So Near And Yet Not So Near At All

So, that’s it then.

The initial month-long closure turned swiftly into six weeks, and then just as quickly into three months at least. We all saw it coming; the diplomatic way that Waterways staff used qualifiers such as “hope", “plan", and “aim" were the giveaway. Well, that and all the footage that has been uploaded to YouTube.

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I have indefinite leave to stay by the work site until it’s open again, and could potentially start fitting the boat out where it is; but the weather is on the turn and my feet are itchy. So around we go… next week I’ll steal an afternoon and go and wind the boat to head north again; get moving and hopefully catch the spring sun as it emerges from the turning season.

Back up around Coventry, Nuneaton and Bedworth, Atherstone, and up to Fazeley. Back in time to mid-December, and back under the motorway bridge that we drove over this time last year, where I pointed and said ‘in a few months we’ll come through there on the boat’. Then I’ll hang a left onto the Birmingham Canal Navigations and strike out towards England’s Second City.

I lived in Birmingham for a while, a decade and a half ago. On a half-built boat in a yard where it transpired that the neighbouring ‘accident repair centre’ was actually making cut-and-shut cars overnight, and where the family owners were running a people-trafficking operation and a hideaway for lads from Liverpool and Manchester with warrants open on them. Where the beautiful walks around the nearby University Parks belied the crushing poverty of the area. Where the locals of the community centre and the Buddhist peace pagoda which bookended the road I lived on both made me feel more welcome than anyone I’d ever met, and where an ex-student of mine (a resident of a neighbouring borough) once told me ‘the only reason they haven’t knifed you yet is because they think you must be dangerous. No-one in their right mind walks about here like you do’. I’d had no idea, but the cleared former industrial area I lived in was the bit that people in the other rough parts of the city said “don’t go down there” about. It’s laughable really, I had a hoot living there, and it made me love Birmingham. Perhaps my green-as-grass naivete protected me, in some way; perhaps I came closer to trouble than I knew. Most likely my place of residence offered some sort of protection by association; certainly my landlord was someone not to be messed with.

It’s all gone now, apparently. The area looks to have been partly regenerated, and the yard itself is empty of boats on the satellite map. Even the old Tower Ballroom, which looked out over every one of us from Edgbaston Reservoir has been demolished. The world keeps turning, eh.

I think of that year a lot, an in-between time. I’d sold up to move to Ireland; a friend and I had found a house in Wicklow to rent and we were going to set up doing blacksmithing courses. I’d sold my big boat after my first marriage went the way of a grenade and had all of my things packed in a horse box ready for the ferry when my mate got snapped up by a TV company as an armourer, and all the plans changed overnight. I don’t quite know how it all came about that I went from that to moving onto an empty boat in a city yard, but a fortnight later, there I was. My dog and I moved in with only an inflatable bed and a sheet of plywood to lie it on, a camping stove and a medium wave radio. Travis was NOT impressed. Anyway, we made a decent fist of fitting it out before life moved on again and that chapter closed as well. The two most vivid memories from the whole episode are extremes of quiet and noise. The quiet was sitting by the stove on Christmas day that year, listening to a CD of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories made for me by an old friend. Turkey sandwiches for me and Trav, and a bottle of Carmenere for the mind. It was truly blissful.

The less tranquil extreme came the preceding Bonfire night, when hoardes of brazen-drunk city girls rocked up on one of the Hen Night boats to see the lads in the yard, greeting everyone round the fire with a full-frontal display before they leapt ashore, bottles in hand. I thought they were going to eat us alive.

Obviously, I survived.

I had a mate there, Ken, who lived with a dopey chocolate Labrador on the next boat along. A lovely man, who had taught welding at a local tech college until his marriage failed and he had a nervous breakdown. We sat and drank in the autumn evenings until one day his mind turned against him completely and he was whisked away to live with his sister. I never saw him again, and still think of him often. I hope he’s found peace, wherever he is now.

This year’s navigation of the town promises to be far more sedate, thankfully. Unless something goes wholly awry with my mapreading I won’t get anywhere near that part of the network; passing instead to the south at Perry Barr and Bordesley Green before gentrifying the scenery at Solihull on the way to my hometown of Leamington Spa.

I hadn't planned on this diversion, but why shouldn’t the canals ape other transport networks in this creaking old country; with some of its cones and yellow signposts now so long-established that they’ll soon have preservation societies of their own. I am achingly close to home where I am moored already; just a single day and a handful of locks between me and the seemingly-apocryphal destination. But that won’t help me now. It’s a round trip of 60 odd miles and an extra 72 locks going round the other way, but if you don’t like boating then don’t own boats. I guess it’s time to tackle the Hatton flight again, drag my backside through the shallow waters of Sydenham, and back up the long flight past the Fosse Way and Bascote Heath. They were, after all, my waters for a few years when I lived on the Grand Union.

I’ll pass the site of the factory where I served my apprenticeship; my paintshop and welding bays long-since vanished under three-storey town houses. I used to stand next to the lock at the Cape of Good Hope pub behind the paintshop, smoking rollups made from ashtray butts and staring at the mist on the water as the heaters warmed the spray booth at the start of the early shift. Perhaps that’s where this life first sparked my interest, at the formative age of 16. I’d already left home by then, mature on the surface but ultimately still a child underneath. There was a feller who worked from a brick shed there making rope fenders for boats. We all knew him as Knotty, a play on the name of his business, “Get Knotted", but I don’t remember his name. He used to sit outside most days turning rope, and would always speak to me like I wasn’t a massive pain in the arse; not a universal reaction in those days. Maybe all this is his fault, after all. Who knows, I certainly don’t. I’m amazed to learn the place is still there, though the father and son who run it look far too young to be the same people.

I’ll have to stop for a pint or two in Leamington, when I go through. Look up some old friends, squint at the new buildings. All of a sudden it’s been years since I’ve seen anyone, years more since I swam in the Leam and the Avon upstream of the towns. The pubs I once worked in, like the factories have long since been pulled down or turned into houses, the familiar faces mostly moved on.

But perhaps this passing through is the homecoming this trip was supposed to contain, after all. In the coming weeks, we shall see.

Encore, our kid. Encore.

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