before you, to get a sense of a living city again: the Millenium Bridge which any and every real London actually always calls the wobbly bridge, even though it honestly doesn't wobble any more...the Globe Theatre, new posh flats and restaurants, an old wooden jetty, people milling everywhere, some earnest joggers in hot tight lycra suits.  Children  running about and climbing on things. A jabber of different languages, lots of tourists. Islamic ladies swathed in dark face-covering robes.  And then, as I neared London Bridge, the bells of the Anglican cathedral ringing out and slowly changing to a tolling announcing that a service was about to start....which meant that Mass was starting at the nearby Catholic church, too, so I hurried, skirted the Borough Market with quickened steps, and got there just in time.