An Ode to Gravesend

The sky is a smudged-pencil-mark grey as I make my way back to my flat. So dull, so dreary, so drab and so colourless. Walking down Dickens Close, leafless trees blackened with exhaust fumes droop over graffiti-stained garden walls. At the top of the hill, the Thames is in full view: the brown, bland Thames. You can see it from pretty much everywhere in Gravesend. It surrounds us like a moat. It strangles us like a noose. From every direction there are brown waves sending sharp winds into the town like mini tornadoes. The Thames is in our veins, manky and polluted. Gravesend is in our veins, like lead. We are Gravesend, all pebble dashed and full of dog shit.

The fucking Thames. It must be haunted, it’s got to be. There must be thousands, no millions, of disintegrated bones scattered across the bottom. At school we learnt that during the outbreak of Bubonic Plague in the 1600s, the town decided to bury the victims at sea because there was no more room for the dead on land. Hence the name Gravesend: end of graves. I think perhaps the constant wind is the spirits of those who died of the plague. It certainly smells like it.