BY NEALE JAMES
I’m borrowing inspiration from Dominique’s nephew peering through a playground train window and I’ll admit to a late entry, a stretched chain if you will and a false start to this story as initially I followed a more obvious line of inquiry; a trip to a railway station. I even found the perfectly shaped porthole sunk into the side of a passenger train bound for London Paddington. The shape fitted, the story didn’t. It wasn’t and isn’t reflective of my current state of mind. And so I returned, as so often I have during lockdown to a river, a canal, close to my home; my refuge from March 2020 to date.
There are four thousand, seven hundred miles of navigable canals in the UK. Eighty seven miles are immediately available to me geographically, if only I had a boat. When lockdown initially enforced a strict local corridor of exercise, I took to the tow paths of the Kennet and Avon Canal. It’s an ‘as the bird flies’ route that engages the cities of Bristol to the west, and London to the east (via The Thames) which, with modest periods of inactivity thanks to a Victorian growth period of the railways and latterly the arterial motorway system, has been otherwise alive for over two hundred years.
Boating types who frequent these waterways navigate their days at two miles per hour (more if the mood takes but only by a mile or two) and I find watching this, slows me immeasurably also.
I watched a volunteer lock keeper dredging the blackened depths with a magnet on the end of a line, in between making pictures.
He asked me what I was doing. I asked him what he could see.
“Bricks,” he mused?
“Shadows,” I answered, “Deep as the black within which you’re fishing. Anyway, what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to find a windlass, (form of winch handle), which I dropped in here yesterday afternoon,” he answered.
“Do you think you’ll find it?”
“Maybe, but I’ve got all day. So there’s a chance I will.”
Life at two miles per hour.
One hundred and five locks - some say one less, there appears a discrepancy of design on one it seems. It’s the one period of activity. I walk the stretch between eighty two and ninety six and watch. The boats rise and fall with the water and though there is activity in the winding of a windlass and pushing of a gate, much of the time is spent watching water flow and listening to it stabilise until you can hear the birds once again. Life at two miles per hour.
