London, my London

Start of my cycle journey

The biggest challenge whenever I decide to undertake a bicycle trip is not the actual journey itself but the getting to the starting point. I have, thus far, avoided using the train, preferring instead to pedal my way to whatever place I kick off my jaunt from. There are two reasons for this: one is that inspectors have yet to make up their minds about bicycles on trains. One minute it is folding bikes and other types that are allowed on, the next minutes it is only the former. The second reason is that, although some of you who know me in real life are acquainted with my London postcode, including visiting my house, my location is not a topic I discuss gladly online. One day, I promise, one day you will all be invited chez moi for tea/coffee and cheesecake (I make a really nice cheesecake).

This peculiarity of adding miles to my journey before setting off on my actual journey was the reason why I found myself on the Ridgeway recently. As in, Enfield Ridgeway. Enfield, the northernmost borough in London, the one with the most parks and green spaces. Ever since I went to the Museum of London last summer (another bicycle trip) I have had the idea of exploring London’s waterways, both small and big, short and long. On this occasion I was planning to cycle along the Turkey Brook trail from north of the M25, near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire to the River Lee Navigation.

However, had I completed the route I had in mind, the title of my post would not have applied. I mentioned I was in the northernmost borough in London. From where I was sitting, on my bike, I could hear the traffic of the nearby M25, London’s orbital motorway. North of it, there was no more London. That is why I decided to chop a couple of miles off my journey and begin on the Ridgeway, a thin strip of a road that starts a quarter of a mile away from Enfield Town and runs northwards until it dies at the Potters Bar roundabout.

It was an unseasonably warm February afternoon with the temperature reaching the high teens for the first time this year. As readers and fellow bloggers know, I do not care for winter (or summer, for that matter). The former barely brings any snow, still the usual sign that the coldest season of the year is upon us and the latter is synonymous with hay fever for me. I love autumn and spring, death and rebirth, better.

However, as I pedalled down the Ridgeway cycle route, I also realised that if there had been any snow I would have been unable to complete this challenge. So, hooray for warm winters, even if nowadays they stand more for climate change than odd weather.
I had a fair idea of how to get to the River Lee Navigation and I also knew that the London Borough of Enfield had recently been granted £30m by Transport for London to roll out a “mini Holland” cycle scheme. What this meant in reality was that clear and easy-to-read signage was in place to guide me along the way.

I slid down a road on my left and saw the brook trail up ahead. Straight away the first difficulty appeared: it was almost impossible to cycle along the stream with my commuter bike. Perhaps a tough, mountain one would have done the trick but I doubted that I would have been able to overcome the uneven terrain and thorny-looking bush. Sometimes it is not the bike, but the person riding it that makes the difference. I carried on cycling on the small country lane I was and eventually I came across North Enfield Cricket Club on my right hand-side. I knew that Hilly Fields Park was not far away and, as I had seen on Google map the night before, the Turkey Brook trail went right through the heart of it.

It was odd that here I was in 2016 cycling through a park that had been earmarked for development – chiefly housing – just over a hundred years before. Luckily, Enfield Council at the time bought the farm the park was on and turned it into a public space. One of the more popular attractions was its bandstand. This was the time of brass bands and with the opening of nearby train stations Gordon Hill and Crews Hill, this part of London began to draw large audiences.

Rembrandt would have been proud

Winter afternoons have a habit of switching the sun lights off too soon. It had just gone two o’ clock and yet it felt like dusk was upon me. Still, as I ventured through Hilly Fields there was enough light streaming through the leaf-free, candelabra-shaped trees. I stopped for a few seconds to take some pictures and soak up my surroundings.

Bar a few dog-walkers and families, the park was almost deserted. Turkey Brook lay on my left; the combination of the shallowest of waters and the bare branches looming over them rendered the scenery Rembrandt-nesque. It was the Dutch master’s etchings that came to mind when I looked around me. The same effect of the chiaroscuro he deployed so effectively in his prints was evident here. The scant but still visible sunrays enhanced the composition of plant, brook and ground, creating in the process delicate but dramatic gradations of light and shade.

I cycled on, past the aforementioned bandstand. After crossing Clay Hill, I found myself on Whitewebbs Park, the grounds on which an old 16^th-century mansion stood once. Rumour has it that the Gunpowder Plot was planned here. Nowadays, Whitewebb s Park has an ancient woodland with small streams, some of which join the Turkey Brook trail, along which I proceeded. A pub called the King and Tinker, dating back to the times of James I, is located north of the park. I went further east, leaving the copse momentarily before entering Forty Hall Country Park. All the time I kept an eye out for kingfishers, grey wagtails or mandarin ducks. I have always seen the male latter as Barry Manilow's avian version of his Copacabana's Lola, but instead of yellow feathers, orange ones on the side of its face.

The mood that greeted me in Forty Hall was phantom-like. A threadlike strip of brook ran on my left as a wide pond opened up on my right. A couple of joggers appeared on my trail, all of a sudden, their huffing-and-puffing heavy breathing the only sound that was heard. We exchanged glances and hellos. Other than them – and me – there was no other soul in this desolate, coppiced landscape. The treetops resembled shutters through which scant rays of the weak winter sun filtered through to render the scenery spectral. I was reminded of Oyá, the orisha of the graveyard. A thin veil of mist hung above the pond. I also remembered part of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 86: “He, nor that affable familiar ghost/Which nightly gulls him with intelligence,/As victors of my silence cannot boast;/I was not sick of any fear from thence:/ But when your countenance filled up his line,/Then lacked I matter; that enfeebled mine."

Tranquil and phantom-like: Forty Hall

It is at a rival poet that Shakespeare is directing these lines. A poet who has apparently stolen Shakespeare’s beloved’s attention from him. I was not surprised to find myself thinking of the Bard's ghost-like soul. After all, the coat of arms of the London Borough of Enfield itself includes a mythological beast that has the head of a fox, the chest of a hound, the talons of an eagle, the body of a lion and the hindquarters and tail of a wolf. So far no one has claimed paternity, I hear.

There was another reason for the spooky surroundings. As I cycled towards the Bull’s Cross exit, in order to re-join the cycle route on the other side, I recalled that somewhere here on my right hand-side stood once Elsings, or Elsynge, a magnificent palace that dominated the area for more than 200 years. From Henry VII to Elizabeth I, this part of north London was touched by royalty. Henry VIII (yes, that Henry VIII!) used to hunt on these grounds. The palace has not been there for centuries, having fallen slowly into ruin.

Leaving the green spaces of Forty Hall, Whitewebbs and Hilly Fields brought with it a new level of difficulty: I would have to follow the Turkey Brook trail now through residential roads. The trick was to use almost-traffic-free back streets whilst keeping an eye on the stream. In the event it turned out to be easy. The cycle signs were helpful and accurate. I followed the brook through Albany Park, Prince of Wales Open Space until I arrived at the River Lee Navigation. That was where I took the photo for my new header. I called it, “Bike at Rest after Trip along the Turkey Brook Trail”. In the meantime the afternoon had already tiptoed into a honey-coloured dusk. I turned got back on my bicycle and headed down southwards. I was going back home, somewhere in London.

© 2016

All photos taken by the blog author

Next Post: “Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On”, to be published on Saturday 14^th May at 6pm (GMT)

Saturday Evenings: Stay In, Sit Up and Switch On

At the end of this post I might lose or win a few readers and fellow bloggers. But honesty has always been my policy when writing online. And if that ruffles a few feathers, so be it. As long as I write with a modicum of decency and respect, I would like to believe that people will react in a similar fashion. After all, I try not to be black and white (pun not intended, and you will see why I mention this later on) about the political or social issues I write about on my blog.

There has been a controversial subject that has been burning inside me for many years. It reached a climax about a decade ago when a former colleague of mine greeted me one day in the office with the words: “Yo, whassup, my Cuban n…a!” I refuse to spell out the entire word out of consideration for those readers who will take umbrage at what I believe to be an offensive term. But you will probably guess what the word is.

My colleague was surprised at my swift and admonishing reaction. I was concise, precise and to the point. Under no circumstances was he to use the “N” when talking to me again.

That was about ten years ago. I had similar feelings recently when I saw and heard Larry Wilmore refer to outgoing president Barack Obama as “my n…a” (notice the ending. The “a” is meant to soften the effect as opposed to the traditional “er”).
I mentioned honesty in my opening paragraph and if I am being honest I have to admit that I had no idea who Larry Wilmore was until I watched the clip of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Then, again, US viewers might not know who Graham Norton is. Still, ignorance of Larry Wilmore's media relevance  does not lessen the impact of his words.

There was an immediate backlash against the comedian. Some of it was justified, some was not. Responses varied from well –informed ones to ill-thought and poorly-articulated ones. Sadly, lost in the midst of this debate was the primary reason why Mr Wilmore’s colloquial phrase caused such a stink: the history, the (mis)use and the (re)appropriation of the “N” word. 

What did you call the president again?

Based on my completely unreliable and unscientific research of no more than a dozen acquaintances, friends and work colleagues, I can say that many black Britons feel uncomfortable with the use of “N” word. Not all, though, young people do not think much of it and do pepper their conversations liberally with the term. You could say that there is a generational divide but Larry Wilmore is no spring chicken. What made him use a word that his ancestors heard, possibly preceded by the “f” word, before they were lynched?

That has always been factor number one in my decision to accept this term: history. You don’t need to be born in the States to know that there is a long history of murders, beatings and punishment inflicted on black people. That the “N” word came to signify inferiority simply rubbed salt in the open wound. That a whole political, economic and social system was erected on the back of this racist notion of black people’s inferiority reaffirms my conviction that use of the “N” word is never justified. Even if it is uttered by a black comedian to a black president.

And yet…

English is not my mother tongue. I may have studied it, mastered it and taught it at some point, but it is not the lexicon I grew up with. Occasionally this makes me feel like an usurper. So, when English-speaking black people talk about (re)appropriating an erstwhile offensive term, I know I must sit up and listen to them. Even if I disagree with them, it is still their language. All I can ask for is not to be the recipient of such hurtful term.

And hurtful it is. The “N” word is not just a product of language but also a phenomenon. A misleading phenomenon, in my opinion. Why? Because it presents black people, especially men, as rap-loving, basketball-playing, slow-hung-jeans-underwear-showing, swagger-boasting “bros”. In the process this word strips the black person of their identity. In fact, it does not even let them carve out their own identity, whatever this might be. It divides black men into the same two camps white colonisers divided our ancestors all those centuries ago: house Negroes and field slaves. The former were the docile, butt-kissing servants, the latter were the fiery, law-breaking firebrands. This division was wrong then and it is still wrong now. Having street cred is not and should never be seen as a substitute for good education and high aspirations. It is not an either/or world, but a both/and one. You can be streetwise and a university graduate.

Larry Wilmore referring to Obama as my “n…a” was incorrect. The setting, the occasion, the audience, everything conspired against him. This makes me think that really and truly there is never a good moment to utter this highly emotionally-charged, controversial word, whether it be in hip-hop or slam poetry, whether it be a white rapper saying it or Common. I do apologise to my Anglophone readers and fellow bloggers for treading on your toes. After all, it is your language. However, I love English as much as I love my mother tongue, Spanish. I am aware that there is a process of reclaiming terms that have hitherto been considered demeaning. I hope the “N” word is never claimed back. There is no “back” to claim. The murders, beatings and punishment will always be there as reminders of the true meaning of the word. You do not need a Cuban to tell you that.



© 2016

Next Post: “London, my London”, to be published on Wednesday 11^th May at 6pm (GMT)