Harper-Thames on the Know Your Local River theme and how a single free volunteer event completely rearranged her weekend plans
This year’s London Rivers Week theme is “Know Your Local River,” encouraging Londoners to identify, explore and connect with their nearest waterway, and I signed up for a single free clean-up event assuming I’d do a polite twenty minutes before quietly leaving, only to end up staying nearly four hours and leaving genuinely obsessed.
Why I Initially Assumed This Would Be A Brief, Low-Commitment Sort Of Afternoon
Because that’s how I approach most volunteering, with a carefully managed exit strategy already planned before I’ve even arrived, a strategy that completely fell apart the moment I actually started properly looking at what was coming out of the riverbank.
What Actually Kept Me There So Much Longer Than I’d Planned
The specific, satisfying rhythm of clearing a small, manageable stretch of bank and genuinely seeing the visible difference afterward, a kind of instant, tangible progress I rarely get from literally anything else in my actual working life.
How The Other Volunteers Actually Responded To My Increasingly Committed Presence
With genuine warmth, several clearly recognising the specific look of someone who’d arrived planning twenty minutes and was now settling in for the long haul, a look I gather they see fairly often at these events.
Whether I’ve Actually Signed Up For Further Rivers Week Events Since This Unplanned Four-Hour Commitment
Immediately, yes, having already registered for two more sessions before I’d even properly washed the riverbank off my hands.
What This Whole Unplanned Afternoon Revealed About How Genuinely Easy It Is To Fall In Love With A Small, Specific Piece Of Local Environmental Work Once You Actually Try It Properly
Mostly that free, hands-on volunteer work has a way of quietly hijacking your entire weekend once you actually commit to it, and that my local river apparently had considerably more to teach me than I ever expected from a single Saturday. More community river discoveries continue at bohiney.com.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
