Since lockdown began, and my horizons shrunk, the Thames has become central to my experience of London than it has been in the last 20 or so years of living here. I realised it was the best place for me to spend that one hour of exercise we were allowed, and my new habit of

Walking its banks has stayed with me now that I can go wherever I like. But I also realised how divorced I still was from the river itself. I'd walk one embankment, cross a bridge, and loop back along another: Victoria, Albert, sometimes Chelsea or through Battersea Park.

It struck me that I've lived here for lost of my adult life without ever touching Thames Water, and how strange that seemed. I grew up next to the River Tay, paddling in it, swimming sometimes, but never here. It reminded me of something @pgilbert142001 wrote about how Our

Mutual Friend is a novel that relies upon the Thames being still in its 'unembanked state', and how the river's 'uncertain boundaries' reflect the porous selves of the characters. And about how the great Victorian sanitary project of embankment severed the city from the river.

I've touched the Seine and the Hudson and the River but not the Thames. So yesterday I walked further west than normal, till I found a slipway leading down to a pebbled beach, where the river lapped onto the stones.

Tell you what, though: the water looked absolutely fucking rank. Better off without it. I didn't even bother sticking a toe in it. Still, you live and learn, don't you?