The Coal Yard and the Nutcracker

Nicola and Michael, my hosts at the coal yard at Ponders End, invited me over for dinner. They run fuel boat Clover, which heads into the city from the yard once a week and has become nothing short of indispensable for many London boaters, bringing them the supplies that make life on the water possible. We had a vegetarian pie, a delicious quagmire of pastry, mysterious chunks, and gravy, and it was excellent. I brought wine which was added to their already well supplied rack, and we talked boats, engines, coal. Michael really does live the life of the coalboater, a never-ending merry-go-round of chine angles, big ends, injectors, composite bottoms. It’s a lifelong quest for knowledge and once again, despite a lifetime around the waterways, I found myself out of my depth. I’m too much of a butterfly, albeit an unusually fat and hairy one, interested in everything and expert at nothing. Michael is unbelievably deep in his knowledge, an expert not just by study but through the complete immersive dedication of his life to being the best boatman he can. Nicola was brought up to it too, a lifetime of working boats and a work week of 25kg sacks of coal affording her an aura of power and poise. They are impressive in their dedication to the art.

Clayton, Nicola’s dog, interjected our conversation by getting his head onto the table with the entirely reasonable view to clearing up the mislaid scraps of uneaten pie. He’s a geriatric dalmatian, I think, quite blissfully unaware of his advancing years, still trying to hump everything in sight, a worthy ambition tragically hampered by his increasingly unreliable back legs.

“He’s a good dog.” Said Michael, and I briefly thought the conversation might move on from coal and boats. “But he’s got a real problem with the eco-logs.”

“He won’t stop eating them.” Confirmed Nicola. “I Ieft him in with a load of them in the coal scuttle, came back, sawdust everywhere. He loves them.”

The boatyard is just wonderful. Washing up on Spey’s back step the night before, Clover had come back upriver from the city, the report of the Bolinder engine carrying for miles along the flat reflective surface, subtle at first, a pulse from afar that crept upon me like the awareness of the pumping of blood, thickening into a soundscape that poured through my back cabin doors as if rising floodwater, driving all else before it, followed finally by the wandering beam of the headlight, seen first in its reflections, sweeping in soft arcs as the fuel boat made her way home.

It’s not like going back in time, because it is a modern boatyard, but quite simply, some things don’t change. Whilst electricity came to power the world, followed by the information age, the truth is that these ancestral working boats with their single cylinder engines remained the best way to do a very specific job, and the cry of the tall pipe, mixed with the shouts of the boaters trying to be heard over the engine, hands blackened beyond soap by coaldust and grease, rough with the slip of the cotton line, are not throwbacks but the immediate soundscape of the contemporary waterway. Fixed as we are with centuries old locks and infrastructure, it is the working boats whose shapes and modes of operation were so perfected by generations of experience that stand best to do the work that is asked of them. Clover and Emu are magnificent, and to be present in your back cabin, your own tiny confessional, low to the water and looking out across the water’s brim as one of them returns to the yard, empty and riding high, proudly having sold every last bag of coal, is a deeply moving experience. The slow emergence of the physical presence of the boat from within the maelstrom of sound and light it pushes before it like a sensory bow wave, the resolution of cabin and steerer from the kaleidoscope of night, in this case Ben acting as relief skipper, is time spent on the edge, an experience so infused with meaning, so deepened by flat water and cold air, as to be completely timeless. The waterways are shaped that this must be past, present, and future, these boats must do this after we are all gone, because there is no better way, there can be no better way than that arrived at by the collective brilliance of generations of people who had no choice but to immerse themselves as deeply as Michael, Nicola, and Ben choose to now and whose knowledge is measured out and immortalised in both the boat and its operation. Few now really know how to work them, to bring out the best in them, to reap the benefits offered by those hard centuries of incremental gain.

“Ben! … On the outside! …. The outside!”

“What?”

“Go alongside Spey!”

“What?”

“Go alongside Spey!”

Ben reversed the Bolinder and stopped Clover in the channel, trying to work out what Michael was telling him to do. The brief second as the engine stalled before reversing and picking up allowed a moment’s conversation and Ben skilfully brought Clover round and alongside Spey as requested. I caught the back line and we tied her off. They inspected the sales report.

“This is good. We can pay the log merchant.”

Work done, the Bolinder’s fire was allowed to die in the agony of an uncaught stall, and the yard returned to peace. Outside my cabin, in fetid darkness, I was aware of Clover’s powerful presence as she festered and stewed, angry to be so briefly idle, anxious to cut water again.

—————–

As if to prove my point about knowing a small amount about far too many things, my dear friend Kate, already of this journal, had invited me to the ballet for the evening to join her family and partner. We were to see the Nutcracker at Sadlers Wells. I stood outside and waited for them, a little early, and saw no hands black with coal dust, no boiler suits or high vis, no faces cracked with badges earned of light and heat and air, just smart jackets and dresses, designer masks, glowing expectation, the pink softness of prosperity.

And what a night. I loved it. I really did. I like to approach such experiences as a total naïve. There’s no point me trying to review them from any knowledgeable standpoint, and instead I prefer to treat them as if I’ve come from another planet; and perhaps from the boatyard at Ponders End, where the pallets of coal stack high and await their turn on the last ride to a thousand vital personal furnaces, I might as well have been. One can be a travel writer in social class as well as geography. This was a journey into a world entirely familiar to many but a previously closed book to me.

From my perfect seat high up but central, I watched as humans at the peak of physical ability described shapes, found perfection in chaos, and I laughed at the exquisite humour, cried at the beauty of it all. Ballet is caricature, but I mean that as compliment. Each moment as perfect and physically contrived as the work of our finest cartoonists, Giles, Posy, Bateman, the chaos of human life became perfectly planned and geometric, laid out for us finally to see it for what it really is. The skill to create a flow of moments, focussing and collapsing, each cog a sentient player, not merely a shape rotated purely by design, is astonishing. Every tiny deviation from flawless repetition crafted to draw the eye, even the shape of the set a play on geometric shapes, collapsing our perspective.

And I thought again of my inheritance, the people that worked the canals, their physical skill and knowledge of how to apply it. Outside observers, should they pay enough attention, were always transfixed by it. CJ Aubertin wrote ‘A Caravan Afloat’ in 1916, and whilst making little attempt to understand the culture of the people into whose world he’d moved with the bumbling entitlement of an Oxford Professor, he was clearly in awe of how easily they flowed through life, how efficient and effortless they made it. “When the whole operation is over, see if you can point out an eighth of a second wasted.”

Tom Rolt’s seminal ‘Narrow Boat’ gets a little closer to something, his description of Tooley’s Yard in Banbury one of the finest things written on the waterways, even if the rest of the book does at times allow itself to wallow in an overcooked gravy of unhelpful sentimentality. But the delicacy and respect with which he treats the canal person’s skill and aesthetic is as beautiful as it is unusual for its time.

Elly (Kit) Gayford gets even closer, writing in ‘The Amateur Boatwomen’, to within a tantalising whisker of the flawlessness of it. Working on the boats as a form of national service during WW2, she trained numerous other women to take up the work and life, and her descriptions of the eyes watching from boats whose families had done it for generations as she learns to command the boats speaks to her deep awareness of what she was amongst, and it is clear she won their confidence and respect through hard work and learning.

The ballet was incredible. Stunning costumes, humour, gorgeous sets, and movement subtle and exquisite. There is little in the world quite so entertaining as watching a highly trained dancer pretend ever so briefly to be clumsy when the script demands. They simply cannot overcome their grace and balance, and stumble and lurch in ways we mortals can only dream of.

Hearing such rich music played by a full pit orchestra was another particular delight and a reminder that if you want the best, corners can never be cut. The completeness of real music, individual and unique for us tonight in a thousand microscopic ways, musicians and conductor going with the flow of the room and the turn of the dancers, will never be replaceable. It was utterly joyful, music and dance at the top of their game.

And so is watching a boating family operating a lock. And so is watching a rugby league team in full flow. What they share is greater than what separates them. The difference is the social class of the audience that appreciates it. From where I stand, I would say that the ballet was outstanding, as beautiful as a champion rugby league team, as skilful as a boating family in command of their home and income, and I’d mean it as the finest compliment I could muster. Ultimately, culture in all its forms is about appreciating other people being really good at something, and when you strip the prejudice away, you find it in extraordinary places as well as the expected. Whilst prejudice is simply failing to admire something magnificent on account of the people doing it.

I danced down the street ahead of my party, bubbling with a joy that needed to vent, as leaden footed, top heavy, and corporeally unpredictable as an elderly, yet horny dalmatian. So very full of happiness, I hadn’t felt so gloriously physically alive in the street after a show since I’d seen Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong’ and tried to climb every lamp post in Leamington Spa in honour of the titular hero. I could claim no such kinship with the Sugar Plum Fairy but surely London was ready for me?

Drinks later, we dispersed into the London night, and alone I caught the last train to Ponders End. In the back cabin, the fire was still reluctantly refusing to expire in the bottom of the grate, so I riddled the ash through, loaded some more Excel nuts on and checked the butterfly valve. In the darkness, sweeties twirled and rolled to the tumble of the luscious music, and through it all a Bolinder cut water at loose tempo, playfully stretching and restricting the flow of movement, organic and vital and symbiotic.

In the morning, my head had finally fallen silent again, the hazy sun rose through the crack in the back cabin doors, and thoughts began to return. Cormorants congregated outside my cabin, and I remembered to tap first to allow them to move with dignity before I emerged into a space I shouldn’t ever try to own. London is a space for all of us.

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Paddington

My mooring was non-ideal. It was in a bit of a cutaway in the towpath so when I opened my back cabin doors, I found myself looking straight down the path, and more to the point other people were looking straight in. If I closed the doors and pushed the slide open instead, I had a reciprocal view of the footbridge overhead, where strolling lovers and resting joggers and telephone call enthusiasts were able to look right in at my inner sanctum. It was a mooring that pretty much invited attention, but it was what there was, and I had to make the best of it.

The area is mostly offices, quiet in the night but busy in the day. I was awakened at 8.15am by a man undergoing what I imagine must have been a phone interview whilst pacing around outside my cabin.

“Yeah, I’m absolutely passionate about process.”

It was a straw too far. I stuck my head out and enthusiastically replied with, “You know what? So am I!”, and he jumped, suddenly flustered. It does not often occur to that tribe of people I increasingly think of as land dwellers that there might be people inside boats.

That’s a strange old boat, I wonder what they do with all that space.

Outside my back door, meetings took place, people sat on the bench, men in suits strode by en-route to important yet unknowable events. People photographed the water cans a great deal. Sometimes when I’d hear something along the lines of “I wonder what this lovely old boat is?” I’d spring up in the back hatch area like a gleeful interpretation gnome and answer “It’s an oil tanker built in 1937 for the Ellesmere Port – Birmingham run.” This often caused great embarrassment for whoever it was. Nobody likes being caught talking about someone else’s home, but there’s always an assumption that nobody could possibly be inside, and even if there was, they wouldn’t hear you.

Years ago, I played this same trick in the dark of night near Middlewich. I was trying to get to sleep down the front tank where we have some rough bunks when I heard some lads discussing Spey’s long deck and why it didn’t have a cabin all along. The idea that it might be a cargo boat had not occurred to them and they were absolutely flummoxed by it. I crawled silently to the hatch and at the right moment in the conversation popped out and cheerfully said “That’s because it’s an oil tanker and carried a liquid cargo.”, an intervention that caused chaos and a likely subsequent change of underpants amongst the lads outside.

I walked out from my mooring to see the area. Down the pontoons, past the rows of idle Go-boats, a business on tickover in the heart of winter, over illuminated bridges, past floating gardens of light and reflection, alongside the back of a small Tescos, quickly past a gym that threatened me with the terrifying prospect of 4000 unique exercises with more added each month, and finally out into the real world. The waterway is encased within a carapace of flats and offices, quite unknowable from the road that runs just the other side. It is a feature, no longer a piece of infrastructure, the water a frame and a mirror for high class developments. Boats are prevented from intruding too far along where they might risk splintering this tranquil reflection.

But this is Paddington, where the condemned were brought to the gallows (Check out track 10), where the human filth, brought by the nightsoil boy, was accumulated with other refuse into heaps so vast they towered over the surrounding buildings, London purging itself of its many unwanted elements to Paddington for transit, with its easy access to the canal and further removal.

Being the nightsoil boy seems to have dropped somewhat out of fashion as a career choice in the Western world, driven to near extinction by the disciples of Joseph Bazalgette and his brilliant sewerage system. I certainly don’t recall the careers advisor offering it as an option, even though my grades probably pointed in that sort of direction. I wonder if the London sewers were violently opposed by those who stood to lose out to their opening, gangs of wreckers and Luddites, storming the confluences, bags of wet wipes and vats of sausage fat in hand. Modernisation always has winners and losers, and it is always a political choice whether to intervene to support those who lose out.

Looking down the main drag towards Marble Arch, it seemed one such heap of miserable detritus was still holding firm. This would be the Marble Arch Mound, a misguided attempt to lure people back to Oxford Street and reignite their lapsed passion for capitalism in what had been Europe’s greatest shopping street. The furore caused by the whole botched idea is perhaps not for this journal, being well documented elsewhere, but with only a few days left to run, and the initial £8 entry fee having been rather desperately reduced to zero, I decided to give it a try. I was asked if I had a ticket, and upon telling them I did not, was let in anyway. There is little in the world as tragic as seeing temporary staff working outdoors on a cold day at the absolute arse end of a failed enterprise, wondering what to do next and how best to disguise the entire episode in their CVs. Perhaps they could pretend to have been on the Paddington nightsoil trade instead.

The Mound rises modestly above the area and does not quite grant a view over London, instead ascending just enough to afford a view of other structures with better views than the Mound. The inside was much more fun, looking very much like a catastrophically out of control loft conversion, and the bottom contained some light and mirror sculptures, enjoyed to the twin soundtrack of ambient music and the spatter of muddy drips cascading through the scaffolding and onto the flat roof of the display area. The handful of remaining trees on the slopes were here shown to be inside pots within the structure, hopefully to find another life after the nightmare ends.

I decided to live-tweet my way round, making the sort of gently sarcastic comments you might expect at each turn. As I finished my trip round, I spotted a sign; “Text ‘HELLO MOUND’ to continue the conversation.”

I did and found myself caught up in a charged and emotional series of text messages with the Mound itself, where it seemed to ask me out on a date, before I proposed eloping to the Peak District, only to be spurned. Such are the risks and possibilities of robotic customer satisfaction surveys.

Within a few hours the tweet thread had gone viral. The development was interesting to watch. The first 1000 or so engagements were people enjoying it as the whimsy I had hoped for. Then it got retweeted by a large group of people passionately opposed to the current government who saw no humour in it but instead regarded my experience it as further evidence of corruption and incompetence. Finally, I was contacted by Times Radio to see if I’d go and do a slot on their breakfast show in my apparent new capacity as Mound Whisperer and public folly expert, which I gratefully accepted. This is the modern social media cycle. Now the mound is gone, and I am back in gentle obscurity.

Besides being a fleeting media darling, I had some other immediate concerns to address. At Paddington station you can get a shower. A stand-up wash is all very well but there comes a point where a shower is the only thing that will do, so I packed my little bag with soap and shampoo and fresh clothes and headed into the station. The showers are on platform twelve, and you must first buy a voucher from the lost luggage department further down the platform. It was obviously a quiet luggage day as the assistant worked through his entire repertoire of jokes with me at the counter as I paid. I played along, and still displaying a charming Northern belief that some places might prefer cash, I asked if they accepted card.

“Certainly, birthday, Christmas, or wedding?”

I sniffed my armpits.

“I was thinking more in terms of condolence.”

I took my little voucher along the platform and showed it to the attendant in the toilet/shower area. He presented me with a small, white, low-budget sort of towel and unlocked a shower cubicle for me.

The shower had cost me £5 and I was absolutely determined to extract every last ounce of value from it. Marvelling in the endless stream of hot running water, something of a miracle to me after weeks of heating kettles on coal and washing from a pan, I washed everything twice as if that might make the effects last longer. As warm water continued to tumble down, my boatman’s mind began to think of ways to achieve maximum value from the experience and I began to wish I’d brought my washing up along as well, although perhaps the sound of crockery clattering might alert a few suspicions back in the attendant kiosk. Well, I could always tell him I’m scrubbing my brass legs.

Restored and clean again I went back to Spey for lunch. My mooring had its own personal Marks and Spencer’s food hall right outside, and a special one too, for this was right beneath the headquarters office block for the firm and was the fancy nibbles in plastic boxes equivalent of the brewery tap. Everything was delicious. All the good stuff was here, stuffed onto spotless shelves stocked obsessively by too many staff. “Flagship”, I imagine them saying to themselves, over and over, sotto voce.

Outside, Spey was moored at the top of a shallow flight of broad stairs, slightly above the entrance to what I now regarded as my own personal food-hall, and the entire gleaming plaza was patrolled by numerous wardens. One fellow had the apparently full-time job of fishing out the detritus that accumulates at the end of this canal arm and was always walking around with a giant wheely bin on a string, a net on a long pole, and a bucket grabber. With the flow of the water and the prevailing winds, every twig and plastic bag that enters the canal between here and the Cowroast summit near Tring must eventually arrive at Little Venice and then drift down the arm. One morning he was merrily fishing twigs out of the water around the back end of Spey as I arose, and I was able to wish him a good morning. He returned the sentiment and withdrew awkwardly, rather surprised to be disturbed from his solitary pursuit.

Another warden knocked on the cabin side as I was writing and called for me to come out, asking what the boat was all about. He felt the artwork had an Indian feel. He then got me to guess where he was from. I embarrassed myself by missing by an entire continent, guessing Georgia when the answer was Algeria. He’d come here by chance whilst travelling the world some twenty years ago and simply never left.

I managed a couple of hours of solar charging as the sun passed through the two remaining gaps in the canyon of blocks that make up the arm. Paddington is a modern canal terminus, a watery plaza of gyms, shops, restaurants, and carefully managed space, privately owned and run, open to the public on account of our inherent profitability rather than by any sentiment or ancestral right. The water itself has different rules, and a few boats can moor for free on the right-hand side, should they find a slot, the shared ownership of the space not now extending past the edge of the water, and many had made it theirs for now, a higgledy-piggledy accumulation of boats, ever shifting and making do. The only historic building is the warehouse on the bend halfway down, now offices for St Mary’s Hospital which occupies a large chunk of the Southern edge.

The end of the arm is no longer a place for boats.

I was visited by a Chinese arts student and her friend. She was working on a project around boats as homes and what that means to those who live on them, and I felt that Spey would be a good opportunity to present a historical aspect to the story, so I invited her along. I wanted to share what I knew about the boat’s carrying past, especially Maureen’s stories, the lady who’d grown up in Spey’s back cabin in the 1940s who I got to know well towards the end of her life.

My interviewers arrived with a large tin of superior shortbread as a greeting, another advantage of mooring up by Marks and Spencer’s, and we got set up in the cabin for an interview on camera. I had cleaned all afternoon, and everything gleamed, not an item out of place, a state of affairs that would no doubt astonish anyone who has seen how I live on land. It quickly became clear that she believed she’d finally found the ethnic motherlode, and my interview lasted two and a half hours. Even I was starting to become tired of my own voice by the end of it.

I do feel it is part of the responsibility of such a boat, though. Like traditional music, the story of the canals and the skillset involved in their use is something passed down the generations, and in both cases I have been lucky enough to be inducted into these vital traditions. Spey and the waterways are an indispensable part of my life, and hopefully will always be so, but I will only be a tiny part of their story, growing up into it as I have, and hoping to pass it on, skills and experience all. Like traditional music, you briefly become custodian of it, and your responsibility is to nurture it and let it evolve a little before you hand it on again.

London boaters are for the most part a community apart, through no fault of their own. It is a community that has quite necessarily evolved somewhat removed from this continuity, and there exists a barrier between them and the rest of the network through which skills and knowledge do not seem to easily permeate. I wonder what more can be done to create engagement between all users of the canal. The dismissive nature with which the London boat community is sometimes spoken of from outside, as a problem that needs solving, rather than a vibrant and valuable community in need of more support ultimately helps no one. I have been met with nothing but kindness and comradeship since I arrived. My choice to make a life for myself in this place on this strange boat is a personal matter that nobody would ever think to question. I am accepted just as I am, and so is the boat. The brightly painted cans seem to attract more attention than anything else.

Education, support, and acceptance are the ways forward. There are too many myths about the waterways round here. “You’ll never get a mooring on the river Lee” is a common one. It’s rubbish, there are plenty. You might struggle on a few specific stretches, but there is always something and either a bit of improvisation or carrying on another half mile always gets the job done. Part of it is a wariness of just joining in with a community that feels alien, not wanting to double moor because it’s not standard elsewhere, when everyone here just gets on with it. It’s a live and let live community where plenty of slack is cut for anyone trying their best and the only cross words are of exasperation at the deteriorating services and dreadful state of the relationship with the Canal and River Trust. It is a hopeful place, where many people have made the step up from much worse and many others have stepped sideways into a life that ebbs and flows with them instead of being forced to the pace of the grind.

I finished my interview with a demonstration of the Bolinder engine, which kicked reluctantly into life with a bang and a cloud of smoke, before settling to a steady rhythm, and I waved my new friends goodbye, glad the colossal transcription job was their problem and not mine.

I left next day to head up the rivers Lee and Stort. Insomnia had struck and I’d been up far too early that morning, early enough to watch the Cornish Riviera sleeper train creep into Paddington and slowly disgorge its contents, some Rivierans leaving as soon as it arrived, others sleeping on a bit longer. Spey needed turning at the far end of the Paddington arm, and there are a series of handy rings in the coping stones along the edge. These have ‘no mooring’ written next to them in large letters, and no sooner had I tied the front end off to one to power round on the engine than men in high vis jackets came running from every direction, no doubt delighted to finally have something to do.

“No mooring! You can’t moor there! You must leave!”

“Aha, but I am not mooring”, and I carefully demonstrated my technique to them. My Algerian friend was among their number, and they all watched cautiously as I brought the boat round, ready to spring into action if I showed any signs of stopping and making a pleasant day of it. But round we came, I reclaimed the line and headed back out.

“We like…” Said the leader, searching for the right words. “Your duck.” Pointing to the large and weather-beaten rubber duck I keep balanced on the headlight mast to irk the purists, and we left as friends.

The sun was shining, and we slipped out of the arm, alongside the dining boats, past the workboat moorings and away onto the Regent’s canal again. I had a tin of shortbread, and felt warm under the wintry sun.

Christmas on the water

Whilst waiting for my PCR test to return, I’d taken the day of enforced cabin rest and ready access to a water tap to catch up on what was threatening to become an out of control laundry situation. Hand-washing clothes in the big dipper is a slow process and you can’t really get the water out, so I hung the larger items up around the outside of the cabin to drip dry, draping my thick corduroy trousers over the swan’s neck. Overnight my negative result came in and I awoke to a heavy frost and found that my trousers had frozen in place. I peeled them off and stood them up. They balanced somewhat menacingly and without support in the doorway to the back cabin like a left-over prop from a Wallace and Gromit film. I beat them into some sort of useful shape and hung them on the towel rail to soften.

My negative result meant that plan A was still going ahead. My girlfriend and fellow Spey owner Bridget would head down to London, and we’d spend Christmas together on the boat. I’d need to leave Ponders End and head back to Haggerston gasworks, which seemed the best place to spend Christmas itself, owing to the availability of a disabled toilet in the nearby park, the shops on Broadway market, and the friendly boaters on the moorings.

Frosty deck. That’s the Camden brewery on the right, in Ponders End as it now is.

The sun hung low and blurry over the reservoirs of the Lee valley as I started Spey’s engine. There was a thick frost over the deck that turned the act of going to the front to untie and use the pole into a life and death experience. Ben was loading Emu for the next run and came over to see the performance and compare notes. Having behaved impeccably for weeks, the Bolinder absolutely refused to start, seeing an opportunity to show me up in front of another Bolinder man, reducing me to a sweaty and angry mess as I kicked it over many times without success. To buy myself recovery time I resorted to stripping off the injector to clean the flutes, before barring the flywheel over with the decompressor open to blow out the excess fuel from the hot bulb. I then failed to tighten the olive fitting on the fuel line enough and combined with the gas blowlamp warming the hot bulb, I managed to start a small but impressive fuel fire on the cylinder head. Ben watched on with a passive amusement that seemed all too familiar. We all know that with Bolinders it’s ‘there but for the grace of God goes I’ when we see someone else having a fight with one and it doesn’t do to be smug. They’ll get you back.

Having put out the fire, eventually it kicked into a reluctant life, seemingly grown tired of embarrassing me in front of Ben, who was no doubt relieved and amused to see an engine room in a greater state of chaos than his own. Down the now very familiar river to the Hertford Union again, each lock now a friend and a landmark. At the now dreaded water safety zone, I struggled to avoid rowers who turned right round in front of me without signalling, seeing me as some sort of moving bollard rather than another river user. I shared down the locks with a young woman in a fleecy dressing gown moving her boat for Christmas too. At Tottenham she got drawn over the water towards a bywash and managed to completely spin her boat round 360 degrees before landing it right in the lock in what proved to be a very elegant manoeuvre.

Bridget joined the next day. I’d spent the morning cleaning the cabin and getting my booster jab. The moorings at Haggerston are ideal in many ways, but the path down the side of the boats was much too narrow for her wheelchair, so I had to carry first her and then it all the way along and across the moored boats to our cabin. Working on the coal run had only increased my strength, and this was not a difficult operation. We do seem to have a relationship at least 40% built on manual handling skills. It’s not exactly dignified, but in a world that isn’t set up for wheelchair users, we can at least get wherever we want to for as long as my back stays strong. We do sometimes take delight in ascending a long flight of stairs and then watching the reactions as Bridget rolls across to be served, knowing that they desperately want to ask how she got there but feel they can’t.

Our hopes of sharing a thoroughly social Christmas with the other boats on the row of moorings had been shattered by the fact that they had all contracted Covid in the previous few days and were isolating together as a group. We waved glasses of festive drinks at each other from a distance, but it was clear that Christmas would be a quiet affair.

Not having known how my test result would go till the previous day, I was behind on Christmas shopping, so we headed into Broadway Market to load up on the finest and most expensive goodies money could buy. A shoulder of lamb from the Hill and Szrok butchers, pastries and cheese from the deli, vegetables, a seriously good bottle of Saint Joseph far beyond our usual budget. Bridget had also brought along the world’s smallest Christmas tree, 2cm tall, and we erected it on the table flap and promptly lost it on the floor somewhere. She also hung little pairs of red baubles from all the brass doorknobs on the cupboards and they swung around like swollen goblin testicles before falling off over the next two days and ending up largely crushed beneath my boots.

The moon rose over the railway bridge on a perfect night, illuminating the edges of feathered clouds and the canal glittered with scattered fragments. Cosy in the cross bed with the range gently glowing and watching suitably braindead TV on the laptop, all seemed right with the world. Santa would not be attempting our chimney this evening, for several reasons, but it didn’t matter.

Christmas day broke and we went for a walk around Victoria Park, enjoying the Christmas day truce in being able to say hello and chat to strangers in London. Knowing our lamb would take many hours to cook in the small over on the range, we prepared it, popped it in and had lunch. I decided to run the Bolinder engine for an hour to keep the batteries charged. This time it started without any of the previous nonsense, now that there were no other Bolinder people watching, but I soon realised that the coolant water system was not working. I cleared the inlet and still there was nothing so I stopped the engine before it overheated and rolled up my sleeves. It was time to clear the mudbox. This is a large pot on the water inlet that filters out the particularly large lumps in the water that would otherwise be forced through the engine. It had filled up with silt and weed from the river and needed emptying. This is a filthy job, and by the end, having used a jam jar to scoop the shite out, I was utterly coated in mud and grease. Happy Christmas from the Bolinder, I suppose. Its sense of timing with such things is uncanny. Still, the smell of dinner cooking had drifted as far as the engine room, there was soft fading light in the sky, the engine was finally running happily and the batteries charging again, and Bridget had a glass of port ready for me when I returned to the cabin and cleaned myself up.

Dinner was lovely, taking over five hours to cook, and in my case disappearing in minutes. I reminded myself it’s not just the minutes of pleasure when eating but the contentedness that follows for many hours. Washing up followed. The cabin is too small to leave it for tomorrow, even at Christmas, and soon every last pan was cleaned and had gone away, and the space returned to good order.

I wondered how Christmas was for the families that worked these boats. I asked a few on a forum I’m lucky enough to participate in and got some amazing answers, stories coming back from childhoods sixty years or more before. Sometimes a charitable soul would come along with a sack of basic presents for the kids, and there might be donated clothes at the church to pick up. Christmas was still spent on the move for many, unless you were iced in. Dinner was chicken if you were lucky, but on the whole it was another day where cargo needed to get where it was going if you were to earn any money. It’s important not to romanticise the carrying age too much. It was relentlessly hard work for little money with no prospects of doing anything different, and no respect shown by a wider public for the effort and skill involved.

We went to bed knowing we would not need to get up first thing to move the boat on. This is why I will never dress up in costume on Spey. I would find it disrespectful to those who really worked the boat and had no choice but to put their whole selves into it when I am just playing at it.

Boxing Day arrived and Bridget declared that she would enjoy a cruise to Kings Cross and back, so we stowed the wheelchair in the rear oil tank, rigged the boat for running again and departed at a very leisurely midday. The towpath filled with walkers gently exercising off their festive excesses and there was a general feeling of goodwill. Bridget steered the locks with growing skill and confidence whilst I ran round the paddles and gates, and we soon got to Islington tunnel. Bridget had forgotten about the tunnel and had recently loaded the range with fresh coals, meaning that the atmosphere within the confines of the 1000 yards of the passage became rather interesting. Having turned the boat at Kings Cross, we returned to the tunnel mouth to find intimidating clouds of white smoke slowly billowing from the portal. Our fire had now burnt through, and the chimney was clear.

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you.” Shouted a fisherman. “There must be something absolutely fucking massive coming through!”

“Oh, thank you! We’ll be very careful!”

I couldn’t see the other end, so I fed the nose in carefully and squinted. There was a humming which could have been another boat or could just have been the resonance of the tunnel itself. The engine stalled as I dithered, and in the moment of silence I was able to judge there was no other boat in the tunnel. I restarted the engine with a bang and we pushed into the gloom. The smoke almost immediately cleared. There had been a gentle draft through the tunnel towards Kings Cross that had the effect of bunching all the smoke into a small but very dense cloud.

The run back to the moorings was pleasant, and large crowds gathered on the locks, pausing their strolls to take pictures and ask questions. The situation approached near Northern levels of general friendliness. By 4pm we were tied up again, facing the other way to the morning, our view from the back doors the great gasholders awaiting their refurbishment and new purpose. All in all, it had been a pretty good Christmas.

Coal Boat Emu

Spey and I were on the move again. I had the opportunity to join Coal Boat Emu for the weekly run and needed to get around East London to the yard at Ponders End from which Emu and Clover both depart on their weekly rounds, Clover going into the city and Emu upriver to Hertford. I passed a boat with two notices in the window, one for a missing cat and another for a different, found cat. Cats can be like that.

Spey, my home, below Old Ford Lock, heading for Ponders End

Spey didn’t stand out as much as I’d expected in London. On the waterways in general, people take pictures, ask questions, really take an interest, recognising it as something of historical interest, even if the specifics were not immediately clear. In London though, she was just one weird boat among many, another person living their life on water however they could, an ongoing project perhaps, an insect between instars. There are people living in bright orange plastic ship’s lifeboats, or in sheds on pontoons made from oil drums. Workboats are being converted, hoppers, barges, old tugs, anything for sale that floats is a project-home to someone. One boat’s entire windowless cabin was simply made of foam insulation sheets bonded together without any other structure.

There’s no such thing as a standard London boat, so Spey only attracted attention through its distinctive irregular exhaust beat, a sound it shares with both Clover and Emu who also run with vintage Bolinder engines. The main consequence of this for me is that my arrival draws people out of their cabins in the hope of buying coal and diesel. It’s a bit like driving around with a set of ice-cream chimes going off, such is the trail of minor discontent I leave behind me. Some see Spey and return inside without comment; others must enquire to find out I’m not a coal boat. Some then ask me if I’m sure I’m not a coal boat, like I might be but haven’t noticed or might be pretending not to be, and a few are genuinely annoyed.

“If you’re not a coal boat, then why does your engine sound like that?”

Said one woman, whilst wearing crocheted Viking horns, returning inside and slamming the doors shut before I could answer.

In the water safety zone at Tottenham, another boat was working downstream and as we neared each other a rower appeared from behind them, on the overtake and into my path. I sounded my horn and steered hard over, narrowly missing them. I have since reported this to the rowing club without receiving a reply.

There does seem to be something fairly dangerous about a form of navigation that relies upon you moving as quickly as possible while facing the wrong way at all times. I once nearly destroyed a coxless four at Trafford one January day at dusk, racing towards me as hard as they could row, without lights or a spotter on the bank. They were four men, all deep in the zone and just rowing as hard as they could, not thinking that anything would be coming the other way, never mind a working boat. I had steered hard and wiped out the oars on one side. They were lucky to be alive.

I will need a certain amount of persuasion that the proposed ‘Water Safety Zone’ in Tottenham isn’t about making it so that the rowers can act dangerously without consequence, give that the dangerous behaviour I’ve seen so far has entirely come from them, and I certainly don’t see how reducing the moorings makes it safer, given that the risk seems to be between moving boats and active rowers. It’s all very odd. No wonder so many of the boaters feel like its being used as a stealth tactic to get them off the water and out of the way.

After six hours of travel, I got to Ponders End. My timing was good because the fuel boats had just been loaded and the arm needed reorganising to let them out. Clover was so heavily loaded she wouldn’t move at all for a bit, sitting in the silt on the backwater. She was loaded to within a few inches of the top of the gunnel, about as loaded as can be, stripes of colourful coal bags laid out like a piece of knitwear. Emu was slightly higher in the water and her Bolinder was employed to pull Clover out of the mud and to the end of the arm, ready to go in the morning. In the dusk, the beat of two Bolinder engines, Spey and Emu, running slightly out of time with each other was intoxicating and took me back to another age. Spey was to become the middle boat in a five working boat sandwich, and to my delight and surprise the engine performed perfectly as I manoeuvred her into position, reversing four times without a hitch.

Michael Pinnock runs the yard, skippering Clover on the citybound run, and we went out for a pint after dinner. He’s a genuine engine nerd and loves nothing more than to talk about the inner workings of a Bolinder. For once I was out of my depth, becoming lost in the finer details of the clutch mechanism, but I listened and tried to learn a few things,

At 7.30 AM, the Bolinders on Emu and Clover kicked into life and the fuel run began. Breasted up in opposition, the two heavily loaded boats wallowed their way into the main navigation channel and then pirouetted slowly round under power until they both faced the right way. Clover downriver to the city, Emu upriver to Hertford. The ropes were let off and away we went.

The two fuel boats dance into the channel.

I was on Emu with skipper Ben and assistant Sean. Three was a crowd, really, but I was a volunteer and they wanted to get a look at me working to see if I could do it. I knew I’d be fine, both with the work and boat, having spent a large part of the last lockdown working on coal boats up North, but I also knew I’d have to prove myself shifting the 25kg bags and working the locks.

Some customers had placed orders and Ben knew exactly where they were, but other people can just flag you down with a wave, often appearing from hatches after you’ve already passed them. Stopping a fully loaded boat and reversing it into position is a serious skill, especially on flowing water and Ben was frequently tested with his knowledge of currents and depths as he got Emu alongside customers. On the outside of a bend facing upriver, a front mast line is essential to prevent the flow from spinning you round,

Going coal boating with a Bolinder boat is frankly a pretty daft idea. They were revolutionary engines when they appeared in the 1920s but a century later it is quite extraordinary to still work them commercially. There is no gearbox, so reverse is achieved by reversing the motion of the engine, spinning the flywheel backwards. This is done through a set of friction shoes that when engaged disconnect the main fuel pump and engage an alternative fuel pump calibrated to put a big shot of fuel out of sequence when the engine is almost stalled. This should theoretically bounce the engine back the other way, dropping the friction plate and engaging the main pump again. It’s a bonkers design, and its remarkable it works as well as it does, which is about 90% of the time. The remaining ten percent of times are made up of stalls, instances where the flywheel bounces twice and carries on the same way, and my favourite, just bouncing between two points on the flywheel without ever picking up either way. The engine makes a soft sort of ‘Blomp-blomp’ noise when it does this. I was also pleased to see that the experts seemed to have just as much trouble with their Bolinder as I do with mine. Just like Spey’s it had moods and seemed to delight in being as awkward as possible, behaving impeccably until someone was watching.

In short breaks between customers, or whilst working the locks I got talking to Sean. His journey into the work had been a typical one in many ways and much less so in others. He’d grown up in Hackney, and just started taking an interest in the waterways. He’d soon realised that he could much more quickly have his own place if he took on a boat and therefore found himself a Dutch barge. Searching for moorings, he’d tried just about everyone on the river and finally persuaded Michael to find a space for him at the yard.

There he’d seen the working boats loading up and leaving the yard each Saturday morning, exhaust barking, loaded to the limit, and absolutely fallen in love with them. Weeks of pestering to get involved had led to this job.

I had to ask the awkward question.

“Some people say that the canals have something of a diversity issue, how is it for you as a black man? Do you feel like they really belong to you?”

“Yeah. I’m definitely British, so this is my heritage. It definitely belongs to me. I love watching the YouTube videos about it all, the industry and the engineering. My friends all think I’m weird. My Gran came from Jamaica when she was six as part of the Windrush generation. They tried to deport her!”

“That’s absolutely outrageous, have you encountered much racism on the waterways yourself?”

“Yeah sometimes. Mostly you get the stares, like ‘What’s he doing there’ but they don’t say anything. My girlfriend and I hired a boat in the Midlands and went right through Birmingham. People were just starting at us like they’d never seen someone like us steer a boat before.”

Ben chipped in from the tiller; “Yeah sometimes people look at me like they want to say ‘Hey, Ben! Do you know there’s a black man on your boat?!’”

“Thing is though,” Sean continued, after we’d all had a laugh, “There’s a sense that we’re all together on the waterway, we’re a community, and it’s hard to be racist to somebody you rely on to bring you essentials.”

“The sense of gratitude is amazing. Like people really rely on you and they’re so pleased to see you. You deliver the coal and that’s families and babies that are going to stay warm now. There’s a real satisfaction in knowing that what you do is so important to people. It’s work that really matters.”

The boat was receiving Christmas tips from many of the customers, who really did value the service.

“The worst thing is that we have to go out even if the weather is really bad. One day it was absolutely awful, a storm, and I assumed they wouldn’t go so I stayed in bed and then I heard the Bolinder starting, and I was like ‘What, really?’”

A customer gave us reindeer cookies with sad eyes. We had long and earnest conversations with customers about the merits of the different fuels for sale. All live-aboards become coal bores. It’s either that or talk about toilets, so coal is the most popular conversation, acting an ice-breaker when live-aboards meet. “What are you burning at the minute?” It could be Anthracite, Excel, Newburn, Eco-coal, Supertherm, Newheat, or Homefire Ovals, each with their devotees who wouldn’t dream of having anything else, and all available for sale from us.

The sacks start off high up, mounded well above gunnel level, but as the trip goes by you have to descend further into the hold to bring them up and at 25kg a bag it is warm work, getting each one on your shoulder and carrying it often down a narrow gunnel to the desired spot. A run of customers would see me stripped to a t-shirt, even on this cold winter’s day.

A lot of fuel to sell. This will all be gone by the end of the run.

Sunday came and it was just me and Ben, Sean only doing the Saturday. I commuted up to Stanstead lock and found Ben engaged in a race against the Polish fuel boats who were coming upriver too, their pair of boats breasted up together into a raft. The challenge was to stay ahead for as long as possible for the passing trade whilst serving as many people as we could. After both crews had served several customers below the lock, we won the race to the lock and got in first.

This is the worst lock on the river. The top paddles are dangerous gate paddles that could easily capsize a careless boat, and we raised them very slowly to avoid washing over our limited freeboard. The lock also has a swing bridge going over the chamber which must be swung off before the lock is filled. The live aboard boater above the lock told me that people frequently fail to do this and soon find their boat trapped beneath it. Several have sunk.

We served a small marina and the Poles finally got by us with a cheerful wave. The crew had expanded to four, all thin as rakes, and there was also a second enormous dog occupying the motor-boat’s cabin top. Both dogs had duvets and toys, and each had a large bowl full of meats and biscuits that the Poles constantly topped up. Never has a dog wanted for as little as these two.

The Poles have got ahead of us! Can we catch them again?

One of the boats we served was the home of a father with his two-year-old child. We chatted at the back steps. As we chatted, the child behind him prised the lid off the tea caddy and merrily commenced throwing handfuls of teabags in all directions. I chose not to bring this up.

The river rises through the pretty little town of Ware.

“See those fancy flats.” Said Ben. “They hate me. I tie up opposite on some runs, and when I start the engine in the morning they shout at me out of the window.”

“It’s like buying a house by a road and complaining when cars come by.” I replied.

“Funny thing is, the more upset they are, the more often I like to stay there.”

The section above the town was deep and Ben finally let me steer Emu up to the lock. He does not like to relinquish the tiller for anyone if he can avoid it, a characteristic he shares with me on Spey. We approached the lock at great speed and found that Poles just starting to work through. Ben placed his trust in the reverse working correctly, and it did. Had it stalled, we’d have split their pair right down the middle.

Above the lock we had another go at hunting the Poles down and almost overhauled them on the wide section before we got flagged down by a customer. The upper Lee was beautiful. Mist sat on the water and visibility was poor. Hints of meadows and small hills took us out of the present day and made the water feel timeless, working boats dropping in and out of the mist. Another customer insisted I drink a glass of malt whisky before continuing into the murk. The final lock to Hertford was a slow affair, the metallic ping of the Bolinder exhaust sounding out from within the lock, smoke mixing with vapour in the dying of the day and drawing crowds of walkers to see what on earth was going on. The waterway is narrow and confined heading into Hertford and the Poles were blocking it with their pair, servicing a customer. They refuse to single out if they can possibly avoid it, not having learnt the deep and difficult skills of pair boating, which in most places is not a problem but here presented something of an obstruction.

Seeing us, they waved for us to come through on a slightly wider section, trying to move their pair out right away from the towpath side. Hitting mud, they ground to a halt and left us a space between their pair and a moored boat almost but not quite big enough to get through.

Ben had already committed Emu to the gap, and we squeezed in, grating along the pair on the outside and the moored boat on the inside. The Poles urgently tried to push their boats to make the space bigger, but they were well onto the mud. A very angry man came out from the moored boat, and a shouting match ensued in strong Essex accents.

“You’re crushing my boat against the wall!” he bellowed.

“Not much we can do about that now.” Ben shouted back, inching forward.

“You’re crushing my boat against the wall, you cunt!” he reiterated.

Swearing at Ben had a galvanising effect. He turned the speedwheel right up, stuck the oil rod fully in and started to blast his way through with every horsepower that could be drawn from the single massive cylinder of the Bolinder.

“A cunt? Then I’ll crush you some more!” he said gleefully as Emu’s exhaust roared and smoke billowed out and Emu danced her way through. Fittingly night had fallen as we did this, plunging the scene of the incident into darkness. The river found its way into Hertford and the head of the navigation is charming, a turning point that feels ancient, surrounded by little warehouses that have become expensive dwellings full of confused faces that stare through jumbled up windows into the soft night when the bark of the engine insists on their attention. Ben used the flow on the river to bring the front round and begin on the route back down to Ponders End.

The run back was quicker, with just a few flag downs to serve. The following morning, I again re-joined at Stanstead Abbotts, along with young Sam on his bike, never one to miss a working boat travelling through his native Broxbourne.

“Will I be in your blog today Tom?” he asked.

“Depends if you do something stupid enough to be worth noting down.” I replied, hoping this would not be seen as a challenge.

At the lock above Waltham Abbey, I really needed a wee, and scanning the towpath I could see two cyclists coming my way. ‘I’ll wait for them’ I thought to myself. The second cyclist arrived at the lock, caught his tyre on a piece of wood and came off. His head fell between two of the safety railings on the lockside, and he banged the back of his neck against one of the uprights. If he’d come off a foot further long, he’d have broken his neck. A helmet would not have helped.

I ran round the lockside to the man’s aid, and found he was merely bruised and shaken. This was not the first time I’d seen safety features making a place much riskier. I also still urgently needed a wee, but the cyclist needed some time to compose himself.

Sam decided his hat was too clean and became jealous of my horrible old boating hat, burnt in places and covered in soot and oil. He held his over the exhaust for a minute or two to improve its authenticity, before looking at it approvingly and putting it back on.

It was around this point that the Covid app on my phone told me I’d had a close contact with a confirmed Covid case and I needed to get tested. Six miles from base, I decided it was less risk to boat back with Ben, staying at the front of the boat, than it was to get the train with lots of other people.

We got back late afternoon, countless bags of coal, logs, bottles of gas, litres of diesel later. Emu was riding high again and handled beautifully. Ben was grateful for my efforts and left me two bags of Eco-coal, a sack of Anthracite, and two nets of kindling on the deck as a thank you.

I headed out for a walk through PCR test, joining a long queue of coughing, feverish individuals, before buying a large bag of food and preparing to bunker down for a bit whilst I awaited my result.

Spoil

I emerged from the tube beneath Paddington bleary eyed and carrying a large coffee. I’d not had nearly enough sleep, but the opportunity to join in with a proper piece of commercial canal carrying was too much to resist. James, the skipper, had anticipated my arrival by also procuring me a large coffee and so I sat on top of Everton’s vibrating engine room hatch in the dark considering my life choices with a coffee within easy reach on either side. It was 7.15am, and we were on our way to load.

Everton is a Leeds and Liverpool shortboat, 62 ft long and just under 14ft wide[i], built in 1953 and still working today. It has been modified to contain two large spoil hoppers, and we were on our way to a building site in Kings Cross, opposite the end of the eco moorings I’d been on just the week before.

Everton is a somewhat Spartan boat, having exactly zero amenities. The steerer stands fully exposed to the elements on the back deck, and although there is a cabin at the fore end, it is completely empty. There is no range, no tea making facilities, nothing. The entire boat resembles an upturned grey slug, although it’s a sleek slug to be fair, with pleasing curves at both ends allowing it to cut through the water with at least a degree of grace.

Through the now familiar run of Maida Hill tunnel, millionaire’s row, and Regent’s Park, James filled in another blank in my mental map by informing me that the large formal garden on our left was owned by the Sultan of Brunei and was the second largest private garden in London.

“I’ve never seen anyone besides gardeners in it.”

I got to grips with steering Everton and found that it drifted round corners like a Japanese racing car, meaning I had to turn into them much sooner than I would with Spey. At Camden I learned more about the boat that’s been steadfastly staying on the 7-day moorings for 4 years and counting. It is apparently occupied by a single mother who is there on protest and lodges an immediate harassment complaint against any CRT (Canal and River Trust) staff who talk to her. CRT are now instructed only to communicate with her via their legal team. When someone is determined to dig in, there is virtually nothing CRT can do to move them on.

Her boat currently contained an exasperated joiner.

“She wants no joins between the pieces of wood! How does she think I’m going to do that? Magic? It’s wood for fucks sake. I’m a joiner. When this is all over, I’m going back to my girlfriend in Yorkshire!”

The top lock at Camden had a boat in it already, waiting to go down. The couple who presumably owned it appeared completely spaced out and were just sitting on the cabin top watching the world go by, clearly on the way down from some sort of mind-altering experience if not yet on the way down the locks. We tied Everton off and asked if they were intending to use the lock any time soon. They looked at us wide eyed, like moving onwards in their journey was an entirely novel and radical idea, before galvanising into action. James set the next two locks for them and I worked them through the top lock, setting back for us.

Stirred from their rest, the spaced-out boaters sped through the next two locks without returning the courtesy of closing the bottom gates behind them or setting back, fully committed to the new and all-consuming task of proceeding forward. We did not see them again. Perhaps they’re going still, somewhere out past the Medway.

There were two other boats on the spoil contract, both big hoppers propelled by tugs as opposed to being self-contained like us, and we passed the uphill loaded hopper above St Pancras lock on a wide section.

Arriving at Kings Cross, we spun Everton round and moored on the edge of the building site. A large excavator made its way over the spoil heap towards us, skilfully redistributing the spoil in front of it to make a path through to the fence. It only took about fifteen minutes to load the boat and we pumped out the rear ballast tank as it worked. When fifty tons was loaded on, we found ourselves somewhat badly trimmed, leaning to the left. We asked the excavator driver to redistribute it a bit, but his bucket just pushed us off into the canal, so we decided to get on with it. Slightly front down, steering and control is a completely different animal. Rather than pivot in the centre the boat now swung around at the back, very, very slowly. Steering became an act of anticipation, as anything you did took a while to have the desired effect. Progress was slow. Loaded deep, we were now grinding along the accumulated sludge of generations at the bottom of the canal. Each bridge was a fight. Displacing virtually the entire water in the canal at these pinch points slowed us to a crawl whilst the propeller sucked up all the scraps of plastic and fabric from the canal bottom and turned into a big spinning ball of rubbish.

Back at St Pancras lock, we cleared the propeller and met the couple who’d just moved into the lock cottage and whom I’d awkwardly misidentified at the member’s night a fortnight previously. The gentleman seemed very keen to get out and know the waterways and expressed interest in coming on a future spoil run. Clearly, moving boatloads of shite is becoming more glamourous than it used to be.

At Camden we met the third hopper coming down empty and neatly crossed over between the top two locks. Their method is to push the hopper into the lock and then put the tug in behind at ninety degrees across the back. That way both tug and 70ft hopper can go down the lock together with a little care.

We wound some speed on through the deepest section back through Regent’s Park and Everton warmed to the task. The bow plunged magnificently through the water, pushing smooth whale-like shapes out either side of us. If we’d had to stop it would have taken quite a few boat lengths to bring Everton to a halt, such was the momentum. I was steering and having a great time. I waved at all the children in the zoo. Some waved back. Most stared. A woman walked the towpath in a metallic style Puffa jacket that from behind made her look exactly like the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz.

We made very slow and noisy progress through Maida Hill tunnel, the boat again displacing virtually all the water and barely crawling along. The less free water around the boat, the more it is that you must shovel your own displacement of water behind you to make progress. Sometimes we’d see boats pulled off inadequate moorings behind us by our passage, even though our progress was so slow. It is company policy to continue and not to re-tie them. It seems harsh but I can see why. Some boats are moored to a hope and a dream on a section with nothing solid to tie to and no obvious way of re-securing. Others held by mooring pins in soft soil that pull out and fall forever into the water. Few London boaters really know how to tie a boat off properly, and there is nobody to learn from. As ever, the twin problems of lack of depth and lack of adequate mooring spaces for the numerous house boats make life more difficult for everyone.

After several very silty hours of working West, we arrived at the Sainsbury’s at Kensal Town. The lack of amenities on our spartan but doughty vessel was being most keenly felt in the lack of warm sustenance, so I ran in and cleared out the hot food counter whilst James cleaned the propellor yet again.

By mid-afternoon we had worked through our warm pastry mountain and were finally in sight of the recycling centre. We tied off onto the bollards on the wharf. James had an extra thick set of ropes.

“Use these. We’ll need them.”

The wharf was at the bottom of a ramp which led up to some enormous gates. The entire recycling complex looked like an enormous Iron Age fortification with high and impassive walls. James summoned the recyclers via his phone and presently the gates swung open to release a large mechanical grab and a big blue lorry, ready to defend the encampment from our incursion. It looked an unequal battle as they advanced upon our position and set up on the wharf.

The grab driver was a wizard, pirouetting his machine in numerous directions and planes, spinning the jaws, getting into every corner of the boat. I saw now why we needed extra thick ropes. The boat, large though it was, was violently rocked and barged by the grab, bullied about in the water by forces even greater. Waves sloshed up against the other shore of the canal. The grab driver continued to impress, the speed and precision of his work undeniable.

“He must be an absolute whizz at those arcade machines. He’d liberate all the teddies in about two minutes flat.”

Watching someone else do all the work allowed for a moment of introspection.

“Is it more glamourous these days being a boatman? I mean, fundamentally we’re moving a load of shite around, but somehow people really think you’ve got a special job.”

“Yes, maybe it is. The people that did this always had extraordinary skills and knowledge, but now we’re respected, even though I’m still learning. I appreciate the variety though. I wouldn’t want to do this exact run every single day. Most of us get to do a wide range of different jobs. And there seems to be the right balance of work available and skippers to carry it out”

“Perhaps it’s the scarcity. There’s just a handful of inland carrying contracts left where once there were thousands.”

“Perhaps. When I got married a few years ago, I was able to put my occupation as ‘Boatman’ on the certificate, and it felt really good. There aren’t many that can say that now.”

This work requires a set of skills and a toughness no different to that asked of boaters from generations before, but those generations of boat people that went before us were very much ostracised from society to the extent that many who left the water would not talk about it in later life. Being branded a “Water Gipsy”, with all the connotations it came with had been a terrible millstone for many to carry, their exquisite skills and immense knowledge not even considered. Now the same work is a job for a Cambridge graduate like James and people passing by express jealousy at the outdoors nature and freedom of his job. Many of those gone before us would have been utterly amazed to see their hard lives romanticised as they are now, their world pictured as idyllic, their work desirable.

Through the gates in the complex, I could see a vast conveyor emerging from inside a colossal building, dropping rubble onto a heap. The size and scale of the plant was immense, receding from us behind the gate out of sight, road, rail, and water access making the three sides of a vast triangle.

The grab had cleared the back half of the hold, which meant that the boat was leaning quite far forwards and the propeller was exposed. We got the hook and cleared it again, adding to our impressive and growing pile of prop trophies, a colourful mound of plastic and textile strips.

On the canal, a large liveaboard came by crewed by Rastafarians.

“I’ve heard people wonder where the diversity is on the canals.” Said James. “Well, it’s all here in London. Everybody is on the water. Look at them, brilliant. Imagine if they all decided to go for a trip to Braunston. People would have a heart attack.”

From the slight embankment the canal runs along we could see Grenfell tower, covered in white sheets with a big green heart on it. Nearer, new tower blocks were going up. I wonder what it would feel like to move into a new flat in such a block and find yourself staring out at Grenfell.

The run back to base was in the dark but much easier without the cargo wallowing us to the bottom of the water. The headlight was mounted near the steering position and mostly illuminated the empty hoppers, but we knew the route by feel and intuition and eased Everton back through the rows of moored boats at Kensal Green. The Paddington arm was like threading the eye of a needle, with poorly moored boats all along, blocking the way. James photographed the worst offenders to report.

“Not that it does much good. Those two have been there for years.” We brought Everton round again at the corner where the arm turns Eastward, and back past the cheese and shellfish boats, full now of the evening dining trade. We passed the Dragonboats, left over remnants of a fleeting Olympics, too expensive to scrap and too hard to repurpose. I waved at the diners within who probably experienced our passing as a slight but unwelcome disturbance in the force, and tied off on the workboat pontoon. Our run had replaced the work of two HGVs. London, almost uniquely in England, is still suitable for a small amount of commercial carrying. The cost and slow speed of road haulage, plus the broad nature of the canals has given it just enough edge to make it worth trying. The carrying age lives on, just.

[i] It was slightly narrowed when it was rebuilt with spoil hoppers.

Eco Mooring

My seven days at Little Venice were up and it was time to move on again. I had booked an ‘eco mooring’ at Kings Cross and was curious to find out what that actually meant. I had an early breakfast and prepared the boat for moving, enjoying watching the character of the boat change as I did it. Away go the solar panels, the roof is swept, the engine chimney restored to position, brasses polished, back deck swept and mopped, long pole brought onto deck, fan shaft on its little mat on the cabin top, vital rubber duck reinstated on the headlight pedestal. Clutter is hidden and the boat assumes an air of sprung readiness, everything in its place. I’d woken up with ‘Scooby Snacks’ by ‘The Fun Lovin’ Criminals’ in my head, a song I haven’t thought about for years and don’t particularly like, but it made a suitable motivator for the work.

I started the engine and released Spey from the mooring. The boat on my inside showed no signs of moving on although it had been there before I arrived. Plenty of boats push the time limits a few days, waiting for a break in their work schedules. I reversed back down the line to Little Venice itself where the water was wide enough to turn round. Reversing is a skill I’ve not yet fully mastered. The working boaters used to take Clayton’s tankers backwards down the locks at Wolverhampton to the gasworks halfway down and I’ve heard many accounts of how they skilfully ran them backwards in complete control. I did reasonably well, only needing to send the engine back into forwards a couple of times to straighten up. Whenever you do anything impressive with boat control you can guarantee that nobody is watching to appreciate it, and when you totally screw it up there are sure to be hordes of people all filming it on their phones.

The Polish fuel boats were on the service mooring in the basin, awaiting a new alternator belt.

“It is good to see you!” Shouted their leader, his enthusiasm undimmed by the setback. The massive dog slept on the roof, spread out like a meat duvet. I swung the front end of Spey round and headed into Maida hill tunnel, running the engine hard enough to generate a shower of red sparks as ancient carbon from the diesel days continued to clear itself out of the exhaust ports. By Camden the rain was coming down heavily, and there were still no free spots on the visitor moorings.

Working the locks by myself in the rain was slow. I didn’t like to leave the boat unattended, so I was unable to set ahead. The rain got heavier, and I was extra careful crossing the gates. The weather had reduced the number of gongoozlers to a handful, although one man shouted “Awful smelly diesel engine! Should be banned!” at me as I was in the top lock. I cheerfully told him that it was running on green biofuel and that perhaps he might wish to consider fucking off and he scowled and cycled away without further comment.

At the middle lock, miserable security guards stood in the rain with nothing to do. I tried to make conversation with them but they gave me one-word answers and slunk off. By a slightly weird coincidence, the bar they were guarding was playing ‘Scooby Snacks’ over the speaker system.

Slowly does it in the rain. Bottom lock at Camden.

Below the bottom lock I paused to oil the engine round, make some tea, and have a piss. Having completed the third of these vital activities, I opened the engine room doors again to find a man with a very expensive camera pointing his lens straight at me. Always a performance.

At St Pancras, I tied onto the service point and began setting the lock. A large and jovial bearded man appeared from within the cruising club on the short arm and said hello. He looked not unlike Phil Beer and remembering when I’d wronged Steve Knightley during my busking trip of England, I cautiously introduced myself.

“I’m Andy.” He offered, and took my windlass to work me through the lock.

“Lovely boat. You should come to the club night on Wednesday, meet the members. I’ll sign you in.”

I arrived at the eco moorings and found my spot occupied by an unattended boat. The rain was really pouring down, so I tied on after the last boat on the no mooring section, hung my coat up in front of the range, had a spot of lunch and considered my options. I rang the moorings ranger who sounded rather defeated by the whole thing.

“Try and get in where you can. We permit double mooring, even outside widebeams.”

I asked him about enforcement of the booking system.

“There’s nothing much I can do. I can ask people who overstay or who haven’t got a booking to move on but if they don’t I haven’t any power to enforce it.”

After a couple of hours, a space became available, and I poled Spey into it. I was outside a live-aboard and had just started to tie Spey off when a lady came out and told me she was just about to move on, so I slacked the lines off and let Spey out again. Finally, I poled into the space and tied off. The next task was to connect to the electricity pedestal. I ran my wire out and just made it to the single remaining socket. I logged onto my account. The service is outsourced to a company called Meter-Macs, and I’d created an account and loaded the minimum £10 onto it in advance. There was no option called ‘Treaty Street’. I rang the ranger again.

“Yep, they think it’s called ‘York Street’, I’ve been trying to get them to change it. I know it makes no sense.”

I thanked him and went back through the process. I found York Street and after working out that the pedestals were splendidly numbered in opposition to the mooring position numbers, located the correct pedestal, but my socket was not listed. I rang again.

“Hello, me again. My socket doesn’t seem to be listed.”

“That’s weird. I’ll ring the supplier.”

Half an hour later, it became available and I was able to connect.

An hour after this, at dusk, another boat appeared, searching for his booking spot. I helped him tie outside another boat and explained my experience of it being a bit of a bun fight. The rain fell around us.

“What is the fucking point of it then?”

He was very wet and grumpy with the situation. We found another boat who was about to move on and didn’t need their socket anymore. Gradually he warmed up. He was a professional boat mover, helping people move boats all around the Southern Waterways.

“People with no knowledge of the waterways buy boats, the marina shoves them out of the door and they don’t have a clue what to do. Especially these big ones. Lots of boats never go any further than the nearest pump out and back. People are afraid of moving, so I do it for them. We’ve had all sorts. Landing Dutch barges on the tidal docks on the Thames, houseboats moving upcountry.”

My spot was right at the end of Battlebridge basin, opposite Kings Place, the Guardian newspaper’s headquarters and cultural centre. Years ago, I’d had a gig in the smaller hall when a band I’m in had a fleeting brush with success. Across the water it all seemed very distant now, with the extremely expensive wine bar called ‘Rotunda’ full of well-to-do drinkers, their voices carrying over the water to our cluster of scruffy floating homes as they enjoyed after-work-drinks. Again, we were an intrusion, a seam of rough living cutting through this high-class waterside destination.

“Darling, there’s boats on the canal again.”

“How awful.”

Eco mooring rules seemed to mean no engines or generators, and definitely no burning used nappies on the range, so I could only burn smokeless fuel which reduced my cooking options to single pot meals, as I would struggle to get the oven very hot without wood. I cooked a sausage stew and cleared everything down for the passing storm that rattled around outside all night and kept me awake. In the morning a floating island of matting and reeds had come alongside and between the boats. A coot stood upon it and faced me down like it was all my fault.

I walked around the area again during the week, over the hill to what was becoming my regular music session in Islington, piecing it all together. A weapons bin, where one can discard unwanted armaments still comes as a surprise to a Northerner like myself. In Waitrose I was ID’d, trying to buy a bottle of St Emilion, which at 38, and showing all the signs of having had a particularly difficult paper round, was a surprise.

“Because this is exactly what the teenagers go for, this sort of stuff. You see them all hanging out on the street corners with their St Josephs and Chateau Neuf Du Papes, doing the Times crossword and comparing investment portfolios.” I said cheerfully, producing my driving licence. In truth I was flattered.

On the Wednesday I made my way up to St Pancras cruising club for the members’ drinks night. I was vouched for as promised by Andy who had installed himself in what was clearly his place at the end of the bar and was then signed in by the Commodore herself. Their clubhouse is called ‘The Waterpoint’ and is the old water tower from the gasworks. They took me right up onto the roof, through a large hatch. It’s a dramatic view in every direction, from the gas holders across the canal, now canisters of expensive flats, across the basin, the railway coming in through what had been the coal yard, Eurostars and regular trains, the massive train sheds of Kings Cross and St Pancras stations, then the mighty new Google HQ building, a construction site of gargantuan proportions with no fewer than 7 cranes dancing over it.

The view from the waterpoint – The gas holders now hold flats instead.

The view from the waterpoint – the arm that hold St Pancras Cruising Club

The view from the waterpoint – St Pancras station

I first came through here with Spey 20 years ago as an eighteen-year-old, and Kings Cross had something of a reputation at that time. As a naïve country boy coming in from the shires, I was somewhat overwhelmed by it all. I recall phoning my parents from a call box and it going dark when the door shut behind me, such were the numbers of prostitute’s cards in the windows, blocking out the light.

The whole area had spent the previous two centuries as something of a midden for the city, and the transformation from industrial waste ground to a deeply fashionable postcode had been terrifyingly swift. The cruising club felt somewhat overwhelmed by the pace of change, and had become hunkered down in their little patch, adopting something of a siege mentality, keeping the tides of change at bay beyond their perimeter. The gasholders had been moved from their old site and erected on the wrong side of the canal, the water tower dragged up the hill and positioned at the end of their arm, the gasworks demolished and cleared, flats and offices. The coal yards now restaurants and boutiques. The world had moved on around them.

An Australian couple had just bought the lock cottage and were also attending the evening, fraternising with their new neighbours. They graciously put a considerable sum of money behind the bar, which was enthusiastically set upon by several of the members. The locked box containing the good spirits suddenly became unlocked and a convivial atmosphere developed.

As the night drew on and people started to leave, I congratulated who I thought was the Australian man on his new lock cottage, only to discover it was a case of mistaken identity and I had congratulated the wrong man. After he’d left, the Commodore had a quiet word with me;

“Yes, he won’t have appreciated that. He has a very nice place in Notting Hill.”

Having committed enough faux pas for one evening, I made my way home to Spey.

A quiet week in Little Venice

Arriving at a new mooring you are the disturbance, the difficult new piece in an already completed puzzle, silent ranks of moored boats, and an imperfect space that’ll have to do. Lines run to land. You’re the modification, the imperfection in the order. Notes are left on neighbouring boats and numbers exchanged. A day passes and you belong. This is home now. Neighbours are met and pleasantries exchanged.

Saturday comes and its moving day for many. The rules allow for a fortnight on an otherwise unrestricted mooring, no more, and with people now freed from the 9-5 the boats begin to move. Saturday announces its presence with the wake of early movers rocking your sleep. Back doors are opened to reveal a stretch of towpath where there’d been a mysterious neighbour before, always out when you were in.

You find you’ve become the old stager who knows which parts of the service block are broken and which still work, offering advice to the new arrivals, guiding them in, catching ropes. Suddenly walkers can look right into your personal space, and tourists take Instagram photos of your copper kettle as you polish it.

New boats try the space behind for size, ropes thrown, long pieces of 2 by 4 used as makeshift barge poles, inexpertly manhandled into some sort of position, and the line-up completes itself again, the kaleidoscope resolving to a new image.

A boat reverses down the row and a rope clatters over my roof as a young couple try to land their widebeam in the space behind me. I pop out to see what’d going on and get a wet rope across the top of the head.

“Sorry!” he shouts, and I push their front end around my fenders and into position. I have a new neighbour.

This is a plum spot. By the entrance to Little Venice is the facilities block. Elsan emptying point, water, and bins. The Holy Trinity for live-aboards. Toilets are central to a boater’s life. The idea of living on the water, free of bond to any single location, traveller without constraint and in touch with nature may be deeply romantic, but if you’re not happy carrying a plastic cassette full of shit down the towpath to an approved disposal point, then this is not the life for you.

The water tap is crooked and badly fitted and it’s not possible to get my water cans properly beneath it. Carrying two half-filled cans back to Spey, a highly stylish woman in faux furs and heels steps off an otherwise indistinct boat in the line, looks me in the eye and says “Nice jugs!” in an eastern European accent.

The bins are a horn of plenty for the local rats, who wait for sunset to slip between the bars that cage them and rejoice in their refilling. I shine a light to get a better look, and the largest are massive, quite unafraid, with a single squeak to let the others know they’re under surveillance before carrying on.

There were toilets here, but they are closed owing to ‘continued vandalism’. The elsan point was also out of service owing to a collapsed drain. It’s an ongoing problem that the areas with highest demand also suffer the highest number of problems. This is then blamed on the boaters for ‘misusing’ them, often leading to the withdrawal of services. This often only pushes the problem to the next facilities or into the community more generally. Remember; “Is there a reason why so many of you shit in the woods?“ It’s not a given that the vandalism had anything to do with the boating community, and the collapsed drain most likely just heavy usage. More carefully designed facilities blocks could be much more resilient, but the budget is hard to find. Boaters in the London area exist on scraps of support and feel little connection to the Canal and River Trust who are supposedly responsible for providing the service upon which they rely. The more urgent the need for facilities, the greater the burden what facilities there are must bear. This means there’s a much higher chance of something going wrong, and a much higher chance of closure as a result. The facilities that nobody uses are always in service and the ones most needed are the most often closed.

The lack of functional toilet meant I needed to search out my best local option. A local Waitrose offered customer toilets, so I decided it was a good week to enjoy a higher class of muesli. I restricted myself to purchasing one or two items each time, so I always had an alibi to return.

In the park, gym equipment is installed like a children’s play area, and young men exercise to repetitive music on Bluetooth speakers. I recognised most of the reps from the Bolinder starting sequence.

My mooring was opposite a row of houseboats, each a squared off floating pontoon with a house built on it rather than a boat that could go anywhere. They’re really just homes spread onto the water, and I don’t understand them, for surely the joy of living on the water is the potential to travel. One morning when I started the engine to charge the batteries, an older lady appeared at one of the windows. I assumed she was going to complain, but instead she told me she hadn’t heard such an engine for decades and it reminded her of her youth, living by the waterways when London still had the narrowboat traffic from Limehouse heading upcountry.

I sat in the cabin and cleaned and polished round again. A tourist group from little Venice came by with their guide. “And here you can see the traditional roses and castles on the water can. And some rubber ducks.”

Little Venice is one of those places on the network that is iconic, in a low-key sort of way. A broad triangle of water, with a little tree filled roundabout in the middle, home to trip boats and café boats, but denied as a mooring to us regular cruisers, the water kept open and smart, free from the intrusion of scruffy liveaboards and therefore we boaters must stack up beyond the bridge, piling up against the barely functional service block like flotsam on a tideline.

I was moored on the main line to Bulls Bridge and the wider network. Head into Little Venice and turn left for Limehouse and the Lee navigation. Turn right and you’re in the Paddington arm, a branch that terminates amongst smart tower blocks, haunt of the besuited and the tourist. Moorings there can be booked at £10 a day. Perhaps I’ll ask my parents for a week in Paddington basin for my Christmas present.

The streets around Little Venice are smart and the buildings tall and pure white, many with broad columns defining deep doorways. There’s a lot of money here, but unlike Broadway Market this is money that’s well set, matured, here to stay, breeding the kind of serious tenure that allows for the trailing of wisterias around porticos. The streets feel generational and abound with the sort of long-term gardening that should only be confidently attempted by those who are secure enough to know they are here to stay, and to whom they will hand responsibility when their days are ended.

Visiting the Lord Alfred in Maida Vale, I achieved a new most expensive round ever, spending £14.55 on two and a half pints of bitter.

I had a gig one evening and needed to get over to Stratford station to meet another band member. I also needed a new rosin for my fiddle, and so walked to Stringers, the top-class violin dealers. Walking in as scruffy as ever had a quite different effect to when I enter off-licences or restaurants. Instead of being horrified and concerned and blocking the exits, the lady behind the counter immediately appraised me and asked me if I had an account. Clearly this is what top class fiddle players look like.

Sorted for rosin, I hit the tube, sitting opposite a French charmer who was wooing a slightly tipsy lady with the sort of cliches I would have considered ridiculous. But it proved depressingly effective, and they were soon taking the government’s advice to ‘snog without reservation’ and I looked away down the carriage only to see a baby who looked remarkably like Hitler smiling back at me.

At Stratford, a man was trying to save my soul. He implored through his microphone, pleading with us to become reborn. He was a good act. He really meant it and had the intelligence and panache to freestyle with great erudition. It must be awful to believe that nearly everyone around you is going to Hell, and I completely believed his sincerity. Much easier to be an atheist. If I’m right, it doesn’t matter that he’s wrong, as we’d all end up in the same place.

A rapper set up his busking equipment across the square and a face-off began. Unable to preach over the rap music, the preacher fired up some songs of praise and sang as loud as he could. Every corner of the city is a contested space, every change bitterly resented by someone who loses something, every uncertain square foot that becomes clarified is a mortal blow to someone else.

The next day, I went to meet my friend James who works as a skipper on the trip boats and workboats around London. He was due to take the electric barge out with a party from a well-known high-street clothing store that evening, departing Paddington at 6.30pm, and was completing a series of afternoon jobs, starting the heating system and clearing the propellor on the bow thruster. To do this, we had to gain access to the propellor through the weed hatch, a task made harder by the fact that although the boat had been commissioned for the run to Camden, it hadn’t initially fitted through the tunnel at Maida Vale, a problem remedied by several tons of ballast being placed under the floor. This had solved the first problem but lowered the weed hatch 9 inches below the water level necessitating the fabrication of a steel collar to fit over the hatch. I helped lump the collar from the storage and up the steps onto the foredeck and into place over the studding. The collar and extra water depth all meant that James had to roll his sleeve right up to the shoulder to reach the propeller, which he soon cleared of bits of rag and cloth.

“So, are you basically self-employed?”

“Yes, I do bits all over London. Some of the workboats, a couple of the trip boats, this one and the Shellfish boat. A bunch of us are with RMT, and they don’t understand what we do so they’ve lumped us in with the oil rig workers on their system. I keep getting some interesting emails.”

The main run for the trip boats is to Camden locks and back, via Regent’s Park.

“It’s the only bit of canal in the country that’s had continual commercial traffic since it was built. The trip boats started here in 1953 with Jason’s trip, which was originally a wooden steamer until it fell to bits and they got a Josher instead. The waterbuses started in 1959.”

We talked about the escalating numbers of boats on the system, and the lack of enforcement.

“It’s tricky. They can’t easily evict people from their homes, but sometimes it’s very complicated. There was one occasion the contractor was sent to recover a sunken boat, and when they got there, they found someone still living on it. They’d simply built a shelf above the new waterline halfway up inside the boat and carried on. What on earth do you do in that situation?”

James changed into his smart skipper’s uniform, and I cleared out of the way before the clients arrived. Spey was moored outside a 50ft live aboard, the back cabin hanging out into the water. I liked it like this, it seemed more secure. Anybody wanting to cause trouble would have to navigate the gunnels, which made the cabin feel remote. Even when the boat behind me had moved on I didn’t drop onto the towpath, preferring to stay outside, in the deeper water. It would soon be time to move on again myself and I had an eco-mooring booked at Kings Cross.

Finding a new home

I returned to Spey from a few days back in the North. I’d had a couple of gigs that had been in my diary longer than my plan to be in London. Between this, a mountain of admin, and a day out to Malham Cove with my girlfriend, it had become so busy I’d arrived at the foot of this enormous limestone cliff, frostbitten and magnificent, deep in the Yorkshire dales, before I’d really had time to process it. I stared up at it and said “I live in London” to myself. It all felt surreal.

I stepped off the tube at my now familiar stop of Bethnal Green. You know you’re nearly back because it’s the stop where the noise of the rails and the tunnel is so loud that you can’t make out the announcement telling you which stop is next. I was starting to understand the character of the different lines. Perhaps a whole day discovering the underground from morning rush hour to party goers returning home at night might be on the agenda for the future.

Walking up the high street, windblown and changing season now to winter, I passed large plastic bags of leaves, tidied up, tied off and ready to go who knows where. It seemed symptomatic of the city to want the trees to brighten up the avenues, provide cool in the summer, but resent the scatter of spent leaves in the Autumn, bagging them up for disposal. “Please clean up after your tree. Penalty £50.” The Hawaiian themed bar, ‘Love Shack’ had a sign on the door saying; ‘Pull me hard’.

Spey’s cabin felt damp and unloved. I knew it would be a slow process to make the place feel homely again, so I relaxed into it, one job at a time. I lit the fire and armed with my new purchase, a convection fan, started to drive the moisture out of the cabin. A jogger with an American accent came down the towpath shouting “C’mon bitch! You got this!” at herself as motivation.

I brought my little space back to life, airing it all out, warming it up, cleaning, polishing, sweeping. The smallness of the space demands more cleaning than a larger space, perhaps due to the sheer complexity of it, the immensely varied demands of the cabin, all of domestic life taking place in an area I could reach out and touch every corner of from the centre. Demands overlap and constant care is needed to stop the place descending into chaos. If a new item comes onto the boat, a home must be found for it, or it rattles about the cabin getting in the way. Often this means displacing something else, which must be removed from the cabin altogether. Every space is designated.

I had a school to teach online as part of a project I’m doing for Historic England and my laptop battery needed a boost, so I started up the Bolinder, oiling round all the moving parts of the governors, greasing, and engaging the alternator to charge my computer. I wonder what the inventors of the Bolinder, the world’s first mass market marine oil engine, over a century ago, would have made of their creation being used as stationary engine to power the digital education economy.

Everything right, and the fire drying and warming it all, I went for a walk down the towpath and encountered another jogger who slowly came up behind and overtook me. He had loud motivational music playing, specifically ‘Rage Against The Machine’s’ 1992 hit ‘Killing in the Name’, and the lyrics “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” blasted out as a fanfare to announce his presence as he jogged and shouted along to it. After a while, I realised that he had this lyric on loop, and I wondered if he ran for hours like this, shouting the same line at everyone he passed.

I would have to move on at the weekend and decided upon Sunday as Saturday was due for bad weather. The wind was already racing up the canal, driving shoals of waves Eastward, and they ran under the swim of the boat, where the back-end curves in on itself, with an arhythmic shlup shlup shlup that kept me awake. I spent Saturday in art galleries and returned to the boat in the evening. The moorings were in a state of animation, with bits of wood blown around, bike covers flapping, and boats banging about. I cooked a basic meal and had a terrible night’s sleep, worrying about stuff blowing away, hearing the chop of the water under the swim and the line of boats bumping whenever I was about to drift off. The closeness to the outside world that is so often a positive feature of back-cabin life can be a problem when you’d rather have a place to hide away. You are still part of the elements and subject to their whims.

The morning was calm, and the sun shone brightly through a perfect blue sky. I had plenty of time before my crew could arrive, so I stripped the solar panels down, cleaned the cabin again, polished all the brass work, recharged the coal scuttle, cleared the rubbish out, and started the engine to begin charging the boat batteries which were somewhat empty again.

My crew arrived, young Sam, a 14-year-old with a tremendous keenness for working boats and his mother Nicola whom I know through music. It was bitterly cold as we let the ropes off and headed out towards Acton lock at Broadway market. Some of the mooring ropes had frozen solid and needed to be dropped in the canal to keep them supple.

“But you don’t wear gloves?” asked Nicola.

“You’ve got to get through a small pain barrier, then you find you don’t need them.” I explained. “It’s like Christmas cards, the first year you don’t send them everyone thinks you’re rude, then after that everyone’s like “It’s just Tom, he doesn’t send Christmas cards.””

At the next lock, we became camera fodder again, an Italian man, having first asked permission, finding great delight in the boat and the crew. He declared me to be especially ethnic, with my windlass, flat cap, beard and Barbour jacket. It all got a bit meta. Wasn’t I supposed to be the one doing the project? I wondered how close the London waterways were to the singularity, where every person on the water is doing a project about everyone else. The photographer documented me his way, and I documented him in my notepad. A fair exchange.

Sam wormed his way into the steerers position, and soon sat himself on the hatch surround like he’d been doing it his whole life, only the cleanliness of his flat cap giving away his inexperience. He certainly looked like he knew what he was doing so I left him to it and went into the engine room to oil round.

Sam demonstrates the classic steerer’s position.

At City Road lock, the crowds were even thicker, and the lockside had become a shrine to a man who had drowned a fortnight before. We stepped around the flowers and other offerings and worked carefully through.

At St Pancras lock, the moored boats were three deep, and even the lock landing was occupied. This is always slightly galling, as they should be kept clear for the safe working of the locks, but I never grumble, instead cheerily using Spey’s front line off the moored boat’s front T-stud to strap the boat to a standstill. A face immediately appeared at the window but recognised they couldn’t complain. I gave them a friendly wave.

The lock surrounds were a sheet of ice, even under the perfect blue sky and bright sun, and we worked with care through, and onwards, down an icy canyon in the flats to Camden. Here, our passage up the locks was watched by ever growing numbers of people, kept back by railings upon which rows of them leant, the enclosed nature of the lock creating the division of stage and audience and turned our progress into a performance in the round.

We ate sandwiches as part of our immersive act, and a hundred people followed the plot, impassively. Some had questions, the usual ones like “What’s under all that deck?” “Where do you live?” “Are you going to convert it?” and the very public nature of your journey means you feel obliged to answer. I have sometimes considered getting a sandwich board made for such situations, entirely filled with a fictional history probably involving treacle mines and snuff. It would be particularly good fun to put that out at museums and working boat rallies.

I’d hoped to find a mooring above Camden locks, but the short run of visitor moorings were completely full, as they always are. One boat has apparently been on the 7-day moorings for four years now, the two residents allegedly selling it to each other for a single pound whenever an enforcement looms, thus restarting the process. I would love to get on here for a week, but spots are incredibly rare.

We made the big turn onto the Regent’s park zoo section, narrowly avoiding a Dutch barge trying to come the other way. It’s Regent’s Park Zoo and Millionaire’s row here, and mooring is strictly forbidden, presumably in case you go native and either become a baboon or a Russian millionaire. This is one post code they definitely don’t like to let the poor into.

Nicola had made the sandwiches in the cabin and there was a crust left. The loaf had been a sort of sourdough baguette thing.

“What do you call this bit of bread, where you come from?” she asked.

“I don’t know. The crust?”

“It’s all got crust, but this end bit, does it have a special name up North?”

“Er, I don’t know. We’ve only started seeing loaves like this in the North in last few years and we haven’t yet fully developed the lexicon to deal with them yet.”

“What bread do you have?”

“Barmcakes. The big ones are called binlids. You can’t beat a cheesy binlid.”

“I’d like a cheesy binlid.” Said Sam.

The canal here is deep, continually dredged out by workboats and trip boats, leaving Camden and Paddington, rubbish hoppers deeply loaded, trip boats full of diners. A large and scruffy working boat called ‘Baron’ came by with a very large blue pump installed in the front end. It was pulling up the water behind and we surfed through the wake.

We found ourselves following some Go-boats, electric day hire open dinghies that emanate from Paddington. They were mostly full of people who looked cold and regretful, not having the benefit of the coal range as we had. Young, well dressed types had drinks on tables, and most had chosen to turn round after Maida Vale tunnel and cut it short rather than continue along, which meant they were all heading the same way as us. We entered the tunnel at the back of a long convoy and ticked along to a soundtrack of indistinct hollering and shouting. They all looked very small and vulnerable in the tunnel, and I crawled as slowly as I could so there was margin for error if they did something stupid.

After the tunnel, we passed another Go-boat heading the other way with two American ladies in it.

“Excuse me, but is this the right way for Little Venice?” They asked.

“You’ve just been through it.”

“We have?”

“The clue is in the name. It’s not very big.”

“That was it? How much did we pay for this thing? Jeez!”

Further conversation became impossible as they fell astern.

We moored up just after Little Venice. The visitor moorings here were busy but there was one 70ft space outside another narrowboat, and double mooring is standard on the London system. The temperature was dropping and the light starting to fade. It was the perfect time to stop.

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Mooring is a subversive act

The lock keeper back at Stoke Bruerne had told me how remarkable he found it that the travelling boater knows exactly what is happening fifty miles ahead and fifty miles behind but has no idea what there might be fifty yards away from the canal, beyond the hedge. This strange linear knowledge reduces the world to a manageable scale whilst preserving the vastness of it. Birmingham may be 100 distant miles away, but each mile is knowable at quite an intimate level, even after just a few trips. The canal is a tactile cord that can easily be learnt from your eyes to your fingertips.

When you moor somewhere for a period, that begins to change. The miles before and behind start to shrink away as possibilities, and instead, the sides begin to open up. In Haggerston, the long miles of potential before me melted from my thoughts, and instead walks took me off the canal at bridges, each trip a new road to discover. Soon a thin line becomes an expanding circle, and the strange fog dissipates. What was an irrelevance becomes a neighbourhood, and Haggerston was my new home, for a week or two.

I needed a safe port and a chance to consolidate a little. I had weeks of notes to type up, and a trip home to squeeze in. Lee, from the London waterways project, had offered me a mooring here whilst I found my feet, on the outside of a 70ft narrowboat with a young family on. This thin strip of offside mooring, home to five boats is squeezed in beneath ‘Containerville’, a development of office spaces in shipping containers. Containerville is both quirky and crap, a duality neatly underlined by the picnic benches outside, each one set in a ring of mains sewer pipe. I’d be the first to argue that there is beauty in functionality, but Containerville doesn’t do it for me, as there’s an awkwardness in the repurposing. This is not what they’re for, really, and it attracts the sort of transient businesses that quite enjoy being here, just for a bit, before moving on.

“It was supposed to be temporary, but these things have a habit of becoming permanent.” Says Neil, my new neighbour. Along the waterside are the remains of Haggerston gas works, reduced to the cylindrical frames of the two gas holders. These are due to become flats, within the metalwork of the past.

“They’ll take the whole thing down, rivet by rivet, build the flats, then reassemble it all around the outside. It’ll cost millions. And take our last scrap of sunlight.” He then gestured at the new flats that had sprouted back towards the railway line, the other side of the mountain of shipping containers.

“They popped up during lockdown. See those pretty buildings in front of them. They were in the way, but they weren’t allowed to just demolish them as they were protected, so they demolished them anyway and reconstructed them with cheap materials by the canal. Criminal in my view. One of the front steps is original which allowed them to claim they were ‘repaired’. Look at the downpipes when you get chance.”

Later, I did, and found that they simply emptied out onto the ground around the base of the building without connecting to any drain. Damp will rise, just like the rents.

“Those flats start at £550k. And they’re crap. This was supposed to be a low impact mooring, solar, composting. Now we never see the sun, except in high summer. We’ve been boxed in.”

Neil continued guiding me round the skyline. Behind us was the railway and road, crossing high over the water, and then the small foundry.

“It’s odd to still see something like that round here.” I commented.

“Yes, they hang on. Sometimes there’s a shower of red bits from the chimney and we all have to close our hatches. Probably won’t last. When they reach retirement, they’ll just sell up. Be worth a million, the premises here. It’s a pension. As for you, there’s no water here, but there’s a tap at the next lock. Sometimes we go there and if there’s a slot on the towpath by Victoria park, we have a week’s holiday.”

For those that cannot find a mooring in life, the reality is tougher. Neil told me that they sometimes had rough sleepers beneath the bridge at the end of the moorings.

“Obviously we want to help. So on one occasion we rang up St Mungo’s, the charity. Often there’s a long waiting list, but this time, in the middle of the night, we got raided by immigration police, six of them, forcing their way in. They’d done a deal with the home office.”

St Mungo’s have since changed their policy on the matter.

All along the canal are hints of a different past. The remains of little warehouses and workshops, although besides the foundry all had closed their doors for good, and most were redeveloped into fancy flats. Planning notices were stapled to lamp posts all over, and everything seemed in a state of flux. The old baths was awaiting its turn, fenced off, handsome galleon weathervane in search of new seas to sail.

Haggerston is well off, and Broadway market the best of it. Artisan this and craft that, so fiercely independent that the proposed arrival of an organic shop I hadn’t heard of was bitterly opposed on the basis that it might damage indigenous organic shops. Restaurants piled high with pre-purchased ambience, coffee shops that looked like phone salesrooms, ramen, olives, pasta and Thai curry. One or two shops from another age stood out completely. A fine piece of signwriting read ‘MOTH KILLING PRODUCTS SOLD HERE’ in place of a name, hinting at a different past.

I needed guidance so I walked into the upmarket wine shop. The proprietor took one look at my countenance, bearded, weather-beaten, wax jacket with paint and tar stains, the gait of a man who has worked his passage south, and carefully positioned himself between me and the door, pretending to be stock checking. I put his mind at rest by buying something excellent and took advice on restaurants. Thus informed, I had dinner at Buen Ayre, an Argentinian steak house of the highest quality. Wipe clean tables, simple menu, superb service. I did not need breakfast the next morning.

——

The next day I hung out my washing along the deck. We have an ancient wooden prop that fits between the clog guards on the deck edge, and with a rope tied off the T-stud and running to the engine room rings, the deck makes a good drying space. Hanging up your clothes is an act of public performance on the canal, a peculiarly personal bunting. Each towpath user considers the view to be entirely public and your act of drying is art to be critiqued. Hipsters took photographs, the quality of my underpants a matter of minor public discourse.

The back cabin became my office, lying in the cross bed, typing away till the battery ran out, with a never-ending teapot topped up from the range, doors open to the sounds of London. Fragments of conversation from the towpath found their way into my space, there being a focus point where the words reflected off the flat smooth sides of the next moored boat, loud and clear, carrying across still water. I heard of profit margins, disposable capital, property ladders, non-refundable deposits, and wrote along to snippets of reggae, dance, R&B, as played by the type of exercise enthusiast who finds the extra frisson of energy they need by sharing their workout soundtrack with the world.

Hannah and Neil had kindly welcomed me to their boat for lunch, providing a wide-ranging selection of crudites of varying degrees of familiarity to me. (Are the crudites people who oppose mechanisation in artisan delicatessens?) We discussed the rapid nature of change in such places as these, and the amateurs who make it their work to record what might be lost. Before the pandemic, the main road end of the compound had been home to a large bus garage, dating from the era of charabanc trips to the coast, and fleets of mechanical workhorses had poured forth each morning. In the blink of an eye, it becomes swept away, listed buildings demolished on a technicality and shoddily rebuilt to make way for generic newbuild transience, virgin flats whose veneer of shiny newness will last just long enough to see the developer on their way. Behind even this, what is claimed to be London’s last bombed out building, five stories reduced to ash by an incendiary bomb and somehow left for 80 years when all around has changed out of sight three times over.

The last boat on the moorings was reverting to nature, buddleia growing from the gunnels twice as tall as the cabin top, becoming unlaid hedgerow. Curls of smoke emerged from a chimney, peeking from the growth like a witch’s cottage in a clearing. A secret place, deep in the city.

I walked and walked the canals, looping off at different bridges, through parks, always back to the strip of water, and onwards, seeing if anything would happen, just learning the place. Hours at a time, then back to Spey, a bite to eat, a cup of tea, a few nuts of smokeless on the fire to keep it ticking over, then back on my feet. Haggerston had little in the way of incident and plenty of gentle high quality.

Under the railway arches, where the artisan bakery has banned laptops from its tables, a model was undergoing a photoshoot, the rough brick of the arch the perfect contrast to high fashion and the scatter of light on shiny leather and jewellery. There’s a violence in such photos it seems to me, the speed and urgency of the male photographer, the passive response of the female model, the lead and follow of a lop-sided dance. The wooden chair upon which the photographer stood suddenly collapsed as I came by, and he came down onto the floor in a tumble.

“Are you ok?”

“Fine thanks”

“Tell me, would you have saved yourself or the camera?”

He thought about it and put his camera carefully down.

“Camera, for sure.”

He was surprised by the conversation. Affecting a broad northern accent allows me to converse with a certain freedom, as people assume I’m an innocent from the shires in town for some agricultural market or something and just don’t understand how it works round here. ‘He doesn’t know the rules, bless him’ and I’m met with kindness and conversation is reciprocated, as an indulgence to an innocent.

I walked at dusk in the vastness of Victoria Park, aware that the freedom to walk through a darkened park on my own without a care in the world was not a privilege everyone enjoyed. The red lights of scooters and bicycles became as one with the planes overhead, reducing and fragmenting my perspective and I was alone with thoughts multiplying. The joy of the travelling boater is often to invite oneself into a postcode one cannot otherwise afford. Haggerston is beyond me, the £6 loaves of bread, the Argentinian steak, the fine wines. I cannot live here, but does that mean I don’t deserve to be here?

The canal represents class division overcome, the peasant breaking into the castle and seating themselves at the high table. Here, where the wealthy youth of London have coalesced and so inspired the emergence of such places as Broadway market, someone like me can come onto a mooring bequeathed by generations of working class gone before and have a holiday in a different social class altogether. Next week, down the line it might be beans on toast, but for a week I can pretend to be secure and easy. I couldn’t stay here, for my own sake. Within a few months, I’d be bankrupt, and the debt collectors would knock the door in to discover my mortal remains, a 16 stone furred artery surrounded by empty bottles of Saint-Véran. I am fundamentally middle class with neither the budget nor restraint to carry it off properly.

So for me, a week in the upper middle class, but to certain others the canal is an endless conveyor belt of social inferiors, each vacated mooring immediately refilled with another pauper who also doesn’t deserve to be here. They like the water, but not the idea that other people might use it, still worse live on it and find a fortnight’s safe haven beneath their hard inherited waterside balcony. Moorings are subversive, for the equality of them respects no post code and no social division. Moorings cannot be shifted to the suburbs and contained within carefully planned slums, out of sight and out of mind. Moorings cannot be priced out of the reach of the worse off. If you’re on the water, then you have the same right to them as anyone else. They are an ancestral ribbon that flows where it always has without reference to the shifting sands of prosperity. Every time someone talks about how all the tatty boats shouldn’t be there and how something should be done, they’re effectively saying that poorer people don’t deserve access to their neighbourhood. Perhaps, you might retort, you should not have built your Jerusalem among these dark Satanic mills.

Among the three quarters of a million-pound flats and artisan bakeries, personalised clothing boutiques, whole carcass butchers and poodles in onesies, a man sat in his little fibre-glass boat, a minimal but contented living, playing his Djembe happily along to reggae. It was a sound that delighted me. Each beat of the drum was a small blow for equality.

If you are enjoying these blogs, then please feel free to make a small contribution to my tipjar or visit my online shop, where my previous books and albums are for sale. Right now, this is pretty much my only income while I build this project up. Christmas is coming, whether we like it or not, and independent artists such as myself really appreciate every sale. Please always buy direct from the artist! Bezos will only spend it on sending another space-penis into orbit, whilst I’ll probably spend it on something far more sensible like a decent Bordeaux. Cheers!

Roses and Castles, Rubber Ducks and Neon Lights

I was cleaning the lace plates in the back cabin. With hardly any room for shelves and the necessity that everything must be able survive the boat bumping about, decorative flourishes in a working narrowboat must either be painted on the walls or hung from them. Narrowboats accumulate decoration over time in a somewhat haphazard way, much as a local history museum acquires items with little or no connection between one another. My local museum as a child, West Park Museum in Macclesfield, had a stuffed panda, an Egyptian mummy, a collection of 19^th century policemen’s truncheons, and some watercolours of small brown birds by Charles Tunnicliffe, RA, a set of items largely bound together by the sole distinction of having been plundered or otherwise collected by the Brocklehurst family on their various upper-class Victorian grand tours of the world, before being bequeathed to a town that didn’t really know what to do with them.

Spey’s cabin now has fifty years of accumulated decoration, including superb contributions from celebrated waterways artists Phil Speight and Tony Lewery, as well as a water can by Kerry Dainty can that reimagines the traditional roses and castles in the graffiti style and features a number of rubber ducks and glow in the dark slime. I like having this on the roof in the hope that it will irk a purist somewhere along the line. It’s a little reminder of whose benefit we’ve done all this work for. We keep Spey in the traditional style simply because we like it that way, and a few minor cosmetic touches of subversion feel right. And after all, its odd that the canal style of artwork, something that must have evolved constantly for centuries, has sometimes become so frozen in time. Kerry, as a woman who lives and works upon the canals and knows her history very well, surely has every right to evolve the tradition as she sees fit. It’s only tradition if it’s evolving. If it stays the same, its re-enactment, and next thing you know you’re wearing a neckerchief and acting like it’s all a game.

The house painter in the Claytons fleet was not particularly well thought of, his roses being referred to as ‘Claytons’ Cabbages’, and I’ve been told stories of boat families who would unscrew every door and fitting in the cabin and take them away for safekeeping during maintenance periods to avoid a dreaded cabbage appearing somewhere prominent. A few genuine cabbages are preserved for posterity in the back cabin of ‘Stour’, Spey’s sister boat, in the dubious care of the Black Country Living Museum who have allowed the boat to deteriorate away to near scrap over the last two decades. The majority of our internal decoration is by Tony Lewery, whose book ‘Narrow Boat Painting’ remains an authority on the tradition.

Cabin decoration by Tony Lewery, dating to the 1970s.

But Spey is definitely a jovial collage of styles, with no fewer than seven artists being represented somewhere around the back cabin, ranging from novice to master. I like it this way, and it reflects our philosophy of being always a learning environment, where crafts are passed on and preserved through practice rather than a sterile place where only perfection will do. There’s always something to draw the eye. Around these paintings are the lace plates. We only have a dozen or so up. Some cabins are absolutely encrusted in them, like a coral reef in the rutting season, but I find that can be a little impractical in the small space of a motorboat cabin, particularly one that can get very busy.

The particular plate I was cleaning was a ‘Souvenir of Isle of Man’ and featured little representations of such attractions as ‘Laxey Wheel’, ‘Sea Terminal’ and an unfortunate looking ‘Manx Cat’, sporting what looked like three overlapping Hitler moustaches. On the back of the plate was written ‘Not for food use. Plate may poison food. For decorative use only. Made in Korea.’

Another plate says ‘A present from Rhyl’ which is written in gold lettering around a scene from a formal Japanese garden with matching pagoda. I am not sure if there was ever a formal Japanese garden in Rhyl, or whether an unsold batch of such plates had merely been rededicated. Yet another just says ‘Foreign import’ on the back. Which only adds to the mystery, for as my editor likes to remind me, everywhere and everyone is foreign to someone else.

My cleaning was interrupted by a tap at the side of the boat. It’s considered good form to tap before making any other sort of approach to a moored narrowboat, but what was odd is that this was coming from the river rather than the towpath. A moment passed, and a yellow beak at the end of a long white neck appeared around my door. For a swan, this was extremely polite, and I went out to feed it.

I’d hoped for a neighbour on this section. From Stonebridge lock, the boats are moored two abreast right up the river for nearly a mile, but nobody had moored alongside me. Perhaps Spey looked too intimidating and business-like as a working boat to attract another moorer. But now, as I fed my cheeky swan, a narrowboat was working slowly upriver, the steerer’s attention clearly flitting to the sides, looking for a spot. I waved him in, slackening my ropes to make a space on the inside. I would be off in the morning, and he’d be there for a fortnight, so it made sense to put Spey on the outside. Having made the ropes good, we chatted for a bit. He’d been on the water a fair while and loved the lifestyle.

“I’ve never had any real trouble finding a spot. If you’re determined to be in one particular place then sometimes it can be hard, but so long as you don’t mind exactly where you fetch up its fine. I work in Kings Cross with young children, and I travel right over the London waterways over a period of time. It’s lovely up here on the river. You should also try down by Hackney where the clubs back onto the water. I got to watch a burlesque show there from my foredeck.”

I asked him about his relationship with the Canal and River Trust. Like so many in the area his view was very negative, despite his very positive relationship with the waterways in general. The latest bone of contention was the ‘Water Safety Zones’ on the river, near the rowing clubs, where the CRT were trying to restrict the number of moorings. Boaters viewed this as an attack on their way of life, and whatever the rights and wrongs of it, and true scale of the restrictions, good faith had entirely broken down between many of the London boat residents and the trust.

“How does restricting moorings make it safer? There’ll just be even more boats moving up and down looking for a mooring. It makes no sense.”

The general sense that the trust wanted to drive boaters off the water was compounded by the deterioration of the facilities on the river.

“The reason there’s so many here is that it’s got pretty much the only working pump out station for miles. The next one up has been out of order for months. And they’ve closed the toilets and showers, the tap barely works.”

Ian felt that the trust’s conduct was nakedly anti boater. He was certainly not just someone who wanted a cheap house. He was a man in love with the lifestyle, who kept his boat right and followed the rules. It is certainly far too easy to dismiss London’s rapidly expanding boat population as merely a consequence of the broader housing crisis, although no doubt that is part of the reason. But many, like Ian, love the water, enjoy the different spots for their different characters, and are increasingly feeling like they considered unwelcome – a problem to be eradicated, despite following exactly the rules laid out by the trust.

I am increasingly alarmed by the total breakdown in good faith between the Canal and River Trust and the people they should be serving. In any other organisation it would surely be considered a serious crisis. I resolved to understand it further. An opportunity to talk to the trust about it would be coming my way in a few weeks.

My friend Kate came to help me move Spey onwards. We had a port and cheese night, and she took the cabin whilst I had a night down the tank. The morning proved warm and sunny, and we were soon heading upriver in search of a winding point. The line of boats eventually peters out after about a mile, and I brought Spey round with a front line tied off to a railing and powered the back round. Dropping down the locks at Tottenham and through the Hackney water safety zone, it was pretty hard to understand exactly what the issue really was, with plenty of moored boats and a number of rowers enjoying the river. The rowers showed no sign of hostility and waved at us. I’d have to just moor up in such an area and find out for myself if I wanted to understand. Many of the boats had protest signs in the window, promising to break the rules and resist, the iconography of class struggle. I still didn’t entirely understand the conflict, but I was determined to learn more. Whatever the rights and wrongs, the breakdown in trust between the boaters and the waterways authority is clearly a terrible thing and for everyone’s sake it must be regained as soon as possible.

I cleaned the chimney brasses whilst Kate took the tiller. It had been a dry week, and the river’s flow was weak. By the Princess of Wales is a sign, attached to a wall on the offside, that I’d dearly like to remove and affix to my bedroom door when I return to the land; “Dredging works ahead. Delays of up to 30 minutes possible.” Access to it is difficult, which perhaps why it is still there so many years after the dredging was last completed.

We passed fuel boat Clover again, working home to Ponders End, and we floated gently past, exchanging chat and comparing notes on Bolinder performance. I asked if I could join the coal run at some point in the future as a volunteer.

At Old Ford Lock, down by the Olympic Park, the congestion is so severe that boats are moored right across the lock landing and access is difficult. We clambered over a large safety fence and jumped to land. The river is muddy and brooding below here, tucked away under scruffy railway embankments and hidden behind sprawling warehouses. The churn of the propellor brings scraps of plastic and black sludge to the surface, and the water grows thicker and less pliable.

We brought the boat down and around Limehouse and started back up the locks on the Regents canal, all of which were against us with top paddles left up and gates open. We soon found a rhythm where Kate would go ahead to close the gates and drop the paddles whilst I’d bring Spey into the bank, tie her off and appear lock side at the exact right moment to raise the bottom paddles. The evening was warm and pleasant, and the extra work became a pleasure rather than a chore, movement carried out with efficiency bringing its own reward.

Moored boats clung on to the edge wherever a pin could be sunk through a slit in the concrete edges. Everything from smart residential boats to pontoons made from barrels with sheds on top. All home to someone, an essential private space in the otherwise crowded city, a place where a door can be shut on it all for a little while and a personal peace can be found.

Mile End lock was full of waterbirds in the dusk. We attempted to encourage them to leave but they would not, so we gently emptied it and nudged Spey in. The swan panicked and tried to get down the wrong side of the boat. I had to push away from the wall to avoid crushing it. That left a bunch of coots, who simply weren’t interested in moving, even when I waved the fan shaft at them whilst shouting “I eat coots”. We brought the boat up on half a paddle, positioning the boat on the side of the lock and drawing the near paddle. This would cause the water to emerge in the gap, pinning Spey where she was. Water welled up and foamed, and the coots were swept round and round. As the level came up and the surge subsided, they regained their dignity and began pecking the side of the boat in revenge.

By the other Old Ford Lock, above the junction with the Hertford Union, the cut through we’d avoided so as to enjoy Limehouse, the sun had set, and we made the last mile to Haggerston in the dark. I had been kindly offered a space here, on a small residential mooring, and we found our spot, outside a full-length narrowboat with a young family onboard. I walked Kate to her tube train, making sense of my trendy new neighbourhood. It was all a bit of a culture shock after a week on the river. I railed at one particular premises that seemed particularly over the top.

“Look at this bloody place. What on earth is it all about? So many neon lights, strange slogans. Far too cool for the likes of me. They probably wouldn’t even serve me.”

“Tom, that’s a neon light showroom.”

“Oh.”

Alone again, I stalked the towpath for a while, trying to make it feel familiar. By the time I walked back round and through the gate Spey felt asleep again, settled in much sooner than me. The range was in and the cabin warm. My second spot in London.

If you are enjoying these blogs, then please feel free to make a small contribution to my tipjar or visit my online shop, where my previous books and albums are for sale. It would not be possible to do these things without your support! Thank you. I really appreciate it.