MYSTERIOUS: How to eat and drink your way down the thames | Mind Blowing Facts

The Thames is not the Amazon, nor the Mekong, nor the Bosphorus. It does not thunder or carve a valiant course through continents. Few compose odes to its majesty, and fewer still drown in its symbolism. What the Thames does — sublimely — is dawdle. Englishly. Stubbornly. This is a river for those who have misplaced their sense of urgency and are in no hurry to retrieve it.

We slipped away from Penton Hook, Britain’s largest inland marina, optimistically fringed with palm trees. A 10 minute walk away looms Thorpe Park, where, for £66 a head (provided you clear 1.2 metres), you can be inverted, soaked, and momentarily relieved of your soul. It’s a curious edgeland, where G-force yields to a neat, nautical galley, and adrenaline crashes headlong into the soft furnishings of a quarter-century-old cruiser. The only loop-the-loop on board was a coiled, bright blue mooring rope; the only scream, once underway, that of a frog resigned to the beak of a patient, watchful heron.