Rachel Lichtenstein
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I am a criminal
I torture kittens
I have an IQ of 23
I carry a knife
I have an IQ of 23 and I carry a knife
I killed my grandmother
I strangled 4 puppies
I am bored......
I will define Essex as being anywhere within 20 miles of the river. Beyond that it may be called Essex but that's as close as it gets.
As little as 10 years ago you couldn't pay a writer to go to Essex, shit, you couldn't pay anyone to go to Essex. No-one took Essex seriously except for the Armed Offenders Squad. There was no art in Essex. The only thing that was made from Thames mud was shallow graves. The place and it's people were shunned and ridiculed as nothing but a wasteland full of pikeys, thieves, and sluts.
Watch this video from a well known English TV program, they sing a song called Essex is Crap.
The thing about Essex was that we all knew secrets about the Thames. I was born in Grays and I knew where the ancient causeway still lay ignored, overgrown, and rubbish strewn. I used to drink in the Theobald Arms where the Press Gang once lurked. We all knew about the English Armada at Tilbury and Pocahontas at Gravesend.
I found this in a very old book:
"There is a certain Essex quality that is imperishable, stubbornness is that quality, downright cussedness that refuses to be brought into line. But there is no common purpose, no uniformity in this obstinacy, it is simply a series of unconnected statements of implacable self confidence."
It's no coincidence that Pirate Radio began in the waters off Essex.
In a 2005 newspaper poll asking readers to mark English counties out of 10 for landscape beauty, Essex scored zero.
And then it started to change. Slowly. Articles in the Guardian that didn’t mention crime figures, the usual gastronomy rubbish, bloody Jamie Oliver, and so on. The once highly toxic waste dumps were grassed over and the birds came back along with their pathetic watchers, we broke into their cars then set fire to them but still they came.
A more cynical person could claim that it was the middle class appropriation of our river but I tend to think that they too always held the river in high esteem but were simply too afraid to actually set foot in Essex.
Until finally, the great Robert McFarlane walks around Essex and suddenly everyone wants to go there except Will Self who would no doubt, and deservedly, get his head punched.
That's the pre-amble to this book Estuary: Out from London to the Sea by Rachel Lichtenstein. Believe it or not I came to it with an open mind. I originally came across this book when it was published but some of the reviews put me off. But picking it up now, within 10 pages I was committed (in Essex that means something very different).
So I can relate to this book in two ways, I guess the content had me emotionally committed from the get go so that's one way and it gets 5 stars from me on that score, the other is by the book itself as a piece of writing.
After I had read about half I went and looked at some of the negative reviews. Someone said the photos were terrible but I thought that maybe they had never been along the Thames with its huge skyline and brooding skies, the ever present skylark song, the mournful ducks flying fast at sunset on winter days. In the photos the sky is so big that anything on the land and even the land itself seems shrunken beyond what is real but that's really how it is.
While I agree it could have been edited better, there was nothing that bad that I'd be bothered to do it. There was repetition in places but it sometimes helped to get the connections between places. I found her reporting of, and interactions with, the locals to be refreshingly honest and non-judgemental. I liked her easily where I had to work at liking Robert McFarlane.
I knew almost everywhere that was mentioned, had been to lots of them but more than that I knew the territory of the map that Rachel was creating with words. She has a sympathy for the places. I really like Robert McFarlane but his stuff is "drier", excellent, but definitely drier. Rachel's writing is wetter, never wet but definitely on the moister side of things. I could see why the Essex people liked her, underneath their bullet proof vests they are really just big softies, psychopathic maybe, but softies all the same.
She makes reference to The Peregrine by J A Baker, Robert McFarlane rates the book as "a masterpiece of twentieth-century non-fiction". She feels the echoes of that book in her wanderings around the marshes. The Peregrine is an absolute masterpiece by which other non-fiction nature books are (rightly) judged. The fact that they both mention it, is all part of the rehabilitation of Essex. If The Peregrine had been set in the Scottish Highlands instead of Essex I am sure it would be on the reading list of all the schools where they teach reading, in other words anywhere outside of Essex.
Overall I found it a comprehensive account of her time on the estuary and a comprehensive account of the estuary. I liked her writing style, I felt her presence on every page. I liked how she found characters everywhere she went and got their stories, leaving a more resonant memory of the place she describes.
After reading it I immediately wanted to go there, even though I was born there and couldn't get away quick enough. I could feel the pull of the river even though it is grey, dirty and unforgiving. Even though it is surrounded by nutters and rubbish and just plain ugliness, as long as you face the river it all looks good.… (mehr)