Overdosed on Caramel Chew Chew

Those of you who have been with this blog for a while may remember how much I enjoyed my first Sundae. Bands, an atmosphere akin to an expanded village fete and all the free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream you can handle. More than 365 have rolled round so it was back to Clapham Common for The Hours, unlimited cones of Phish Food and children dancing with pantomime cows. It was just as good second time around.

An absence of rain, a rug to read my Sinclair on and the best smiling company in London made the music and ice cream incidental. I was lost in a sea of smiles, killer sentences and families radiating so much happiness they would shame a Disney movie. Only the odd song broke the civilised air. A cover of Bankrobber and The Holloways roaring: ‘So this is Great Britain and welcome aboard/A sinking ship that’s full of shit and someone nicked the oars/Our once unique identity’s been washed from our shores…’

Overdosed on Caramel Chew Chew, we fixed our feet north before The Proclaimers finished on the inevitable 500 Miles. Home to spicey soup, foacia and saying goodbye to the little Canadian ghost who had been haunting the place. I like spirits who leave ice wine instead of shower ectoplasm.

Baggage ported to the nearest tube and our ghost dismissed with a wave, we flowed back through quiet streets. The biggest noise was from our chuckles over the CIA ‘safe house’ sporting a Mercedes with Langley plates on its drive. Sometimes it is like Darius Jedburgh is back in town. We stopped at the bridge for a while. A tarot full moon on the canal’s dream black water needs an audience.

All Absurdly Quaint and yet Absolutely Wonderful

I am ridiculously English. This is an inescapable fact – just ask anyone who knows me. Village and church fetes are also ridiculously English. In my childhood, being dragged to them was so unavoidable it was not worth putting any effort into resisting the annual trips to vicarage gardens and school playing fields where they tended to be held. The one time I did manage to get out of going to one, my brother somehow managed to win a lamb. I was exceptionally jealous and have had a lot more time for the possibilities thrown up by fetes ever since.

Given I live in central London, village fetes are somewhat thin on the ground. However, while my little patch may lack tombolas and Maypoles on the village green, it more than make this with its own version of a traditional fete – the Canalway Cavalcade.

Living in the environs of the Regent’s Canal, I am used to site of assorted narrowboats gently chugging passed their permanently moored sisters now serving as eccentric homes and offices. Yet on the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, the area known as Little Venice becomes flooded with boats from all over the country. This year, everything from working freight barges to floating retirement homes decked out in the habitual, absurdly floral folk art used to decorate canal boats, started mooring up on the Thursday night. By the end of Friday, more than 150 assorted craft, mostly traditional narrowboats, had gathered for the floating festival.

Part boat rally, part mild-TAZ with the added trappings customary to an rural English fete, the area is turned into both a tourist attraction and a temporary community for boaters. Stalls pack the canal bank. The real ale tent jostles for space with the pitch for Punch and Judy show. There are no lambs to be won, but the tombola offers tins of beer among its prizes if you pay your money and take a gamble in aid of the campaign against the British government’s current barbaric attack on England’s canals. Dixieland jazz is played from the floating platform next to Browning Island. Polyphonic improvisation rolling out across the water to dance in the sunshine with the happy chatter of the towpath crowds.

Christians who usually tour the waterways of England proselytising run a Wheel of Hope game of chance and tract distribution racket next to a white elephant stall raising funds for Camden’s Pirate Club. The gut-punching aroma of a whole pig being roasted floats in the air while you navigate your way through crowds sifting through countless tables selling craft items made by boaters. Herb plant sellers stand next to local historian hawking his wares. Every child seems to carry a balloon or a sticky treat. It is all absurdly quaint and yet absolutely wonderful.

During the times when the canals were the thriving arteries supplying the oxygen that allowed English industry to flame and flourish, the canal folk drifted apart from those tied to the land. They developed not only their own argot, but also a free-floating culture. I used to think the only remnants of this were the twee and largely faux decorative style. However, the Canal Cavalcade has made me reassess my knee-jerk dismissal of a continuation of this waterborne heritage. A lot of boats were clearly owned by those choosing to live off the grid with alternative lifestyles going beyond making a living as travelling puppeteers-come-Reiki-healers. Many of the craft belonged to retired couples, refusing to stay in one place and let autumnal decay take hold.

This year the Cavalcade also had an underlying political message. The waterways of England could be used to combat congestion and carbon emissions, yet the Government department responsible for them – the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) – is slashing the budget that maintains them. Many of the boaters are not your typical political activists, but everywhere I looked, I saw them taking the time to passionately tell anyone on the towpath who would listen about what the proposed DEFRA cuts could mean to the future of the canals and their way of life. This is everyday politics, widely ignored but resonant beyond just those at the immediate wrong end of these atrocious DEFRA plans. The waterways are pretty much our last nationalised resource and New Labour seems bent on destroying it.*

The highlight of the Cavalcade for me was last night’s procession of illuminated boats. Surreal Girl has known me for six years, but even she has rarely seen me exhibit such childlike glee as I displayed on the blue bridge. As craft painted with hundreds of points of light and colour came down the canal towards the pool of Little Venice, I was cheering along with the thousand or so others gathered to watch. I oohed as one boat came towards us, at its prow a man swinging great chains of fire. Clapped as another did the canal boat equivalent of a handbrake turn, spinning on the black water to reveal each of its glorious illuminated sides. A huge part of the joy was just knowing that everyone else had bothered to come out on a cool night to see something so simple yet so enchanting.

My favourite entry in the procession was spun with innumerable white lights, creating the effect of waves running across its surface supporting a model Avalonian boat perched on the cabin. As it glided under the bridge, the reassuring chug of engine echoing against Victorian brickwork, I felt like I was sharing in a blissful mass hallucination. My little bit of London had never felt so of England and yet so touched by something akin to the glamour of fairyland.

I do not have to tell any follower of English Hoodoo that the word fete originally meant festival or feast. It may call itself a cavalcade, but my local floating fete is a sustaining feast for the imagination, showing how the city can be made anew through the simple celebration of shared purpose. Sometimes it is bloody grand to live around here.



*If you want to know how to protest against this, email me.

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.

Back From the Frontline of Fatigue

Until today, I had only managed to sleep in eight out of the last 72 hours. I was still functioning; I competently bought provisions in Bayswater, my butternut squash risotto was a triumph with the whole house, I was able to watch an episode of Quatermass IV on TV while still following its subtleties and even held a decent conversation, offering advice on a concept as abstract as making a successful presentation to one of David Cameron's review groups. I was functioning, but in the same way a plane does just before all its instruments strobe and flicker then fail simultaneously as it drops uncontrollably from 23,000 feet.

The bone-deep tiredness that came crashing over me in increasing waves meant I was beginning to drift away to another planet. I had started the Sunday teary, emotionally raw and vulnerable. The encroaching exhaustion made it hard to connect to underlying hurts and fears. I began losing time in bouts of unbidden, uncontrollable contemplation. Of course, by the time I could actually get to bed, I had crashed through the wall of drowsiness and spent the early hours of the morning in a state of jungle-wired alertness hearing every creak of the house as it settled and the continuous low drone of the Westway traffic.

By the time Today came on the radio, it was clear I desperately needed to spend the next few hours recharging. This was achieved by gentle dozing and meditation till about 11; a late breakfast at my favourite Spanish café in Bayswater who do their own spin on arroz a la cubana with fried banana and eggs; some geek reading and then a walk for a few of miles along the canal. As the drizzle began to turn into hard, cold bouts of rain, I found I had long stretches of both my outward and return journeys free from the usual fuckwit cyclists and more aggressive bench drinkers you sometimes encounter when heading towards Kensal Town. I stayed out of drift mode and drew energy from the landscape, the weather, and the echoes of history crackling in the psychic static of the places I moved through.

Sheltering under a bridge during the most antagonistic phase of the downpour, I drank in every sensation: the sound of water hitting water; the bass rumble vibrations transmitted through Victorian brickwork as lorries and double-deckers passed overhead; the smell of damp newspapers; the soothing trace as beads of rain travelled down my forehead; the pull as wind played with my leather overcoat. I was awake, alive; back from the frontline of fatigue with words to write and a glint back in eye.