“I always come back from the river feeling like I am ready to face the world again,” says Author and Mudlarker Lara Maiklem. I nod enthusiastically, of course, I know exactly what she means. “Like anyone I have had ups and downs in my life and the river has always been the place to come to. My confidant in a way, I have told it so much, I talk to it a lot. It just listens, it is just patient, and it is always there. I think there is something about the fact that it is moving, it takes your problems away.” I have never thought about it that way, I see the river as a way of washing my troubles off, but of course the idea of them all flowing downstream with the silt and dead leaves is part of it.
Lara and I are on the north bank of the River Thames in Central London, we met at the water’s edge adjacent to Cannon Street station. The tide is on the turn, Lara has been at the foreshore all morning as the tide went out. “The foreshore is a really meditative and comforting place for me to go,” she says. “I can combine my two passions, nature and history.” On arrival, Lara looked so excited. She fumbled in her waist-bag and produced a gilded 16th century button and placed it in my palm. I looked at the tiny thing, it had mud encrusted into a loop where the thread would have gone. To me it looked more like a bead or pendant, but Lara can identify exactly what it is and which period in history it is from. “I have always found history incredibly comforting; it is the feeling that we are not the first people to have all these problems and we won’t be the last,” she says. “Everyone is making history all the time, you are leaving a little of you behind, however small. The objects I find, ordinary objects, it is connection with ordinary people.”
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