Her curtain call

Some say first impressions are the most valuable ones.
I disagree: for me, it’s the first confusion that defines a good story.

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(Archive of Lady Catherine de Turnips, entry 4663-00-7.)

My dear friend,

I shall spare you the details: I just spent my morning on the foreshore of the Thames, enthusiastically looking through the bits and pieces that can be found somewhere at the bottom of the river.

I told you I’d spare you the details, but after a bit of consideration, they are magnificent, and I just want to share them all.
Even the fact that I enthusiastically — and am not ashamed! — spent some time collecting white shiny shards of something that appeared to be, as my guide has told me, a chamber pot. They were beautiful, white and shiny. A piece of infrastructure of somebody else’s life.

I will never stop being fascinated by the fact that the Thames, in London, is tidal all the way up to the Teddington Lock, as if it is the ocean. If your first impression is made during the low tide, you may find it unpleasantly, astonishingly shallow and even more muddy than one would expect from a river running through a capital. The ontological status of the Thames riverbed is unstable, just like the mud that is the key ingredient of the aforementioned surface. I have ruined my boots not once or twice. (Once, having attempted an impromptu stroll, had to steward a riverside vegetable orchestra performance barefoot).

In essence, if you take a boat somewhere central, the river around you is tidal. If you go, for example, to Richmond, the river is still EXCEPTIONALLY tidal there, and there’s a pub whose terrace is known for the fact that it can be submerged twice a day. They even provide rubber boots for those who are motivated to stay during high tides, while sharing their table with paddle boarders and, probably, geese.
(Possibly, there is more advanced equipment, but, most likely, not as complex as a submarine. Once again, the word “submarine” implies being under the surface of the sea. If we are in the river, what is it? “Subfluvium”?)
To socialise with geese, I prefer to stay on the dry land. They are too insolent to have even more high ground.

Going back to the tides: to me, they seem to be a prerogative of a bigger body of water, something as big as the Pacific Ocean, no less, not of something streaming through a city.
(Even Bosphoros, with all its beauty and huge vessels, stays, visually, at the same level. I didn’t, personally, measure it, but I stayed long enough, observing, to have noticed the difference.
The Golden Horn, which is more river-like? Even more, visually, stable, with all the waves, ferries and jellyfish floating by the bridge; with all the Byzantine swords and modern cars, as they say, that can be found somewhere down there, under all this water.)

Still, when we’re dealing with the Thames, the water comes and goes. The difference can be something like 7 metres every 6 hours!
(And yes, I just checked: it’s something like two elephants, possibly more, if one stands on the other’s shoulders, but their posture remains natural in those slightly unnatural circumstances of mammal stacking. I didn’t dive into the range of sizes and interspecies varieties, because, even though I am fond of detailed observations, I have certain boundaries.)

So, because of this never-ending tidal movement, having something to do with the Moon, accelerated by boats and accompanied by the river flow, the underwater landscape is constantly in motion and exposed — twice a day. What is above, is below, in this particular situation, we can take it very literally: what has been above, ever, still can be found there, below the city, in the riverbed. Most of the time, fragmented, far from monumentality, shattered into minor pieces — even if they are white and beautiful.
Centuries and centuries of history. Romans. Tudors. Transatlantic trade. Whatever you can find on a bookshelf in the aisle of history books for children, traces of that can be seen on the foreshore at the low tide – unfortunately, with no label and with no detailed provenance. Most of the time, they tend to be colourful, yet muddy bits and pieces of something.
Also, clay tobacco pipes are always painfully in abundance, as if they were plankton drifting in the water.

So yes, I understand the sentiment that you simply had to spend one of your first days in Rio on your quest for kefir. Fermented milk products mean a lot to me. So glad you found it eventually, on the way to Ipanema.

Some say first impressions are the most valuable ones. I disagree (only partially): for me, it’s the first confusion that defines a good story. First struggles? Possibly, if they are gentle, like a sudden want of a particular dairy, not of a life-and-death kind (looking back, I’m not sure how I made it through some of those).
And, even more importantly, a good story is defined by the fact that you can share it with someone.

As for first impressions: one can never be sure what the “proper ones” are. Years and years ago, I visited my friend Hannah in Jerusalem. She met me at the bus stop: my long bottle-green travel dress and bright orange umbrella (why did I even take it anyway?) seemed to be quite the opposite of the winter palette defined by the beige local stone.

So, imagine a city with thousands of years of history. A centre of immense symbolic significance for several religious traditions, a heart of ancient pilgrimage routes, a site of at least two Golgothas and one immovable ladder, a cause of its own psychiatric syndrome! As a first step, where would you take a guest who came there for the first time?

In my case, it was a second-hand shop. Very small, yet perfectly aligned with local textures.
Surprisingly, for Hannah it wasn’t even a subtle way to demonstrate a knowing disapproval of my sartorial choices. Like a dolphin in her long black skirt, she dived into the waves of hats and headbands for her own enjoyment. As for me, I almost walked away wearing a curtain that separated the fitting room from the rest of the shop. It looked too perfect as my new scarf, yet, unfortunately, my limited linguistic ability did not overlap with my limitless fashion sense.

Thank you for sharing so many interesting things with me. I hope that the idea you were thinking about a couple of weeks ago has received further development. In the meantime, goodbye!

Yours, as ever,
C. de T.