Tuesday 12th June

Where we are situated, just on the river behind Canary Wharf it is incredibly quiet.  The Isle of Dogs is in a big loop of the river, and despite the presence of all that commerce just a few hundred yards away the fact is that nobody drives through the Isle of Dogs; we are literally on the road to nowhere.  No-one in their right mind would think of driving through us as a short cut, and so there is remarkably little traffic.

Our house is almost unique too in having a fairly decent sized garden and glory of glories, there at the bottom of the garden is a lake, well a large pond really.  It was once a dock basin and has been preserved now as an artificial lake.  And at this time of the year the wildlife are thriving.  We even have ducks and some moorhen chicks, little black balls of fluff, stumbling over the large water-lily pads and paddling furiously to keep up with mum and dad on the water.  There are large goldfish lurking in the depths and iridescent blue dragon flies hovering near the surface, and of late we also have a heron who has also made this lake his home, as he stand on one leg and tries to catch one of the elusive goldfish.

Here, as in the distance loom the towers of Canary Wharf, and just across the river the O2 dome sits like a big fat cat, we can watch as the little moorhen chicks, totally oblivious of us humans and the busy city nearby, learn to walk, swim and eventually fly.