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Reflections on my last day as a European
In the year before we voted to leave the European Union, I went for a walk down by the river Thames with an English friend. It was a beautiful, sunny morning after a day of heavy rain, the first, weather watchers said, to mark the end of a warm period and the beginning of what threatened to be weeks of unseasonable cold. But here was a reprieve: clear blue skies, the golden halo of autumn, ripe and still.
We walked down my street to the underpass near the old Quaker meeting house, by the disused Hammersmith registry where I got married as a newly arrived immigrant from California nearly twenty years before. We went under the busy highway cutting through the neighborhood, built when the river was an open sewer full of warehouses and docks. Now it’s been cleaned up, the warehouses turned into luxury housing and the riverside pubs thriving and restored.
You can do a good four miles, bridge to bridge, over the green Victorian iron laced monument of the Hammersmith Bridge, along the southern shore west to the Barnes and then back east again to the terraces of Chiswick by the Fuller’s Brewery.
I have done the walk many times in the two decades I have lived in London. The first was before I moved here, with the English boyfriend who became my husband. We did a lot of those walks, escaping his rented single room with nowhere else…
