The Harpy Houseboat? Yes, it is a very fancy and well-appointed vessel (do you call houseboats vessels?) moored up near Tower Bridge. Our old friend Karol (from Lyme Regis) had rented it for a special birthday celebration. A unique venue and a rare and unusual experience to visit it. In addition, as it is a good few days since I wrote a blog post, Battleaxe touches on last week’s visit to the major Roman exhibition at the British Museum – ‘Legion: life in the Roman Army’, and, much, much closer to home, a visit to Cooden Beach.
So, there’s the houseboat, above. The weather is really annoying right now – a mixture of sunny intervals and torrential showers, with a whippy cold wind thrown in for good measure. I took a number of photos on our walk back and forth from London Bridge Station to the Harpy, some of which appear here. On the way there it was absolutely freezing and partly wet – we even had to stoop to taking refuge in a Starbucks. On the way back it was bright and sunny! All the architecture along there is either incredibly modern and arty, hence wind-swept and bleak in the wind and rain, or heavily restored Victorian…
Anyway, the Harpy is a beautifully restored old Customs House boat, really very large, with four bedrooms and a truly massive living-room/kitchen, and a wide deck all round. It is available to rent – at a price – not surprising given its location and the luxurious interior. Karol was staying for three nights with some Lyme Regis artist friends, and others she had known for years and years, from her earlier career in film. A few more, including us, had come up for the day on her actual birthday. There were 11 of us – a small and well-behaved band – no wild parties allowed on that boat! You can see the website about the Harpy for all the details and lots of photos (link above), so I won’t say too much here. We had taken Karol some cakes, including a pink-iced ‘Princess’ one with a very fetching tiara for the birthday girl.
We met some pleasant and interesting people, including a woman I have met before with Karol, successful children’s author and political activist Anthea Simmons. If you Google her up there is lots about her, here is just one example…
So would I want to stay on the boat? One thing to note is that however luxurious it looks it is a boat – it floats, rises and falls with the tide, and bobs about in the water. When we arrived, the tide was low, and it was sitting quietly on the Thames mud. But in a very short while it gave an unexpected lurch – the tide was coming in. In the next few hours it rose in the water remarkably quickly. It was a windy day, and the vessel moved more than we expected, but that was just normal rocking. When a boat passed on the river – and there are loads forging up and down – mostly quite big passenger pleasure boats, the Harpy would lurch against its metal mooring posts. Would that bother me? Probably not, but it might bother some. However, the views are just fantastic, the boat is wonderfully comfortable, and the whole experience is unique. Here are a few more pictures:
And some more of our walk to get there and back… some very arty views…
So, last week we went to the British Museum. A very well-publicised and high-profile exhibition… Again, see link above. We had met some of Philosopher’s oldest friends – people he was at Cambridge with – all of a certain age. The exhibition was very large – it took us a long time to get round, and there were no seats along the way. We were all worn out by the end. In addition, it was very crowded – even though there were timed entries, so often these museums and galleries let too many people in at once. I mentioned in the last post that when friend Jan and I went to the political textiles exhibition at the Barbican, we struggled to read the signage, and this exhibition was exactly the same, for different reasons. The lighting was dim, and the writing on the signs by the exhibits was quite small. The likes of us had to stand directly in front of the signs to read them, and that was very difficult because of the crowds. I do think more attention should be paid to the fact that so many visitors to these things are older. These days they bend over backwards to cater for child visitors – this exhibition had loads of space devoted to kids activities, and slightly irritating kids signage featuring a rat (why?) – but what about older visitors? Ah well.
The exhibition was interesting, but would have been more riveting to people really into Romans, and Roman soldiers in particular… They had some quite special things on display, including the world’s only this that and the other – here is a shield, for example
But what’s this I just found… Eh? Well, Battleaxe was certainly wandering around looking confused, but… mind you, tthere were a lot of dark corners…
What struck me was how small the Roman Army was – only abut 200,000 to keep much of the then-known world subdued. Bit like the British in India I guess…
So, finally, Cooden Beach. It was a rare sunny day and Philosopher and Battleaxe had set out to visit the Long Man of Wilmington, which we had never seen close up. The traffic was terrible. After a long crawl down to the lights at the Cooden roundabout we gave up, and turned off down to the beach. We have not been to the Cooden Beach Hotel for absolutely years – went once to an Antiques Fair when we first came to Hastings. It has been refurbished and relaunched and is now ‘The Relais Cooden Beach’. It’s a very 1950s mock-Tudory roadhousy building – the sort of place one’s parents would take you for Sunday lunch after a ‘little drive out’ in the motor. Here’s a pic off the internet…
But it has been done up tastefully, and we had a good coffee in comfortable surroundings – would be even better in hot weather when you could sit on the terrace – and even a complimentary chocolate cookie each. Astonishingly, it cost less than two take-away coffees from the Costa kiosk on Hastings Station… So, Battleaxe would recommend the Cooden Beach for coffee, at least – haven’t been for anything else, so I don’t know as yet.
After the coffee we went for a walk along the beach. So quiet and peaceful, lots of interesting things to pick up and an amazing selection of weathered breakwaters and groynes…
