Gradually, our intermittent forays along the river are getting further afield. It’s going to get hard to find new stretches that are a reasonable drive from here. Today it was so hot that we waited until 5pm before we set out. I’d started to think that the stretches were all looking kind of the same, but the spot we first hit the river today was totally different. It was a small pool and a ford over the river, with white flowers growing on the water top and a huge willow opposite.
We were planning on walking up the side branch to the main body of the Thames, where there was a weir, and then either back the way we came or around the other side and over the ford. However, the path turned out to be a bit disused – I ended up carrying the boy on my shoulders to keep him out of the nettles.
We were going for about 20 minutes with no sign of the weir. My wife spotted a crayfish crawling along the river bottom and I leaned out with the boy to let him see it when suddenly the bank turned out to be more grass than bank and I was scrabbling and turning and shoving the boy bank up whilst I went into the water, and about knee deep in mud. When I got back out, my flip flops were still in the water, and even when the water cleared a bit there was only one to be seen.
My wife was a good deal more sanguine about me rooting about in the mud given the crayfish’s presence, and at one point the boy said ‘If you only find one sandal, you will have to hop home’. It took a good bit of rooting about and in the end I had to jump in again, but eventually I found the other shoe, and we found an alternative way back to the pool where, after a small incident of a missing puppy, I took a quick swim.