onionbagblog

The 120th Anniversary of Vauxhall Bridge

Another sun-drenched morning at the table of dreams. The air was incredibly still. If ever there was a time to play with the non-wind ball, then this was it. Anything could happen… Absolutely anything could happen.

Replacing the usual sugar rush energy drinks being spilt on the table, today we rocked up to find what looked like pollen. You don’t get that during a sterile indoor table tennis game.

The field was largely quiet and silent. There seemed to be an abundance of planes flying overhead. We’re not talking jumbo jet-style craft here. It looked like a mini air show.

I tried to focus my concentration. As ever, this was a wasted exercise. I managed to win one game, and then allowed my playing partner to come back in to win the next four. Oh well, there’s always tomorrow.

To the sailing club! For the second time in two consecutive days!

A combination of bright blue estuary wild skies and also favourable high tide times was the lure that was too good to resist.

But where to paddle to?

Downstream and the great unknown? Upstream and the stinky poo smell of the Hythe? Or perhaps even a rare excursion up the Roman river?

The Roman river, it was.

We were keen to avoid what might have been a bit of a Gig Fest assault. Both boats for the rowing club had made their way earlier in the day over to Brightlingsea for the Gig Fest race downstream and back. The Roman river looked like it would be the quieter option.

It was a gentle paddle, making our way upstream and then cutting across the muddybanks for the Roman river.

We did pass one brave fella who was out wild swimming with his luminous yellow floating device. He was on his back and was actually scrolling away on his phone. Now there’s confidence for you.

We reached the mouth of the Roman River. It took some delicate manoeuvring to make our way around the mysterious brown patches.

That’s shit, etc.

Soon we had the tranquillity of the curves of the Roman river all to ourselves. We were even treated to a fly pass by three swans. You could feel the rush of air as they made their way ten meters or so above us.

Some paddle boarders then approached us from behind. This was a leisurely row for us. We came seriously close to the embarrassment of being overtaken by a couple of paddle boarders.

The Canadian geese could then be spotted sunbathing on the muddy banks. They deserved their rest, having earlier made a rifht old early morning racket, waking up half the town.

We reached the mill that signifies the end of the Roman river that is passable. We had timed the tidal times to perfection. We were carried out on an incoming tide, and we’re now ready to head back to the sailing club, floating along on the outgoing waves.

“Can you take some shit pictures?”

…asked my rowing companion.

“No, I don’t take shit pictures”

…came my reply.

“I’m a semi-pro photographer.”

“No,”

she said.

Can you take some pictures of the shit?"

The dirty dog.

The river traffic picked up as we headed back towards the sailing club. There was plenty of kayak action out around the Estuary wilds. We had the first spotting of the season of the ferry. I’m not sure what the aquatic equivalent of Chapeau is.

Never judge a book by its cover. Which is just as well, considering the album art for the McDonald and Giles self-titled CD that landed in my post box this morning. PHWORRR! Talk about pinups etc.

I know very little about the duo apart from the King Crimson connections. Even then the names were new to me. The track Flight of the Ibis stood out on a recent Late Junction early morning listening. Interesting, I thought. I’ll have a bit of that.

The album has early 1970s prog jazz written all over it. I’m increasingly finding myself being drawn towards this type of nonsense. You can get yourself lost in the music and not have to think about 2026.

Modern life is rubbish, etc.

We rocked up at the table of dreams on Friday morning only to find that some entitled middle-class little shit had spilled some crappy sugar rush of a drink all over the table. Arse. Whatever. We decided to press on and play the briefest of brief games.

It was incredibly humid and rather hazy out there today. It was also coming towards the fag end of half-term week. The park was busy and rather noisy. At one stage we had an audience of around half a dozen little ankle-biters watching us.

I never really found my rhythm. I raced to a 3-1 defeat. I was optimistic of making some spectacular comeback. My playing partner called quits, claiming she had an optician’s appointment. Aye aye. I see what you’ve done there, etc.

To the kayak! On Friday lunchtime. I got my time and tides all wrong. Oh dear. I arrived at the Sailing Club to find the rowing club were packing away after an earlier session.

Something’s not quite right here…

For some reason I had read my tidal times all wrong. I’m not sure why this happened. This is the amateur tide reader who, don’t forget, spent the best part of a month putting together a highly complex spreadsheet that automatically pulled in tide times and then adjusted them. Oh well. Now I’m here I might as well make the most of what remains of the water.

The rowing club weren’t the only water users packing away for the session. Half-term week meant the young cadets were coming in to the Sailing Club hard in their dinghies. I had to wait a few minutes or so before I could launch.

Finally I was out there. There was no one else around on the estuary. Fancy that.

I got a little lost in my own hippie shit aquatic ways. I ended up being carried on an outgoing tide to Whitehouse Beach. I then realised I was running out of water. I didn’t fancy my chances taking it any further.

I hovered around for a short while and heard a little bit of splashing underneath my hull. I had a slight fear of what may be lurking deep down below. This was no time for hanging around. It was probably just more endless shit floaters.

I heard a distant cuckoo on the opposite shore. This was my homing signal to get back to the Sailing Club. I panicked slightly for the final 10 minutes remaining, fearing I would run out of water. Either side of me I could see mud banks emerging. On more than one occasion my oar churned up thick, dark brown Essex estuary mud.

I managed to recover my kayak with around half a metre or so of water left on the hard. Dick.

I wasn’t the only river user out there who had fucked up. An army of jet ski flotillas were struggling to make it past the barrier. It couldn’t happen to any nicer fellas.

I’ve been trialling out Wispr Flow as part of my new workflow process. Basically it’s a nifty AI tool that takes dictated text and cleans it all up.

Oh wait. AI tool, you say. Steady the buffers etc. Isn’t this some kind of scary shit? Well not really.

What Wispr Flow does is to listen to your dictated text and then clean up all of the messy bits that might be in there. It can also be stylised to add specific punctuation and even snippets of code that fit in with your style of writing.

I’ve got it set up across mobile and desktop. Mobile is a bit sketchy to be honest. The iPhone keyboard interchange can get a little bit fiddly as you switch between the standard keyboard and Wispr Flow, as well as emojis. It seems to work far better on desktop where you simply hold down the function key on the Mac and start talking.

The idea was to use it for dictating blog posts. This is the first one that I’ve done. There’s something about it that I don’t quite feel comfortable with. Writing per se is where the enjoyment and freedom comes for me. Dictating a blog post limits the flow of words and any style an individual might have, and the emotions that you want to create. Dictation is more about shopping lists,, right?

Wispr Flow is proving to be rather good for AI prompts however. The more rambling and lengthy prompt you give to any AI tool then usually the better outcome is delivered at the other end.

I’m still on the free model for Wispr Flow. I’m not sure how much the service will be reduced when my free trial with all the added on features expires, but so far it’s proving to be far better than the inbuilt dictation on an iPhone or even desktop. Apple really should be building in their own AI tool to help with this process.

I can’t but help think that this is Dukes of Hazzard outtakes. Country rock is cool; country soul is even cooler. Sadly this is neither really. It’s bloody annoying banjos. They did my nut in tbh. It did pick up right at the end with the Don’t Be Cruel cover. Country rock ‘n’ roll is early Elvis, right?

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I just played my two summer albums. That’s my two summer albums of 2025 - Weller’s excellent El Dorado, and Emma Jean’s Weirdo. Both got rinsed heavily from around July onwards through until Autumn. The recent run of Estuary Wilds SCORCHIO weather triggered a muscle memory within me to fire them up.

I’m clearly in need of some summer jams, as the kids may say, for 2026. I bloody love a good summer album. It’s something that defines those early starts, taking you through into hazy afternoons, and then carrying through until the end of the day. Repeat, repeat, repeat. I’m not sure what’s out there right now tbh.

Weller always finds me. There’s not a lot of algorithm dropping going off there. Emma Jean came via Gilles Peterson. Most of my new music is through GP these days, with occasional input from R over text.

A summer album does have a special quality. The seasonal thing needn’t be obvious, but there has to be a hint of a change of the season. It also helps if it’s running music, something I can fire up, and then head out plodding for an hour long leg stretcher - assuming my six month muscle injury ever heals.

I might just stick with the Weirdo album. It’s lush, introverted and has a head nod at celebrating the freaks. I fit in there quite well.

A sugar rush of a sunshine prog rock album that landed unexpectedly in my feeds this morning. There’s an interesting Beatles non-backstory here. That pulled me in. 3:47 EST is an innocent, often naive album. It tries to create what The Beatles might have been in the mid ’70s. It’s an endless speculation that I find hard to escape. “If The Beatles don’t exist, you don’t exist,” etc. I love the optimism and the bubblegum pop. It’s also why punk had to happen.

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