As it turned out, my brilliant idea of a trip on the canal was a lot more testing than I’d remembered from previous expeditions long ago. The boat – at 65 feet was hard work; like steering a blind carthorse through a minefield. Directions needed to be figured out long before they were undertaken because narrow boats don’t do anything quickly and steering from the unprotected deck in the persistent rain and wind made me feel like Socrates must have felt as the impact of the Hemlock spread through his body. My hands and feet became more and more painful and even regular offerings of Dundee cake and hot tea failed to move the dial.
The canal has become a kind of linear favela. An improvised substitute for non-existent affordable housing, untreated mental health and addiction problems and unemployment amongst young people. Yes of course there are posh well-found boats for second homers and even airBnB offers (check out the combination locks) and there are numerous canal holiday companies but an uneasy truce between the stakeholders looks and feels highly unstable. Then, recently, the number of permanently berthed wide-beam boats has exploded and can make life very difficult when negotiating a sharp bend. Even finding a mooring spot near any of the villages, towns or road bridges is a nightmare. You can tell the struggling boaters from the piled high wet logs, one wheeled bikes and scrap metal piled on the roof. It’s a sad reflection of a betrayed generation left to rot by governments who don’t give a shit.
The last day was by far the coldest and although the sun eventually broke through and dispersed the mist, I was on my knees as we pulled back into the boatyard. I’m getting a bit old for this malarkey. Our joy was complete when, after we’d loaded up the car, we discovered the battery was beyond flat; rather – dead. Luckily one of the engineers (we’d seen so much of them trying to fix the heating during the trip that they felt like friends) saved the day with a portable lithium battery.
But there’s always a plus side, and this photo taken in a quiet stretch between Avoncliff and Dundas shows the beauty of the autumn trees. The lone fisherman, by the way, gave us a short seminar on how boaters should pass to preserve harmony. He said that many boats tried to pull over to the opposite (shallow) side instead of holding to the middle – thereby stirring up the mud and ruining the fishing altogether.
I’ve always had difficulties with this season. The dying of the light drains the joy out of me and I seem to lose all motivation. But every year – I ought to know this by now – there’s a kind of Kübler Ross moment of acceptance and – as if a switch has been thrown – I feel OK again. I woke up at 5.00am on Sunday and paid an outstanding bill and then fetched my sourdough starter from its hiding place in the kitchen; unscrewed the lid gingerly and sniffed, expecting the worst. It was fine and a lightning bolt of optimism shot through me. Back during lockdown when everyone was making sourdough, the internet forums were full of newcomers suffering from starter anxiety and wondering whether it was even possible to take a break from feeding the ever demanding baby. Yeasts, I should say, are lovely, useful and tiny organisms and are rather harder to kill than Bindweed. I often neglect my starter shamefully – I’ve had it for well over a decade – and it still comes back and fills the kitchen with a delightful apple fragrance. Interestingly, no-one I’ve given it to has managed to keep it alive for any length of time. Has it micro-evolved to the exact conditions of the Potwell Inn kitchen? We’ll be off to the mill this week to get some decent organic flour and all will be well and all manner of things will be well once more.
So I made my peace with winter and spent most of yesterday walking (in my head) on the estuary of the river Esk in Cumbria where it joins the Irish Sea.
We were here in late August 2019 and I took a few photos of flowers I didn’t recognize. Five years later and my plan to organise retrospectively some of the 13,000 photos into a botanical database brought me back again in memory to this beautiful and bleak area, just south of Sellafield. The initial plan was to add Sneezewort to the file, but then I noticed another bunch of photos with nothing but a date and location in the EXIF data. First impression was that they were all pictures of Samphire except that when I looked properly it was clear that they were all three of them different plants and that none of them was Samphire. I should add that there was an abundance of Samphire around but that the proximity to Sellafield would make the eating of anything found on the seashore pretty dangerous! Anyway, in a very contented few hours I’d nailed all three and added them to the database; all of them shoreline and estuary specialists.
Sea Lavender, Sea Purslane, and Sea Aster.