Along the tow path

by J, of Duchess Omnium

When I am on the canal I usually sit in what’s traditionally called the saloon, almost at the front of the 62 foot long boat. There are two chairs, and I occupy both, moving from one to the other depending on the fierceness of the fire and the strength of the cold outside. From one chair my toes can reach the cast iron stove, where there’s a mark matching the melted tread of my slipper.

On Saturday evenings I burn candles, stew a chicken and watch a bit of tele. When I was at school, impossible as it sounds now, the clever girls did Latin and the dim ones did physics. The tele is dim and prefers volts and amps to ablatives and gerunds, but because I am clever I don’t know how to give it what it wants. It splutters in and out of life.

I watch a show in which people have brought ugly stuff from their attics to a place where antique experts will tell them what it is worth. It’s the credit crunch and that’s the only kind of tele the BBC can afford. At exactly the moment when the expert says, You will be surprised to learn that on the open market this item would fetch… my tele demands more amps (or volts; I don’t know which because I am clever) and it turns off.

I’d had enough of this last Saturday so I grabbed my torch (that’s a flashlight to you North Americans) and trundled up the towpath to the pub. I knew Stematos, the Greek landlord, and his apple-cheeked British wife would be glad of my custom. That is, I knew Stematos would be glad. Apple-cheeked is not at all clear that I am worth the bother.

As I have written before, I have more than once fallen foul of the 3 o’clock Baguette Watershed, meaning no foreign muck after that hour, but she might just stretch to a slice of ham between two nicely buttered slabs of honest British bread, if I ask especially apologetically.

The pub is about a quarter of a mile along the towpath and over the bridge, but I didn’t make it that far. As I reached the bridge I saw that a group of boaters had gathered around a bonfire. I took a spare seat and someone passed me a glass of wine. Faintly acrid smoke, smelling of burning creosote, drifted past me and across the canal. At my back I could feel the night, cold and clear, but the bright heat of the flames drew us all in, and we were warm and merry.

I had seen in the new year around a bonfire with much the same crowd: people whose last names I don’t know, who are called after their boats or creatures of the canal. The bonfire shone on shaved-headed Ratty, my first friend along the towpath; purple-haired, Emma, my near neighbour; Pat the engineer; Mar who put an axe through his foot last week chopping wood and Scotty who has to go to parenting classes on Tuesdays or else he won’t be allowed to visit his wee babby.

Because I used to walk a toy poople along the towpath, I have also had occasion to mention the scary dogs some of my neighbours keep. My poodle has emigrated, and the uneasy peace along the tow path, and in the pub, is breached a little less often. We are all still variously lame, divorced, pierced, tattooed, out to lunch or gone fishiing, TV license fee evaders every one. I am fast catching up with the others, a connoisseur of scrounged bonfires: I favour picnic tables.

Nevertheless, it still feels a little odd to find my fifty-five year old self alone in this company on a March evening in England getting drunk under Bridge 216a and warming my toes on burning fence posts. When I was a kid there was a joke (I think it was from Maine) and the punch line was always, You can’t get there from here.

Turns out you can.