LEAVES FROM A NATURE NOTEBOOK: A NIGHT WALK ALONG THE THAMES AT HAMMERSMITH IN MIDSUMMER

'The night gives permission to imagination...'

[‘Moonlit River’, engraving by SA Bolswert, Nat. Gallery of Art, Washington DC]

Midsummer in the city, about 10pm, folks being witty. Coming out of Hammersmith Underground I pass a gang of youths, joshing, drinking larger from cans; one pours the contents over the head of his mate. Shampoo! The heat is on. Police sirens scream; a city catchphrase. After an afternoon inside a library, I’ve prompted for the familiar walk when ‘in town’, Hammersmith to Putney Bridge, but on the south side.

Outside St Paul’s Church a fox slinks through the metal railings; the gaps in the railings are perhaps four inches in extent. A rural fox would get stuck. From across the road, through the uriney light of the streetlamps, a muscled guy in a black singlet shouts, ‘Foxy!’, boom-box voice audible even over the traffic from the flyover almost above our heads. I feel like a country fox myself. Out of place. People fear the night in woods, nyctohylophobia. (Conjoined from the Greek ‘nycto’, night, and ‘hyle’, forest, with ‘phobos, fear.) I’m fritted by the city at night, its people, its people with rules and mores I do not always understand.