Well, that’s Christmas mucked up for another year then. Boris has just done another of his U-turns and the writing is on the wall saying Christmas Is Cancelled. Having declared in July that almost all Covid restrictions have been removed in England irrevocably, he came on the television the other day to announce cheerfully what he called his “toolkit’ for dealing with the virus during the Autumn. Plan A was to give booster vaccinations to people over 50 and to give a single vaccination to children over 12 whether the parents agreed to it or not; however, Plan B – a punishment to all we naughty people if we continued to get ill – would be a return of social distancing, compulsory face mask wearing and lockdown. I despair. This government, lead by the Prime Idiot, has made more flip flops than a Taiwanese shoemaker. We were assured, of course, that Plan B would only be invoked in extremis, but we have heard all that before: the very fact that Boris has announced a Plan B means that it is quite likely to happen. Of course, this only applies to England: social distancing and face masks are still compulsory publicly indoors in Scotland and Wales, and the restrictions there have made no difference. Scotland has worse infection and death rates than England. On top of all this, a mass shortage of HGV drivers is already causing shortage of goods in some shops, so the odds are we won’t be able to buy a Christmas turkey anyway. Oh yes, and the Daily Telegraph has just announced that there is a growing energy crisis caused by a shortage of gas and general lack of strategic planning, so we might be going on a three-day week like we did in the 1970s, with power cuts. Excellent. Maybe we should all slit our throats now and get it over with. As it happens, the number of people tested positive for Covid in the UK is, at last, dropping as is the number of people admitted to hospital; the number of deaths from Covid has levelled off at about 1,000 a week after a very gradual climb; and the predicted wave of infections following the reopening of schools after the summer break never occurred. After eighteen months of living with this virus I have come to the conclusion that it does its own sweet thing no matter what precautions and restrictions we take: we really must learn to live with it and start behaving normally. Curiously, the trigger for invoking Plan B in England will, apparently, once again be “to protect the NHS” ie so that hospitals are not overwhelmed. That reason carried some weight eighteen months ago, but the NHS has since had that time to get its act in order and to gear up to deal with a high volume of infections. It would appear that it has not done so despite the recent hefty hike in funding and taxes, but it did find the time to employ 40 extra administrators on salaries in excess of that of the Prime Minister, and to hire more Diversity and Equality Officers. It is interesting: in the 1920s when tuberculosis was rife, the country built many specialist sanatoria specifically to treat patients with the disease; nearly 100 years later no-one seems to have thought of adopting a similar approach for Covid patients. Whatever, Jane and I and the other senior folk will be given booster vaccinations at the same time as receiving our annual ‘flu jab, and all we can do is hope that things work out all right. Note to self: must look out those candles and buy some paraffin.
I am a man alone. Jane has gone off to Windsor to see the Queen and her castle, and I have been left to my own devices for the day. Jane is a member of the local arts society and it arranged an organised trip to Windsor and some garden or other. I would normally have gone with her, but I have a lodge meeting this evening so I could not go. Also, the bunch of old women who run the society have decreed that those attending should wear face masks while getting on and off the bus, and so I would not have attended under those conditions on principle. Jane has gone off with members of her coven instead, so here I am twiddling my thumbs all day. Strict instructions were left with me before Jane left: lunch was to be the small pork pie in the large fridge, consumed with the remains of the three-day-old cheesy coleslaw that went off at midnight last night (“Smell it first – it’ll be OK…”) I was not, under any circumstances, to eat the large pork pie in the small fridge, which was destined for consumption on the boat tomorrow. I was also invited to eat some of the small trifle left over from yesterday’s dinner, with the metaphorically underlined caveat that some was to be left for her supper when she returned this evening (I took this to mean “eat that trifle at your peril”). With these last instructions hovering in the air, Jane thus departed for the bus leaving the breakfast table uncleared, the toaster in disarray and her napkin not replaced into its napkin ring. Clearly, she believed that I needed things to occupy my day. Ho hum.
This fascination that women seem to have for keeping their husbands gainfully employed never ceases to amaze me; it is almost as if they believe that the devil makes work for idle hands. A very wise old friend once told me sagely that women cannot bear to see men enjoy themselves (as evidenced by the fact that many women prefer to make love in the dark), and I have found this broadly to be true. I have lost count of the number of times I have checked with Jane if I can help with cooking or other task that she is engaged on, have been dismissed with a ‘no thank you’, have settled myself down with a cup of tea to watch a re-run of the first episode of Midsomer Murders, only then to be summoned for some task or other just as I put my feet up. In passing, I mentioned my friend’s pronouncement to the delivery driver from Mr Muck when he dropped off a ton of compost the other day and his previously lugubrious expression sprang to life: clearly I had struck a chord.
“How right that man is!”, he said.
“I make model aeroplanes”, he went on, “and the other day I asked my wife if she needed any help with anything. She said no. So I spread out all the tiny components on my desk and started assembling them. Just as I got around to the trickiest tiny detail she demanded that I stop what I was doing and go with her to buy curtains. I couldn’t believe it!”
With that, he dumped his muck and drove off to the next customer. So there you are, it must be true if a random sample in the compost trade confirms it. Women simply cannot bear to see men enjoying themselves. Trust me on this.
We are enjoying something of an Indian summer here in Melbury, with temperatures distinctly temperate and very little rain. Apparently it is a spin off from a hurricane that has caused all manner of mayhem in North America, thus proving that it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. We are off to the boat again tomorrow to try to make the most of the benign conditions and to prepare the vessel for winter. We may even be able to take advantage of our inflatable tender to actually go somewhere. The last time we were down we anchored off Bow Creek on the River Dart, launched the dinghy, and tried to motor up the creek two hours after Low Water on a flooding tide to visit the hostelry at the end, but ran into trouble half way up: first the outboard motor’s propeller started catching the riverbed, to I shut the motor down, hoisted it in, and deployed the oars. When the oars themselves started hitting the bottom, and the water depth was apparently six inches, we had to admit defeat and turn around. One day, one day…
When it comes to riverbeds I do have form, I’m afraid: when we had our narrowboat we ran aground several times, but that was always in fresh water on the inland waterways, so I would argue that those incidents don’t count. The last time would have been in the year 8 or 9, as I recall, on the River Thames at King’s Lock upstream of Oxford. The lock-keeper was at lunch so I dropped Jane off at the jetty to get the lock ready while I waited, preparing myself mentally to perform the highly skilled task of bringing a seven-foot-wide narrowboat into a twenty-foot-wide lock (look, there is a knack to it). Anyway, I became bored with waiting at the jetty so I took the boat away to idle my time sailing in a number of circles in the large weir pool downstream of the lock. Some boats were moored up there on the lock island, so – clearly – the water was deep enough. Or not. I got half way round the pool and literally ground to a halt. No problem, I thought, engage full astern and back out the way I had come. She wouldn’t budge. I then noticed that the large patch of green reeds that I had seen in the centre of the pool was, in fact, grass. Oh dear. In the meantime, Jane had prepared the lock for my entrance, opened the gates, and found that I had apparently disappeared. Never easily beaten, and suspicious that I might be enjoying myself, she made her way over to the lock island to look for me and eventually appeared on the bank opposite. There then followed a stream of questions, followed by helpful advice, starting with,
“What are you doing there?” (reply, “Not much”),
passing through,
“Why did you do that?”
and eventually ending with,
“Have you tried going astern?”.
I tried all manner of manoeuvres and rocking the boat under power without result, but she still wouldn’t budge. There seemed nothing for it but to jump off and push her off. I went up for’d and gazed at the water. Just as I was about to jump, Jane took charge again from the bank:
“You are not to jump off! Horatio, I forbid it! You don’t know how deep it is. Do – you – hear – what – I – say?”
I jumped off.
And the water came up to my ankles.
In the end, I had to pump out all of the boat’s freshwater to lighten her bow, then return to the water and simply push the boat off before swimming around to the stern, clambering aboard, and puttering ignominiously back to the lock by the same route as I had entered. Jane, in the meantime, spent her time locking through several other boats as an impromptu lock-keeper, picking wild flowers, gazing at the birds and bees, and chatting to the lock-keeper when he returned from lunch. I eventually entered the lock, standing on the quarterdeck in a large pool of water that streamed from my clothes.
“Did you fall in?”, asked the lock-keeper.
“Not exactly. I ran aground in the weir pool”
“Oh God, you didn’t go up there did you? It’s very shallow. People are always getting stuck there. We really must sink some navigation buoys at the entrance to warn people”
Now you tell me, I thought. Never mind. The water was most refreshing and it provided an hour of diversion on a sunny day.
I was a Volunteer Lock-keeper on the River Thames for several years, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I learned a great deal and I met some lovely people. The River Thames has 45 locks, stretching from Lechlade in Gloucestershire – near to the source of the Thames in the Cotswolds – to Teddington in Greater London, part of Richmond upon Thames. Downstream of Teddington, the Thames is tidal. One of the things I learned as a lock-keeper was how ignorant many people were regarding the purpose of a lock and weir: one American, for example, once asked me why we did not do away with all the locks and weirs, and let the river run naturally. My reply was that we could, but the towns and cities on the Thames would then flood every winter, and navigation on the resulting shallow river would be virtually impossible (entering lecture mode here – pay attention). Each of the 45 locks on the Thames comprises a lock island in the middle of the river, with a weir connecting the island to one bank, and a lock connecting the island to the other bank. Each island houses a delightful chocolate-box style lock cottage in which the lock-keeper and his or her family lives, and a large garden. Often, the island also houses a small camping site with showers and WCs, available to book for hikers on the Thames Path or boaters emulating the book “Three Men in a Boat”. Almost all lock-sites are in a picturesque rural setting and are idyllic. A weir is essentially a controlled dam, with gates that can be raised or lowered to control the depth of water upstream of the lock to within a few inches; control is undertaken by the lock-keeper, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, in all weathers, and he or she will be kept very busy in times of heavy rain. Damming the river in this way holds back the stream to flood pre-determined flood plains in the countryside rather than allowing it to flood towns and cities downstream. Clearly, a river with a dam across it cannot be navigated, so on the other side of the lock island is a lock: a chamber with gates at each end, that can be filled or emptied using sluices, to transport boats up or down stream: a sort of water-based single-step staircase. Nowadays, boats that use the locks are mainly recreational craft – narrowboats, barges or gin palaces (see Blog 56) – but a few commercial craft also use the facility. All the Thames locks are manned, though out of season sometimes the job is shared and locks manned on a part-time basis. All the locks from Oxford downstream have hydraulically powered gates and weirs, but the rural locks from Oxford to Lechlade are manually operated, as are a few weirs. I was based on one of the manual locks, so it was quite hard work, but the lock was in the middle of the countryside and a joy to visit. I supported the resident lock-keeper so he could take breaks or his lunch, or while he was maintaining the island or tending the garden. The lock-keeper at my lock kept chickens, which defecated on the logbook if not watched and had to be chased off with a water pistol; the lock-keeper also won prizes for his herbaceous borders. I met some very nice people as they passed through the lock, the process of opening and closing the gates, then the sluices, being – of necessity – a slow careful process that facilitated a gentle conversation with boaters. In some cases I was probably the only person a boater had seen all day, so they were happy to talk and, of course, the general public sometimes drifted down to a lock simply to watch the boats go by or have a chat. I only stopped doing the job because the Thames was a good 60 miles or so from where I lived and I grew weary of the commuting, despite the fact that it was only once a week in Summer. So there you are: a potted description of locks, weirs, floods and lock-keepers on the River Thames. I can recommend a boating holiday on the River Thames or, if you prefer, walking the Thames Path following the river from Lechlade to the Thames Barrier, camping at a lock island every night. You won’t regret it, and the River Thames upstream of Oxford is particularly magical in its beauty.
Right. Can’t sit here writing all day: the sun is out and I must give that dodgy coleslaw a sniff while catching up on Vitamin D. If I don’t write again then you will know that Jane has poisoned me. Now which pork pie was it that I was supposed to eat?
20 September 2021
"A Very Vintage Chap..." 