Trading in the information super highway for the Lea River highway / Football players as blue and red battleship pegs moving across the field / An old man is lurking in the bushes behind the field / Looking at a bird’s nest? / Looking for the secret drop-off stash of cocaine? / At least he can enjoy the sun in that activity.

This waterway, the Lea, I see as some sort of wild, pulsing artery of the East London artists and thinkers and sort of the subject of many writings and, assumedly, late night drunken debauchery and party conversations / A sliver of a memory of nature for the proud ones of Hackney / It does hold a bit of mystery and intrigue / Dark warehouses on the river / Wild-haired houseboaters in wool sweaters picking old wine bottles and flower pots of the boat roofs.

I get a feeling from it that most people might likely not get; a mild sense of comedy — surreal comedy — Victorian boat locks combing out Walker’s packages and Lucozade bottles with a giant shoebox of a Tesco store casting a geometric shadow on the water / An old block of artist flats and something called “The Greenway” buzzing with mid-30s professionals in jogging attire abreast of beatnik drunkards getting their kicks from a can of White Ace / New, weird, wonderful outsider graffiti on walls overlooking rusty barges full of old wire cables and pidgeon shit / Fields here get full landmark status in the maps of London and literature whereas back home vast square miles of forest behind the portable (housing)-infested secondary schools are just called “the woods” (note no caps…) or “up behind the smoke pit”. Let’s attribute that difference to history: you couldn’t really write a “London Orbital” a la Iain Sinclair for a city like Kamloops, British Columbia — stories about drunk ranchers, 10cc motorbike enthusiasts and new age moms running from their twenties in Vancouver…

Whatever the merits of nature this gash of the Lea lacks, it does project a — sorry to use the word — “vibe” about it. Foot trodden rituals, disused liquor cans from last night’s river round-up / Psychological art-markers on the bridge spans and walls / I look around and the old man is gone; having found out new notes about birds or getting really high behind a tree sampling the goods.

Apparently the “vibe” is being squashed by swarming joggers / I pack up my little scrawl and think about continuing down the Lea in the trees.