Dreams of Limehouse ...

I had often wanted to visit Limehouse - it has featured in some of my more unsettling dreams - 

There, in those moonlit dreamscapes, I see the dripping walls of Thameside warehouses - gas jets flare in blind alleys - Nayland Smith is being stalked by Dacoits - Sherlock Holmes, disguised as a lascar, slips into an opium den - a cursed Elizabethan sailor broods within a slave ship - I hear soul stirring shanties in candle lit dens - one of Walsingham's agents takes a wherry for Deptford - 

But before we walked down Narrow Street, we had cappuccinos and croissants in Cafe Vesuvio - young mothers sat with their children - they'd just come from the gym, with their swim wear and badminton rackets - they were sinewy glossy sirens - their beautiful apartments overlooked the river - their husbands hunted numbers in glass towers -

Looking upstream, from Victoria Wharf, I saw Sci Fi ziggurats, glinting in the January sun - I vowed to ascend The Shard - a Thames Clipper churned the turbulent river - 

Yet Narrow Street still reminded me of my dreams - there were the warehouses, with their mysterious facades - there was the sad shell of a Victorian tavern - above me the vapour trail of a jet marked the sky - there, flickering in the air, whispering or singing to me, were all the ghosts who'd filled my Limehouse dreams -