Steve Haywood - One Man and a Narrowboat: Slowing Down Time on Englands Waterways

ONE MAN
-AND A-
NARROWBOAT

Slowing down time on Englands Waterways

Steve Haywood

ONE MAN AND A NARROWBOAT

First published in 2004 as FRUIT FLIES LIKE A BANANA

This edition copyright Steve Haywood 2009

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For Chris Haynes
19162008

Time and tide wait for no man.
Old English proverb

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
Old English joke

I t was a birthday that finally galvanised me into action. Well, not so much a birthday in the general sense as one birthday specifically. One of mine as it happens. It was one of those unsettling birthdays, the sort that have a zero on the end and which come along with alarming regularity every ten years or so.

OK its no use being sheepish about it it was my fiftieth. It happened in November, the same as its been doing for as long as I can remember, so I cant say it came as a surprise. Actually, my forty-ninth birthday the year before was a bit of a pointer to the way things were going. So one evening over dinner, halfway through a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, I began talking to Em about the essential nature of the English soul.

The essential nature of the English what? she said. Some of these cheap wines can be high in alcohol; you need to be a bit cautious of them.

The English soul, I explained. The basis of our being, the core of our identity I thought, erm, I might take a trip around the waterways of England to sortta look for it My voice trailed off. The truth was that despite what I was saying I hadnt been thinking much about the soul of England at all. Id actually been thinking about getting out of London for a jolly all the soul stuff was just an excuse for the trip. And not a particularly good excuse at that. It didnt even convince me. This much was obvious to Em. The more she challenged me on what on earth I was thinking about, the less I was able to justify it.

A search for the soul of England? What planet was I living on? I might just as well have gone on a search for a new design of the wheelie bin. Or the perfect pork pie. Even I could see that getting away from London was the main thing. All this stuff about the English soul was important, yes. But not that important.

Even so, Em was surprisingly amenable to the idea, given that it was likely to involve me spending protracted periods of the summer on a boat cruising through some of the most picturesque parts of England while shed be battling daily on the 7.43 a.m. to Charing Cross on mortgage duty. If you ask me, the real clincher for her was the promise of finally getting shot of me moping about the house grumbling about the sad state of contemporary British television. OK, so Id been moaning about this on and off for as long as Id been working in the business, but I think that even Em began to recognise I might have a point after my hard-hitting investigative documentary on the Lockerbie bombing had been beaten for a top industry award by Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

And Ill tell you one other thing: it wasnt a neck-and-neck race to the wire either.

Mind you, there were other incentives for her as well. Weve had a canal narrowboat for years, and as any boat owner will tell you, the idyll of getting away for weekends on the water is nowhere near as well, idyllic, as it sounds. Once youve fought your way out of town through the Friday-night traffic and actually got to your boat; and once youve unlocked it in whats probably by now the dark; and turned on the electricity and the water and the gas; and got the heating going to warm the place through; and made up the bed; and unloaded the shopping (assuming youve had time to do any shopping); and run the engine to charge up the battery and set about those thousand and one other tasks which invariably face you from clearing out that packet of chicken legs you inadvertently left in the (switched off) fridge, to getting rid of the spiders that have colonised in your absence well, once youve done all this, its pretty well time to start packing up to leave for home again.

Perhaps it was the prospect of weekends when she could arrive at the boat like royalty and be taken off cruising that led Em to be so open to my proposal. Or maybe it was because she never believed it would actually amount to much, given my tendency after a few drinks to come up with big ideas that never did amount to much in the sober light of dawn. At that stage Im not sure I believed it would ever happen myself either.

The fact was, I was totally immersed in my life in London. I might have toyed with the prospect of escaping from the city, but it was more of a fantasy than a reality. Apart from Em, there was the family, friends, the job. And then there was the house which wed bought a few years before. It was still in such a sad state of repair that, had there been such a thing, wed have been targeted by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to London Victorian End-of-Terraces (This-Room-Hasnt-Even-Been-Touched-Since-You-Moved-In Department).

The house was a constant niggling worry, a sort of agonising mental checklist of things Id promised myself to do. I hated it and felt responsible for it. But at the same time I loved it too; it was the nicest house wed ever had. Contemplating the prospect of being away from it for a protracted period, I went all sentimental. Just thinking about the top-floor landing Id been considering painting for two years made me dewy-eyed; and the idea of redecorating the spare room (and maybe even replacing the carpet, which had become so threadbare that recently even the cat disdained to use it for sharpening its claws) made me come over all soppy.

And the garden! Aaaah, the garden. What wasnt I going to do to the garden? The mere thought of the garden was enough to reduce me to a simpering, tearful jelly.

I thank the washing machine going on the blink for putting paid to all this mawkish nonsense. One day it took it into its head to overflow. This is not a very desirable state of affairs at the best of times, but its a pretty catastrophic one when its located as it is in our house in a bathroom at first-floor level. The water went straight through the floor and brought down the living-room ceiling. I was fond of that ceiling. But then again, I was fond of the books and CDs which we kept underneath it and their condition wasnt exactly improved by what happened.