Moments of Grace and Light

Since February, the majority of my days have had a life during wartime feel. The guerrilla attrition of stress has been cutting deep into the elements of my life still recovering from old injuries. I have felt old, broken and emotionally exhausted. The shuck has been prowling and I have been worried about going tharn.

Now, if you are one those readers who agree the anonymous commentator who wrote ‘Please go back to slashing your wrists in public – you being happy is boring’ this might be a good time to stop reading. I could easily give you enough vivid details of my angst to turn English Dreaming, English Rain into the Fugazi Times. However, today I would rather record moments of grace and light.

One of my favourite, less psychogeographically heavy walks in London is along the canal from my home to Camden Lock. Sauntering passed colourful houseboat homes with ripe names; passed mosque skylines and temples of old money; passed hyenas ripping flesh in Regent’s Park; under the undeclared works of art that pose as Victorian bridges; through clammy tunnels to bursts of green that speak of a vegetal force ready to recover the city as soon as mankind vacates it. On a good day, even the tattered professional drinkers hugging their cans of beer and watching the water from wooden benches can make me smile at the richness of illusion.

This afternoon, in sunlight and the best smiling company, I walked to Camden Lock. A half-hearted browse through the over-priced junk of the old horse hospital, a laugh at the ‘Bono is a Twat’/‘Make Coldplay History’ T-shirts and the obligatory stall lunch were all managed before it was time to catch the last waterbus back. All of this was a wonderful diversion. Even just focussing all my attention on watching the deft strokes used to create our crêpes gave me relief from dwelling on everything currently preventing me from getting more than four hours sleep a night.

If I had to pick a favourite memory above all others from 2006, it might just be taking the waterbus from Camden Lock with Surreal Girl towards the end of last summer. Even above memories of travelling around the Highlands and Islands, concerts in Hyde Park or eating ice creams at midnight when returning from parties held in the shadow of MI5, that particular boat ride still shines. The trip back today was just as glorious.

The whole ‘There is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats’ may seem overly English, but the reality is that taking a boat along the canal it is incredibly relaxing. Once you aboard, you have to submit to its pace. You enter a bubble of reality that runs on its own timescale. There is nothing you can do but give in to the actual rhythm of the water for an hour.

The gifts of a riverborne perspective – uncommon angles, the enclosing darkness of the Maida Vale Tunnel, invading the privacy of the stretches of moneyed riverside, being within touching distance to Browning Island – wash over you. The river becomes a reflecting road. Following it in this way cleanses and refreshes the spirit.

It has been a beautiful day.