Tamsin: Do you have your stick?
Child: Yes, I do, got yours?
Tamsin: Do you remember how to play it?
Child: Yes, I do. We drop them on the count of three.
Tamsin and child: One, two, three.
Tamsin: Okay, over to the other side.
NARRATION
"Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there one day." Such were the words of the late author AA Milne. The same man who dreamed up the simple game that has delighted children - and adults (at least this one) - for the best part of a hundred years.
Child: Okay
Tamsin: Let's go over here.
Child: Okay.
Tamsin: Do you see it?
Child: No… Oh, they're neck and neck.
Tamsin: Pretty much. Now they carry on their journey.
Child: Oh, so we both win, that's a nice thing.
NARRATION
My memories of Pooh Sticks are as old as my memories – and experiences – of the streams in which they were played. Time was, any bridge over a narrow stretch of water, was an excuse to cast tiny twigs downwards before rushing to the other side to watch them sail away on the slow-moving surface. Wondering not only whose would emerge first, but how far they might travel and whether they would eventually make it to sea.
Looking back, I think the game itself is what put streams on my inner map. And they have stayed there ever since. They might not roar with the frothing white tips of an excited ocean or reflect serenity as might the glassy surface of a still lake, but they hold a magic of their own. Moving at their own steady pace and often easily accessible, streams offer a more intimate encounter with the water - and wildlife - around us. If, that is, we take a moment to look.
I have walked the same tame banks of the stream near my home hundreds, if not thousands of times. Soaking up what it so effortlessly shares. The sight of early morning mist rising from its surface, the ever alert grey heron that gingerly wades through its shallows, its very particular smell, and the dappled interplay between light and leaf where branches reach over its narrow body. I feel like I know it well, this slip of a stream first documented in the 13th century. But that, it turns out, is just a story I've been telling myself.
It's not that I've never considered the rest of its some 30 kilometer course; the upstream and downstream of this little river called the Panke and known best to people who live in certain parts of Berlin and its northern fringes. I just haven't done so seriously enough to follow the path of either one or the other. Until now.
City-bound, the river weaves its way through residential areas, former industrial complexes, allotments and parks. Sometimes running within sight, sometimes burrowing underground; sometimes contained within high brick walls, sometimes at greater liberty to determine its own bounds. Sometimes flowing and sometimes barely more than trickling towards the place where it splits in two and spills into larger waterways for the next stages of its eternal journey.
It is both enlivening and enriching to see it quietly move beyond the confines of the section I usually see. It becomes so much more than my limited experience has allowed it to be. It is perhaps like watching a tethered animal be set free. An animal that I kept on a leash and only allowed to wander where I wanted it to.
So walking waterside through an ever-changing cityscape, then, is to witness that animal come into its own. The Panke - whose Slavic name is taken by some to mean bud and others swirling river - leads now, flowing with confidence, ease and knowing through the remnants of its own historic importance as it gently invites me to consider the role it has played in lives already run their course and the impact they have had on it.
When you actually follow it, you realize that you've got all of these little corners and you realize how much life there is in those, in those spaces.
Paul Scraton, writes about place, people and history, and knows the Panke and its past well. He cites the places in and around Berlin named after the little stream, and points out a host of bank-side old buildings - industrial, residential and recreational - constructed for the waters that began flowing have been flowing here since long before the city grew up around them.
Paul Scranton: I enjoy this kind of outsized impact that this... it is little more than a stream has on, for example, the names of districts; the fact that it somehow has shaped this part of Berlin and the outskirts over time. And I really like that kind of idea that rivers are often routes to follow. They follow the lie of the land, which obviously impacts roads and rail that comes later and you realize that these kind of trails or tracks that we create as people, communication links, they're quite often tied to these streams or rivers.
NARRATION
That this unobtrusive river should once have served as a health resort for Prussian nobility or provided water for tanneries, factories, paper mills and the royal iron foundry are captivating narratives. Even more so though are the stories of connection and consequence that have played out around it.
Paul: If you think about the origins of the industrial neighbourhood growing up alongside the river because of access to water, then if you follow the story through the bombs the British and American bombs are being dropped on the factories here because they are here and they're only here because the river was here. So in the end, the origin of that story is the river as well.
NARRATION
Such thoughts are very much with me when I head upstream to explore the river's unobvious and contested beginnings. Some say it springs from sodden fields, other from a pond named for the Devil. Both eluded me. But Paul said on once finding an empty Schnapps bottle neck down in a ditch in the vicinity and concluded that to be the stream's source.
Whatever the truth of it, upstream, this stream is a different experience. Often narrower and with steeper banks, it runs alongside a four-pond nature reserve, beloved by both birds and their watchers. But there is less water in the actual river bed. It seems to become a shadow of itself, ghosting me entirely in places. Though from what I have read, it wasn't always that way. Left to its own devices, it was reputedly once wide enough to accommodate small boats, was pure enough to drink - both as water and beer - and provided food in the fish.
But we tend to leave little to its own devices, choosing instead to fiddle and reshape things to suit our ever-changing human needs. To that end, this river has been canalised, polluted and covered over. Yet still it flows. And still it attracts waterfowl, foxes, squirrels, birds, fish, insects, plants and people to live from or partake in its existence in some way or another.
Jessica Lee: For me the big thing is watching it through the seasons, watching it as the weather changes, the depth and the clarity. You can you can just come and catalogue all of the brilliant things you're seeing from plants to other creatures to other people and it feels kind of like a space that collects.
NARRATION
Jessica Lee studies and writes about the natural world – often about water. She sees a stream as an invitation to start exploring connections within a physical place, but also as a living reminder that things are constantly in flux, ever changing, with no two ripples of water ever exactly the same.
Jessica: We have that proverb 'you never step into the same river twice' right? There is a kind of steadiness. There's this opportunity to check in to the same body of water, the levels change, the wildlife might change, but it's here, and it does sort of force us to be in that mentality of being comfortable with change. Being comfortable with the idea that things are not static, which I think at this time in the world is a really nice thought to come back to that like okay, the world is changing, we need to get comfortable with that change and figure out how to navigate it. But we can have these moments of checking in with ourselves and nourishing ourselves and reconnecting to the place that we are.
Tamsin: And you think a stream is useful place to think about doing that?
Jessica: Yes, absolutely. A stream is a really obvious metaphor for movement and for change. That reassuring changeability. And so, yeah, and there's that idea of being able to journey someplace from them, right? We don't just come here and stay here. You come here and move.
NARRATION:
I think about this steady movement as I walk along a familiar stretch of the stream a few days later. While its superficial beauty is still in seductive evidence, I now also see the depth in its shallows, its abiding patience and ancient generosity. It is no longer simply part of a city stream close to my home, but like ourselves, is a product of what it has lived and is currently living through. A moving story book. In more ways than one.