bird on the water

On this blog wonder | wander | women never get tired of talking about the waterways of our beloved London and the wildlife that live there. We made several posts about the birds that thrive in the marshy areas of London canals and how it's a precarious balance of human and natural residents.

We found a totally unexpected species of bird living on the water this week! But first to set the scene: a visit to our favourite Word on the Water, the fantastical bookshop on a boat.

We enter the "reading room" at the front of the shop and see that, as happens so often in a cozy bookshop, someone has already taken the best chair.

This regular visitor is special though: a cheeky robin! Many wild robins are so used to humans that they will even perch on a gardener's shovel, like in Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden, if the gardener feeds them regularly.

This one made himself thoroughly at home. I had never seen a robin so comfortable with humans close by. He was completely unafraid and even flew into the shop after a while as if he was conducting a tour.

Word on the Water looks more like a well-stocked home library than a shop or a storefront. Not only that, it's like the home library of our dreams. People come in and immediately declare that they wish they lived here. Our little host was just another dream-like element of this magical bookshop, like a character from Harry Potter or Howl's Moving Castle. As jazz music played outside he preened and fluttered by the books. 

Word on the Water used to be exclusively a secondhand bookshop, but its owner Paddy says that the recent gentrification of the Coal Yards and Granary Square in the area has led to a boom of new customers and thus he can stock new and vintage books at lower prices than big bookshops. Good news for the local community - here's to more visitors of all species!