Caught by the River editor Diva Harris and her dog walk amongst the parakeets and palm trees of a tropical August.
Ground cover/wall cover: hollyhock, blackberry, rosehip, conker and apple. Half-ripe hawthorn berries, and passionflowers with hard green fruit.
Sometimes our walks are adventurous and extensive, and other times, even the park at the end of the road seems too hot, too far away, too busy, or too inconvenient. At the start of the month, the dog wears an uncool purple rubber boot to protect a toe injury. She sounds like a grandma who’s popped to the shops in her slippers as she shuffles along, and she tires more quickly; we mostly walk around the block, up to the big estate and back again. But there is still lots to notice if you care to; lots to sniff attentively (she the dead frog in theatrical pose; me jasmine and rose). An orange poppy sprouts from a crack in the pavement and crab apples recount Newton’s discovery of gravity in miniature. It seems unfair, absurd even, to keep a dog built quick as an arrow confined to her quiver, but we give her time to sniff her way across lampposts, snail trails and low brick walls; those powerful canine olfactory centres conjuring worlds of comprehension we can’t even imagine. Concentrated sniffing is as good a workout for dogs as physical exercise; just 15 minutes can supposedly give them as much stimulation as running off-lead for an hour. Walking with her nose helps to keep the crazies at bay until the nick between her long, bony toes neatly knits itself back together, and she is once again free to roam.
We get in the habit of meeting B in the park on his way back from work, and he teaches the dog to walk to wheel, trotting alongside the bike with her snout neatly in line with his front tyre. For a couple of weeks, she thinks that all cyclists are he, and shadows them on the paths until she realises her mistake.
The park feels tropical, summer at its crescendo, the early evening light bright yellow and everything in it electric green — parakeets divebombing, lime bikes whizzing, children’s palm trees planted on the path in chalk. B and I spend August dusks trying to capture the rose-ringed parakeets on our phones as they leapfrog from tree to tree in their nighttime ritual, but for the most part they are too fast; eerie spectres that hover strangely in the frames. Some legends would have it that the tens of thousands of parakeets in London are all descendants of a pair released on Carnaby Street by Jimi Hendrix. Another theory is that there were enough escaped pets to establish a feral population. Either way, what was once a novelty is now just another new normal in a chain of new normals. The peep and chatter of exotic birds has come to sound like summer in London.
It’s hard to believe that in just a few weeks it will be dark, the park gates locked, long before B can cross the river on his bike. The summer burns hot but it is fleeting, picnickers already dwindling; leaves curling and crisping, soon to surrender to gravity with the apples, acorns, conkers and helicopter seeds. But that isn’t quite yet. As long as the evenings are drawn out and golden, we will pause on the bench under beating wings; marvel at the flashes of green as we sit and discuss our days, the dog panting at our feet.
