Dear Blog,
Missed me???? Perhaps it should be ‘mist me?’ with all the fine rain and drizzle we have had in London since Sunday! My young granddaughter wanted to go to London (to see the sights she had viewed on the TV), during the school holidays so the family went to the Lea Valley Camp site for five days and took the grand kids around the famous bits of London, real tourist stuff!!! Having travelled on Public Transport for the week, it is clear that on only lip service seems to be given to disable travel. Having lugged a child’s wheelchair up and down numerous flights of stairs, very few tube stations having disable access, I am quite knackered. My only objection to the system is that the information service is poor in the extreme. Repeatedly we were told on enquiring that this or that facility existed at the next tube station if we would care to just walk to the next station only to find that the said facility existed only in the imagination of the person behind the information desk. I only hope Boris gets his act together for the Olympics and particularly the Paralympics or he will get a certain amount of justified flack. There is no excuse for misinformation. What’s wrong with saying ‘I don’t know’ then everyone knows what the situation is. If the London authority was crap and ill prepared for a wheel chair, the Londoners were magnificent, even in the rush hour, making the lives of the children much easier than otherwise might have been the case.
So the week:-
As I said, we camped at Lea Valley Leisure Centre at Pickets Lock where the ill fated Athletic World Champion ships were supposed to have taken place a few years back!!
Monday:- Got the tent up only to find that the spot was too close to overhanging trees. Had to ask the site manager for another spot, moving the tent, fully erected, across the site .... how embarrassing is that???? We plonked down near the golf house. I went for a trudge. My goodness me, what a miserable lot! I trudged along the canal from your actual Picketts Lock. No reaction from the canal boaters, the path cyclists, the canal side strollers, the fishermen .... honestly missus I’m not trying to rape your granny!! Giveus a wave, giveus a grunt. Owt is better than nowt.
Tuesday:- Trafalgar Square and the National Portrait Gallery in the pouring rain. Nelson was wearing his mackintosh and his wellingtons and the lions were really pissed off. So a day with the wheelchair was a real eye opener. Stairs, stairs, stairs and more stairs. I can recommend a good Lift Company from Keighley if Boris is interested.
It is noteworthy that the vast majority of tents on the Lea Valley site are occupied by workers using camping as a cheap means of accommodation while working in London. The following you might find interesting, Blog. In August, last year, in the Guardian newspaper, the following article by Helen Pidd, appeared:-
Bob Casbeard commutes a few days a week to his urban planning job in Hackney from the Lee Valley campsite. Photograph: Felix Clay
Visit one of the campsites encircling the city and it becomes clear how some people make the sums work: by shunning bricks and mortar to live in tents, caravans and mobile homes.
Each morning at these sites the shower blocks teem with commuters washing, shaving and making themselves presentable for a hard day's graft in the big smoke.
Last week a council worker called Philip Hanman hit the papers when he claimed he had been forced out of his job after his bosses discovered he was commuting to work in Barking and Dagenham in east London from a campsite in Epping Forest, where he slept in a £30 tent. Hanman has taken voluntary redundancy from the council and now lives with his family in Cornwall, where he previously spent his weekends. Camping commuters are far from rare in the capital. On the Lee Valley site in Edmonton, north London, near a monster branch of Ikea and surrounded by pylons, 40 pitches are reserved for "long-termers".
Many of them work constructing the Olympic park, driving buses or in other jobs in the city, returning to their "real" homes at the weekend.
Here, in a neat caravan, lives one of the more unusual residents. Last year Lucy Boggis, 21, spent her days chasing amateur athletes up a climbing wall in her role as Tempest in the Sky series of Gladiators. Now, she is devoting all her energy to the 2012 Olympics, where she hopes to represent Britain in the heptathlon. With no lottery funding, money is tight. So last September she decided to set up camp at the Lee Valley site, which is next door to an athletics centre.
Each morning, she makes herself porridge on the small van's stove, before padding over to the shower block for a wash.
She's at the track for 9am, and spends the day practising the hurdles, high jump and the other five disciplines that make up her event. On the weekends she goes home to her family in the West Country. "Some of my fellow athletes take the mickey, but most of them actually think it's a good idea. If you don't have funding, you don't have much spare money, and it's much cheaper to stay in a caravan than rent a one-bedroom flat," she said.
Lee Valley is one of the more expensive sites around London, charging between £12.30 and £16.40 a night for a one-person pitch, depending on the season, plus £3.60 per day for electricity.
In a caravan a few doors down from Boggis lives IT contractor Keith Davidson, who commutes to Canary Wharf each day.
The City is less than an hour away by public transport, with a regular bus service stopping at the site and taking campers to the nearest station.
"My family lives up in Aberdeen, but I often get contracts down here. The main reason I stay here is because of the flexibility – if you rent a flat you often have to commit to six months or a year, whereas here you can come and go as you like," he said.
The campsite's only residency rules are that everyone has to clear off during the few winter months when the site is closed, and that you pay for every night you're taking up a pitch, whether you're there or not. In a motorhome nearby lives Bob Casbeard, who commutes a few days a week to his urban planning job in Hackney. "I've been coming here on and off for eight years," he said, showing off his retractable satellite dish and extensive cooking facilities. Unlike many of the other long-termers, Casbeard is not camping to save money – he owns houses in east London, Suffolk and the Champagne region of France. "I do it to save the planet," he said, pointing up to the solar panels on the roof.
He added: "It does save me some money, though. Sometimes I stay in a hotel in Chigwell, and it costs £70 a night, which even for three nights is more expensive than parking my van here for a whole week."
To which I replied with the following letter which was published
‘Helen Pidd (Aug 16th) cites Lucy Boggis living in a caravan as a novel way of coping with living costs whilst trying to improve her athletic prowess to achieve an Olympic Games selection.
In the mid 60s, I moved to Coventry for my first job. The city was then very much a boom town with the car workers earning sky high wages which in turn bolstered the local cost of living. Straight from university I had no savings and my income was meagre compared to the average Coventry citizen. My parents were in no financial position to help. I too harboured ambitions for Games selection but life was one great big financial struggle. Like Lucy Boggis I hit on the idea of living in a caravan to cut costs. Not a mobile home, but an old seaside caravan with huge glass windows and paper thin walls which did nothing to retain the heat in winter. It had a bedroom which had to be abandoned for four months of the year to avoid hypothermia! The water tap had to be kept trickling to avoid being frozen up for weeks until the next thaw. A thirty yard trek to the toilet in mid winter is no joke! It was not unknown on a cold winter’s night, to leave a hot water bottle in my bed, only to return from training to a solid block of ice between the sheets. In the summer, the heat was unbearable; food having a short shelf life because I could not afford a fridge. No funding was available forty years ago. Indeed, Helen will not have to suffer the hardship of losing her wage every time she competes for her country. Weekend cross country races on the continent cost a couple of day’s salary. The Olympic Games cost me three weeks salary as the local authority regarded my selection for my country as unauthorised absence! Unfortunately the Commonwealth Games were held in New Zealand in 1974 incurring a personal wage deduction of six weeks. By this time I was married and that was a huge blow to our savings and our ambition to become a house owner. Luckily when I ran in the European Games for Great Britain the dates coincided with my annual holidays so I was not penalised financially!! Perhaps the resentment of feeling a second class athlete will fire Lucy Boggis as much as it did me.’
I thought I might pop round to the caravan to see the young lady, but I thought better of it as I thought she might be over awed by the presence of such a famous athlete as me.
Wednesday:- The Natural History Museum and Buckingham Palace in the sun shine. The Queen didn’t invite us in for tea as she was worried that the wheelchair tyres would mucky her carpets. Her majesty has only just had them cleaned so I suppose that is understandable. I bet it cost her quite a lot to have all those carpets done, these carpet cleaning firms are not cheap you know, Blog. It’s an arm and a leg just for a door mat and the size of the door mat in Buckingham Palace must be quite big. Oh those joggers. You see them here, you see them there, you see those joggers everywhere ... weaving in and out of the crowds, jogging on the spot at the traffic lights ..... Give it a bit of thought folks.
Arriving back at Edmonton, the bloody doors of the train wouldn’t open so we had the pleasure of an unscheduled trip a little further along the railway line, then a climb up and over the footbridge at the next station, wheelchair, bags and all, and a return trip back down the line with a climb up and over the footbridge at the station, wheelchair, bags and all.
Thursday:- Tower Bridge and the Science Museum in the pouring rain. We were treated to the London Bridge opening to allow a huge Cruise Liner through to dock opposite the Tower. How much did the fat cats on board have to pay for their holiday? I bet it was a bit more than our camping fees?? With all the hassle of humping the wheelchair up and down all those flights of stairs, one of our bags was left on the circle line underground tube ... the bag with the car keys pinned inside!!!!!!!!!!!!!! When we caught the mainline train back to Edmonton from Liverpool Street, we didn’t catch the main line train back to Edmonton from Liverpool Street. We got on the wrong train ................. The Train Ticket Inspector was very understanding and didn’t make us walk all the way back to Liverpool Street. He let us use one of his other trains which had space on it for us and the wheelchair.
Friday:- Heard one early morning golfer, spouting words of wisdom to his playing partner. ‘I always talk, I never stop, I go on and on all the time. The trouble is I don’t know I’m doing it.’ As I dozed off back to sleep, I wondered if I should ask his permission to use his quote in my next philosophy lecture? And down came the rain.
Nice to be back to local trudging ................
Colin
