Against the current

2008-12-22T08:07:00.000-08:00

Experience the loneliness of the long-distance paddler as he swans through locks, glides past swans and paddles into the very jaws of death with nothing but an orange kayak and voices in his head for company.

"A Genuine Tour de Farce!"

“A rip-roaring roller-coaster ride of an adventure.”

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Epilogue

(All criticism gratefully received - unless it's negative, in which case I'll cry. Please post your comments where it tells you to and let me know what you think.)

Epilogue

2008-12-22T08:04:00.001-08:00

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five

Epilogue

A large area of low pressure was rolling up the west coast of Britain, bringing serious flooding to all areas from Cornwall and Devon to Wales and the Lake District, and on up to the North East. The South West was one of the worst hit areas, with more than two weeks of rain falling in a twenty four hour period on the Friday.

By the next night, when I was enjoying the luxury of a dry duvet and a roof that didn’t flap, the Environment Agency had issued thirty four flood warnings. People were being rescued from rising flood waters, roads were closed, events cancelled and motorists were being injured by falling trees as winds gusted to over 60mph. Several roads were under water in Gloucestershire, where the Thames rises and a road in Gwent was closed due to a landslide. Two people died in Plymouth when their car hit a tree in blinding rain.

The head of flood risk management at the Environment Agency said: “After a wet summer the ground is already saturated and as a result the rivers and streams are responding very quickly to even small amounts of rain.” Red warning boards, which indicate that at least 50% of the weir sluices at a lock are open, remained on the upper reaches of the Thames until the 16th of September. The river flow doubled in three days from 18.3 cubic metres per second (cumecs) on the Wednesday to 35.1 cumecs by Saturday.

By the end of the weekend, two days after I had returned home and my tent was still drying out in the garage, the headlines were declaring:

‘100 flood alerts as 2 weeks’ of rain fall in a day’

- The Daily Telegraph, Sat 6 Sept 2008

‘Five die as storms rage across Britain’

- The Sunday Times, Sat 6 Sept 2008

‘Killer storms leaves a trail of devastation as they swept north through Britain yesterday’

- The Sunday Times, Sat 6 Sept 2008

‘Six dead in flood chaos’

- The Mail on Sunday, Sun 7 Sept 2008

‘Death toll from two days of fierce storms rises to six as heavy rain continued to batter Britain’

- The Mail on Sunday, Sun 7 Sept 2008

‘High waters end river trip’

- Maidenhead Advertiser, Thu 18 September 2008

Nevertheless, I had achieved more than I had expected. I had succeeded in planning and setting out on an expedition that was exclusively mine. I had succeeded in creating memories that were new and unique. I had succeeded in getting to Osney lock. I had succeeded in surviving to live another day.

- end -

Statistics:
5 days

3 campsites

1 free camp

95 miles

48 bridges

32 locks

59 cities, towns and villages:
· Teddington

· Hampton Wick

· Surbiton

· Bushy Park

· Thames Ditton

· East Molesey

· Hampton

· West Molesey

· Sunbury-on-Thames

· Walton-on-Thames

· Shepperton

· Weybridge

· Chertsey

· Laleham

· Staines

· Hythe End

· Old Windsor*

· Datchet

· Eton

· Windsor

· Bray

· Dorney

· Maidenhead

· Cookham

· Bourne End

· Marlow

· Bisham

· Hurley*

· Henley

· Lower Shiplake

· Wargrave

· Sonning

· Caversham

· Reading

· Purley-on-Thames

· Mapledurham

· Pangbourne

· Whitchurch-on-Thames*

· Lower Basildon

· Goring

· Streatley

· South Stoke

· Mulsford

· North Stoke

· Wallingford

· Crowmarsh Gifford

· Benson

· Shillingford

· Dorchester

· Clifton Hampden*

· Appleford

· Culham

· Abingdon

· Lower Radley

· Sandford-on-Thames

· Kennington

· South Hinksey

· North Hinksey

· Oxford

(* = camping)

33 species of birds:
· Mute swan

· Mallard

· Coot

· Moorhen

· Great crested grebe

· Sand martin

· House martin

· Grey heron

· Lapwing

· Jay

· Magpie

· Wood pigeon

· Green woodpecker

· Carrion crow

· Rook

· Grey wagtail

· Black-headed gull

· Blue tit

· Tawny owl

· Dunnock

· Wren

· Kingfisher

· Hobby

· Kestrel

· Cormorant

· Ring-necked parakeet

· Red kite

· Buzzard

· Green finch

· Reed bunting

· Robin

· Canada goose

· Greylag goose

3 paddlers

1 row boat

4 blondes

- end –

2008-12-22T07:51:00.000-08:00

Day Five

Dunkings and Dead Fish

‘Tomorrow’ offered more than I would have wanted, given the choice. For a start, as I placed one foot into the cockpit of my kayak and lifted the other to follow suit, the stupid thing suddenly rolled precariously and tipped me into the muddy waters of the Thames. It was my first dunking and I wasn’t happy. I hauled myself upright, streaming water and silently cursing to myself. It was an ignominious start to what would prove to be a day of high drama. I had risen early, eaten a banana and muesli bar and packed up the Karot in two trips to the water’s edge, keen to cover as much distance as I could that day.

The grass was soggy from rain during the night and the sky was as low and grey as an inner-city car park. I had pushed the Karot’s nose into the water, leaving the tail end resting on the muddy sloping bank for stability while I climbed in. That was obviously a bad technique and I would have to bale out the inside before I attempted to set off again. With my plastic cup packed in the watertight hold, I looked around for an alternative. I decided to see if Jabba the Hutt could lend me a cloth, so I splashed across the grass, past roosting ducks and foraging hens to the house. It was eerily still, with dark empty windows staring balefully at me through the grey dawn. On the wall of the porch hung an old-fashioned mop so I tip-toed quietly up the steps and unhooked it. I crept surreptitiously back to the boat hoping to mop it out and return it before Jabba the Hutt noticed. By the time I had started mopping out the cockpit and wringing the water onto the grass, I had an audience.

“Are you all right?” Gill from the caravan enquired. “I saw you fall in. Poor you. What will you do now?”

“Oh I’m fine,” I replied as if this was a perfectly normal boarding procedure. “The boat needed cleaning anyway.” I mopped the seat a final time, satisfied that it had done a better job than a mere bale-out with a plastic cup, before returning the mop quietly to the porch of the bridge house.

For my next attempt, I was more careful. Besides, with an audience, I didn’t want to humiliate myself further. I decided not to bother changing into dry clothes as one part of me optimistically hoped they might dry naturally with the heat of my body during the day. The other part of me, the more realistic me, couldn’t be bothered as they would probably only get wet again anyway. My shirt and shorts were made with that special-weave, quick-drying polyester fabric that athletes wear to draw the moisture away from the body and let the skin breath. That’s what it said on the label.

Once again I slid the Karot nose-first into the water while leaving the tail end resting on the bank. I stepped gingerly over the roots that protruded through the mud and balanced myself carefully with one foot inside the cockpit. Leaning forward to swing the other leg in and lower my sodden bum onto the sodden seat, I overstepped and rolled the kayak and myself into the water again.

To say it was getting annoying was an understatement. I stood, waste deep and dripping in the warm water looking at the concerned faces of Gill and her partner, who had walked over to witness an expert kayaker embark on his epic voyage.

“Bother,” I exclaimed with my typical restraint. “It’s never done that before.” Gill from the caravan was busy taking photos. That made me feel good. I rolled the stupid kayak the right side up and dragged it out of the water where I flipped it over to empty it. I walked across the sodden grass to the porch once more and, hoping Jabba the Hutt was still asleep, grabbed the mop off the wall again. I mopped the boat out again and walked back to hang it on the porch, for the second time. I returned to the river bank and slid the stupid thing into the water - again. I slid it in all the way, as I was beginning to wonder if the tail end hadn’t been resting on a lumpy root to cause it to pivot as I climbed in. I stood in the water beside it and entered in the conventional fashion this time, gripping the rear and front of the cockpit opening to maintain my balance. Gill from the caravan continued taking photos throughout.

“Third time lucky,” I grimaced as I successfully lowered myself into the damp squishy seat. I thought the clapping from the river bank was an unnecessary accolade as I pushed off from the bank with as much grace and professionalism as I could muster for someone who had so lamentably demonstrated his aptitude in his chosen sport. Gill from the caravan accompanied me along the length of the campsite frontage taking photos as I pulled myself and my recalcitrant craft upriver.

“I’ll send you some copies!” she shouted as I disappeared into the gloom of an early morning drizzle. Thanks Gill, I look forward to seeing them.

Clifton lock was only a few hundred metres upstream and I arrived at its closed gates five minutes after leaving the campsite. As it was well before the lock keeper would come on duty, I opened the gates myself. Deciding to do it without getting in and out of the Karot after each operation, I climbed out and unravelled the blue rope wrapped around the front and walked the kayak into the open lock, where I tied it to a bollard before shutting the gates behind it. All that remained was to open the head sluices at the control board at the top of the lock. Once the levels had equalised, I pressed the button that said ‘open gates’ and watched as the great wooden doors swung apart. I walked the Karot to the mooring bank outside the lock and re-wrapped the rope around its nose and climbed into the cockpit.

The great cooling towers of Didcot power station loomed out of the mist ahead as I paddled down the lock cut. Passing under a very Victorian, arched steel railway bridge at Appleford, I looked out for markers along the long haul around the great sweeping curve of the river. The next was a procession of power cables crossing a few hundred metres ahead. I passed slowly under those, looking out for the road bridge at Culham, then the narrow lock itself. It was just gone nine o’clock, so the lock keeper was on duty when I arrived and I was let through without having to disembark. I had covered three miles in over an hour.

Culham, my well-researched itinerary told me, was the site of the Culham Science Centre where a particle accelerator has spent the last half century trying to created nuclear fusion safely. I don’t remember any headlines saying they had succeeded, so I’m guessing we can’t expect cheap, virtually free and totally environmentally-friendly energy any day now. Oliver would have plenty of time to get in with the other rocket scientists and invent cold fusion.

I encountered no-one. A grey sky and a fine drizzle did their best to dampen my spirits. They failed, as I had goals to achieve and sights to see. But not at Abingdon. I was keen to pass through this riverside town, cover the big left curve around Radley and get to Sandford-on-Thames, halfway up the straight stretch to Oxford, where I thought would be a good place for lunch. After Culham, I finally turned my back on the steaming stacks of Didcot.

The paddling was hard and relentless through Abingdon. The town, I discovered, was about as architecturally inspiring as a council estate on a wet weekend. It was devoid of merit or note. Dismal streets of tedious terraced houses fronting one of the world’s great rivers. What a waste of real estate. The rain drizzled over the scene in a melancholic haze. There should have been a cut in the bow of the river at Abingdon that cast it adrift on a forgotten backwater. It would have saved me time and tedium. I wanted to be past Abingdon and sitting in the welcoming pub enjoying lunch.

I was still very wet but warm, despite the rain. My lower body was cocooned in a steaming fug beneath my splash guard. My upper body was glowing with exertion. It was hard. It was unremitting. There was no joy in my Sisyphean labour. Like crawling up a giant sand dune and slipping backwards with each step only to repeat the upwards trudge with no end in sight.

Abingdon lock gave me a pause. A yellow board was on display on the downstream gates. It read: ‘CAUTION: STREAM INCREASING’. No kidding, I thought. You should see what it feels like from down here. I pulled into the opening gates as the lock keeper operated the controls above. It was five past ten.

“I’ve just put the warning board out,” he shouted. “Did you see it?”

“Yes,” I replied cautiously, not being sure what he was implying.

“We’ve opened the weir sluices to reduce the river level. It means the stream is increasing.”

“I noticed,” I replied conversationally.

“You shouldn’t be on the water,” he persisted. “I have to recommend that you get out of the water.”

“I’ll be OK,” I replied. “I’ve made it this far and I’ve handled the current OK.”

“I know, you look like a competent paddler, it’s just that I’m legally obliged to tell you.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it,” I replied as light-heartedly as I could. “But I need to get through Oxford today and camp at Eynsham tonight. I’m on a schedule.”

“OK, good luck. They’ll warn you again at Sandford.”

Terrific, I thought as I shouted ‘thank you’ and pulled out of the lock. Now I’ve got lock keepers to fight against all the way up river. I paddled up past the weir stream and hugged the bank all the way around the leftward curve of the river, passing under Nuneham railway bridge, until it straightened out at the grey pile of Nuneham House a mile and a half further on.

The stream against the bank was marginally less strong than in the centre, or at least it looked it from my position brushing the reeds and ducking under rain sodden branches. At Nuneham House, set high up behind a sloping lawn amidst a display of sheltering trees, I crossed over to the right bank. Midstream was a roiling, slithering conveyor belt of angry brown water carrying, I began to notice, various items of flotsam. A log bumped my hull in confirmation. It wasn’t any old bit of broken branch, but a length of milled log, pointed at one end. A log that was made for a purpose, the kind employed in buttressing a low earth wall or bank. Next, a rubber tyre swept past, then various plastic items: a water bottle, a lampshade, an orange boat fender. I began to wonder what was happening upstream. Perhaps a tornado had ripped through a caravan park? Or an avalanche had swept through a village carrying all with it? I expected to see the bodies of dead sailors soon.

However, a dead fish did, indeed, float past. Large, broad and broken. Mottled silver and black. Its tail was torn, its scales shredded and its back arched in a deathly contortion. I thought it a coincidence, but it was soon followed by another that bumped passed my hull and, a short time later, yet another, smaller one. I wasn’t sure what they were called and thought of the surly fisherman I had encountered yesterday and his unwillingness to educate me.

I ploughed on though the wet and the damp and the buffeting wind. At times it seemed as if I was getting nowhere. No movement, just a slowly changing river bank. Pull! Pull! Pull! Pull! I urged myself on. Head down and thoughts of nothing but reaching the pub at Sandford. My glasses speckled with droplets of water. My vision limited to the orange hull and the brown water in front. How did it come to this, my dream trip up the Thames!? Think of those days in summer. Those sun-drenched idylls on sparkling water with dancing insects and never a breeze. Of easy speed and happy encounters. When the paddles lapped poetically and brief pauses to observe a song bird in the reeds meant floating gently in the same place while making an identification.

Sandford. Sandford. I’ve got to get to Sandford. Three more power pylons to go. Under the next one striding across the fields and river banks lined with reeds. Two more to go. A copse of trees on the left heralded the next one. It took an age to crawl under those wires as the final cables and Sandford lock crept into view a short distance ahead. I limped into the lock with its welcoming lock keeper and not-so-welcoming yellow board.

“You shouldn’t be on the river,” he stated. “The stream is increasing. We put the warnings out this morning.”

“I know. I saw one at Abingdon,” I replied.

“No-one is out today,” he added. “The current is too strong.”

“I wondered where everyone was. I haven’t passed a soul all day.”

“We had thirty millimetres of rain yesterday and we’re expecting another sixty today. It’s not a good time to be out on the river, even in a power boat,” he continued. If he kept this up, I ran the risk of getting depressed, so I changed the subject.

“I hope the pub is open, I’ve been looking forward to lunch all day.”

“The Kings Arms. Yes, you can pull up over there by the car park,” he said, pointing to the pub car park on the river bank opposite the lock. I already knew where I would tie up as I had started a day trip from Sandford a couple of months ago when I had made my way upstream to Osney lock, with a side excursion up the Cherwell amongst the carefree punts.

I thanked the lock keeper and swung over to the right bank where I pulled up under an overhanging tree at the end of the car park. It was quarter past twelve. It had taken me over four and a half hours to go eight miles. I lifted myself onto the bank, tying the Karot to a branch of the nearby tree. Taking my day bag containing my money, Swiss Army knife and redundant sun glasses out of the cockpit, I splashed through the beer garden to the pub entrance, thankful finally to be out of the rain. I leant my paddle against the doorframe and stood in the stoop for a minute so the water would drip onto the mat before I entered. Heads turned, but not in a good way, as I walked across the room to the bar. I was an alarming apparition in fluorescent yellow lycra top, red buoyancy jacket, black shorts and sandals. Most of the customers were in suits, sitting around tables sipping non-alcoholic drinks, trying to act serious and businesslike.

“I hope you’re doing food, “ I said. “I need something hot and filling.”

“Here’s the menu. Help yourself,” the barman replied. “Would you like something to drink while you’re waiting?”

As tempting as this sounded, I didn’t want alcohol as I didn’t fancy collapsing into the Karot under a dripping tree tonight. So I settled for a large diet Coke and ordered soup and a hamburger. I replaced the upholstered chair at a spare table with a wooden one from over by the door, so that my wet clothes wouldn’t damage it. It was when I sat down and took my first sip of Coke that I realised how wet and cold I was. The thought of sitting at that table, shivering with cold and fatigue for the next forty minutes suddenly seemed foolhardy. A spare change of clothes was tucked up nice and warm in the waterproof hold of the Karot just waiting for this situation. I told the barman what I was going to do and walked back to the Karot to retrieve them. I smiled apologetically as I re-entered the pub and walked though to the toilets at the back. Once inside, I peeled off my top and took off my soaking shorts and stood there, towelling myself hurriedly before a customer walked in to see a naked man drying himself in front of the mirror. I carefully rolled up my wet clothes and placed them to one side before pulling on the sports shirt and shorts that I had so laboriously dried at the campsite the previous night. That felt better.

It was when I gathered up my wet clothes and walked out of the toilet, that I noticed the sign on the door. It said ‘Wenches’. That would explain why there were no urinals. I scurried self-consciously back to my table where I asked for a plastic shopping bag from a passing barmaid to put my wet clothes in.

The soup arrived, warm and aromatic, smelling of herbs and heartiness. Then the burger, plump and steaming and dripping with melting cheese. Strangely, I was not hungry after the soup, but ate as much of the burger as I could, feeling my body warming and my strength returning. I studied my map, read my itinerary notes, putting off the inevitable return to the wet cockpit.

It was only ten miles to Eynsham lock and the campsite on the island there. I would have successfully passed the last conurbation of my trip and entered the stretch of river I had been longing for. Nothing but open countryside and welcoming villages. Ten miles would have been nothing any other week. A couple of good hours paddling and I would be there. I wasn’t so sure today and accepted that I would have to put in a bit more hard work than normal to achieve my goal. But even at today’s speed, I should be at Eynsham by four.

But first to get through Oxford, where the river narrows to a channel between the concrete walls that lined the riverside streets of the town. Iffley lock, then Osney, then Godstow and finally Eynsham. Four locks to maintain my new schedule and set me up for the final day’s paddle to Lechlade.

I stepped out of the warm pub in my dry clothes and splashed across the courtyard to where the Karot was tied. Once I had loaded up and pulled on the splash guard, I dropped resignedly into the damp cockpit and fastened it around the rim. I pushed off from the bank, full of food and optimism, feeling the wet seat slowly soak through my dry shorts and the rain slowly dribble down my neck to my dry top. I paddled up through Sandford Pool past the island and made painstaking progress to a sharp left hand bend in the river before inching under the rusty steel arches of Kennington railway bridge. Boats sat disconsolately against sheltering banks in the rain. On my left, fields and flat land stretched off into a grey mist beyond. My parka hood was over my head and the pitter patter of rain against my ears accompanied the splashing of my paddles.

I passed under the Oxford ring road bridge, knowing that somewhere off to my left was Edmund’s university. I had driven him back to his digs on the Harcourt campus many times, taking the A34 trunk road up to Harcourt Hill and calling in to the local supermarket before unloading boy and provisions into his untidy little room at the end of the corridor.

A hundred metres further on lay Iffley lock with its grey stone cottage. A wooden footbridge on the left arched over a stream that lead to a portage ramp. A red board was out when I dragged myself up to the gates. Not unexpectedly, they were closed, but the lock keeper came out as if he was expecting me. Had Sandford lock phoned him? Any fears that he would prevent me going through for my own safety were dispelled when the gates slowly yawned open. Perhaps the idea was to trap me inside and not let me out the top end? He shouted down to me pointing out the red board.

“I know,” I acknowledged, “but I’ve come this far.”

“It will be worse upstream,” he continued. “You’ve got the Folly Bridge channel and the narrows at Friars Wharf where the canal comes in. Gets a bit hairy there when the river’s like this.”

“I’ll be OK,” I replied through gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Your shouldn’t be out on this.”

“I’ve been doing this for years. I’ll be OK,” I insisted. “I have to go on. I’ve got places to go, people to meet.”

“Well, you wait and see. It’s not good up there. I’ve been talking to Osney and they’ve opened up the weir sluices,” he replied as the lock filled with water and I was raised up. The wind whipped his storm jacket as he walked the short distance to the control board and opened the head gates.

“I’ll tell you what, go as far as you can and if you get into any difficulty, come back here. You can spend the night on the island here and think about it.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it,” I readily agreed before he got even more insistent. “I’ll let you know.” I dragged myself out of the lock into the calmer waters above, shouting thank you and trying to look competent and strong as I powered my way upstream.

“See you soon,” he shouted after me hopefully. I already had my head down and was pulling hard to reach the right bank where I would negotiate the bend ahead and disappear from his view. It was half past two.

The sky was a bruised brown from horizon to horizon and a stiff wind roughened the surface of the water. On either side were fields and occasional trees. The Thames path was on the left but no walkers were out at this point. All tucked up warm and dry at home. I saw no-one as I passed under the broad arch of Donnington bridge and slogged on up through a series of bends to the entrance of the Cherwell beside a row of boathouses. Progress was agonizingly slow. Beyond were the dreaming spires of Academe but I wasn’t interested. They could dream all they liked, they weren’t helping to get me any closer to my destination. My world was confined to the snug cockpit of the Karot and the river immediately ahead. I was thinking of nothing, just the relentless ‘splurgh’, ‘splurgh’, ‘splurgh’, ‘splurgh’ as each paddle dragged through the water. I remembered my rhyme:

‘The hard way on
is better done,
than easy life
that’s never fought,
nor easy race
that’s always won.’

The slow forward motion was barely discernible unless I fixed my eyes on a spot on the bank and checked it a few minutes later to confirm that it was behind me. I stayed against the right bank after the Cherwell. A couple of students ambled past, hunched against the wind and rain. Soon they were gone, disappearing into the drizzle ahead. What were they doing out on a day like this, I wondered? It’s Friday, they should be in class, or studying.

As I approached the narrow channel through the city, the brown water began moving faster against me. I increased my rate and applied more power to each stroke, telling myself that I would only have to keep this up until I was past Osney, where the river would open up and take on a more gentle nature. Folly Bridge, that the lock keeper at Iffley had warned me about, soon came into view. It remained ahead of me for what seemed like hours as I slogged towards it. I knew this was the centre of the town, where the pubs spilled their occupants out onto the river bank and towpaths on sunny summer days. No such scene today. The buildings were brown and empty and glistening with rain. No happy shoppers lined the balustrades of that ancient bridge as it choked the channel beneath its grey stone arches. I pulled myself across to the left bank for the approach, past a retired tourist boat moored against a jetty and into the rushing torrent beneath the bridge.

Folly Bridge comprised three low arches, each about eight metres wide sitting solidly on a channel that was barley thirty metres across. From my position downstream, it looked like the narrowest point of the river so far. On the upstream side, the water was creating a bow wave at the top of the pedestals before erupting past on either side and pouring down through the constricted channels. It was impossible to pause, to slow my pace. Like a salmon leaping the rapids, I increased my speed and power in a frantic surge of energy, realising that I couldn’t not get through. I couldn’t let an old Oxford bridge defeat me. I couldn’t even guess how fast the stream was flowing, four, five, six miles an hour? I counted the strokes. Hard and fast. No pause. No let up. One two three four five six. I kept counting each stroke. I reached a hundred as I inched under the left hand arch. And on and on I thrashed!

‘To carry on
And on and on
Further on
And then some more
Always strong
Always sure’.

The stream flooded against me like a living thing, a seething brown serpent doing its best to swallow me. I must have looked insanely stupid under that arch, barely making any progress yet thrashing the surface of the water with flashing paddles like a mad thing.

I tried to think of stuff to spur me on. My wife. My children. What would they think? If they saw me now, would they laugh? Would they be proud of me or think I was a daft daddy? “Andrew, you be careful,” Carolyn would say. “Dad, wouldn’t it be better to get out and carry it around the bridge?” from Roddy. “Hee hee! You look well mental doing that!” Amelia would say. “Way to go, Dad,” from Ed. If pressed, Oliver would say something like, “Dad, what do you think you’re doing? You haven’t canoed in your life!” They don’t know me as well as children should know their father. Do they ever think well of me? “Of course they do, but they’ve got lives of their own,” Carolyn tells me when she sees my pain. Deep down, I believe her. It had been the same with my life. After I had left home and gone down to Auckland and university, I hardly had anything more to do with my parents. Never sent birthday cards and never received any. It was a strange life that was little understood by an adolescent Andrew trying to make his own way in the world. I didn’t even recognise my own parents impending divorce as I left for England. But I think of them now. Now that they’re not here. Now that I’ve got Oliver, Edmund, Roddy, Amelia to remind me.

I grunted each syllable of their names in time with each stroke of the paddle. Oli-ver! Ed-mund! Rod-dy! Mi-a!

“They love you,” Carolyn reassures me. I know. They didn’t chose the life they have, it was thrust upon them when the recession of the 1990s changed everything. News of divorce, bankruptcies and suicide was our daily fare. Marriages were breaking like toys after Christmas and several of my friends added to the statistics. I had been fighting the adverse economical tide for months, so when I joined the club, we would meet for drinks in a state of shock, dazed and wondering why the wives seemed to get going when the going got tough. I was always good with words, just rubbish at turning them into money when my family needed it most.

I finally broke out from under the arch where the pressure of the stream relented marginally and the boat stopped rocking so violently. I nevertheless had to keep up a strong pace for the confluence ahead.

The channel took a sharp right hand turn beyond Folly bridge and narrowed where it was squeezed in by the streets of the town. I inched on upstream hugging the wall, past where the Seacourt Stream and the Oxford canal entered, thrashing on past wet streets and tedious terraced houses. No-one was about to witness my efforts. It made no difference whether I hugged the concrete wall or battled on midstream, the surface was a roiling torrent on both sides of the river. I knew there would be no pause until I passed through Osney lock. But I had to get there first. I quickly looked at my watch. It was quarter past three. Forty five minutes to cover less than two miles. I couldn’t be bothered doing the maths, but knew that it wasn’t good. I was paddling for my life and nothing was going to stop me. My thin parka clung to my arms and my hat dripped water onto my face. My sprained wrist was hurting with every pull and my back ached for the first time.

I thought of the river ahead, the gentle beauty of the Cotswolds and I remembered the broad calm of the river at Teddington with clouds scudding across the sky and swans gliding out to greet me. I yearned for tonight’s campsite and urged myself on with the thought of a sweet cigar and a smoky Laphroaig sitting at the doorway of my tent congratulating myself on a goal achieved.

I passed under the footbridge at Friars Wharf a hundred metres upstream of Folly bridge and inched on towards an old steel girder bridge. The river flowed relentlessly past carrying a bobbing barrage of branches and bottles. It twisted left then right, then left again. I crept past the entrance of the Oxford Canal, paddling like fury for every inch gained. Fighting my way across the channel at each turn, I was barely in control of the kayak as the midstream current attempted to twist the prow around and sweep me away. It seemed like an age reaching the Osney railway bridge and it offered me no respite. Instead, the current increased as I got closer to the lock ahead. The weir stream off to the left was unleashing another torrent against me as I crawled towards the lock gates. The rain had eased but the low clouds nevertheless threatened more.

“I bet you didn’t expect to see me?” I shouted as I pulled to a stop below the gates, stretching my arms forward then backwards, rolling my sprained wrist and dragging it in the water to relieve the pain.

“I did. Iffley phoned,” the lock keeper shouted back. “What do you think you are doing out today?!”

I was a bit taken aback and in no mood to argue. “The best I can,” I replied. “Shame about the weather.”

“Are you mad?!,” he shouted down at me. “The stream is increasing. We’ve had a month’s worth of rain already in the first week of September,” he replied.

“Is that right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” he insisted. “Sir, you really shouldn’t be out today. I advise you to get out of the water.” He was nevertheless opening the gates.

“It’s not that bad is it?” I replied. I paddled through the gates with ease now that I was out of the current. It was an enjoyable experience. My position low down in the lock also gave me some respite from the wind.

“Have you seen what the river is doing?” he continued. “We’ve got red boards out. The weir sluices are open.” He stood there glaring down at me from under bushy grey eyebrows and yellow sou’wester as the brown water foamed around me. I felt small and vulnerable suddenly in the middle of his lock. No-one else was about on the river bank. The footpath was slick with rain. Everyone was in warm homes and offices, safe and unthreatened. Once I got to Eynsham, so would I be.

“I haven’t got much further to go today,” I said. “I just need to get to Eynsham. I can camp at Eynsham and then I’ll see how it goes from there.” When the water levels equalised, I held on to the lock wall to steady myself.

“Eynsham? Do you expect to get to Eynsham,” he said. “Sir, my advise is not to go any further. That’s my advice and, as lock keeper, I am obliged to tell you.”

“I know what it’s like,” I replied testily. “I’ve been paddling up the river for five days. I know what it’s like. I’m all right. I can do it.”

“Sir, have you seen what the river is doing up there?”

He was starting to annoy me. Staring to undermine my confidence. So far, I hadn’t had any doubts and I didn’t want any now.

“It can’t be worse than down there,” I said, indicating the stretch I had just battled up. “I must admit, it got pretty hairy through Folly Bridge though. But I’ll be OK. Don’t worry about me.”

“You may be an experienced paddler,” he admitted. “but I repeat, I strongly urge you to get out and look for yourself.”

Thinking that the only way to appease him was to do as he said, I agreed.

“Can I go through and look from up there?” I asked, hoping that at least he couldn’t stop me once I was through his lock.

“All right. But be careful. Come through and tie up on the right immediately outside the gate. Just pull up over there,” he instructed, pointing to a walkway just beyond the lock gates.

The upstream gates slowly swung open to reveal something I had never expected to see on the Thames. Normally, the gates swing slowly apart and the water on the upstream side is as still as the water in the lock and I glide gently out. But not now. The pressure that had been building up behind the closed gates was suddenly released and a surge of water rushed headlong towards me like a small tidal bore. I steadied myself against the wave until it bounced off the closed rear doors. But ahead, was the real shock. Through the open gates I could see the stretch of brown river flanked on the left by two vast weirs, one after the other off into the distance. The current frothed and rolled towards me down the centre of the river before suddenly being jerked sideways to cascade over the edge. It was like something out of an Indiana Jones movie just before a riverboat and all its occupants plunge screaming over the lip of a giant cataract into the frothing maelstrom below. I gulped, not even sure if I could get to where the lock keeper had told me to tie up. I gingerly hugged the right bank to avoid the pull of the current over the weir system. The channel looked only about ten meters wide here and the sideways pull was fierce. I inched along the walkway and grabbed the first bollard I came to. Ahead, the river curved around to the right so I was going to have to get out and walk the remainder of the distance along the walkway if I wanted to see any further.

“Now get out and take a look,” the lock keeper shouted across. “Tell me what you think.” I reluctantly dragged myself out of the cockpit and onto the walkway, trembling at the sudden release of tension. I was hoping to see a broad swathe of calm water where the current was lessened by the increasing breadth of the river. As I moved along that walkway, angrily kicking aside two sleeping mallards along the way, each step revealed the same narrow ribbon of seething brown water advancing towards me. Finally, I could see as far as was possible before the thing twisted off between narrow banks lined with dripping trees a quarter of a mile further upstream. More of the same. No broad gentle pool or lazily meandering river opening out to welcome me home. I turned to look questioningly to the lock keeper.

“How far is it like that?” I asked.

“It’s like that all the way up to Port Meadow,” he confirmed. “It funnels through that narrow channel for another mile and a half further on.”

“But past that? Surely this far upstream, there’s not much coming into the Thames?” I pleaded. “It can’t get any worse can it?” I was trying to think logically. I only had forty miles to go. The shorter the river, the fewer the tributaries feeding it.

He corrected my geography. “You’ve got two of the biggest. The Windrush and the Evenlode come in up there.”

I looked at my little Karot tied forlornly against the walkway and remembered all we had been through. I thought of Carolyn meeting me in the Cotswolds on Sunday. Organising friends and family for my triumphant arrival at the Riverside pub in Lechlade. My family. I thought of my lovely children waiting to greet me, watching the river downstream for the orange speck that was their colourful father. Greeting me with teenage awkwardness and reluctant pride, bewildered by the popularity of their heroic parent.

“Listen to me,” the lock keeper shouted. “There’s red boards out all the way to Lechlade. If you think you can do it, go ahead. I don’t want to be responsible. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Bother, I thought. As I stood there transfixed with indecision, I felt myself sagging within, like a balloon slowly deflating. I hadn’t realised how exhausted I was from the morning’s exertions. Almost five hours hard crawl over the ten miles from Clifton Hampden to Sandford-on-Thames, then a two hour slog up through Oxford against the strongest currents of the trip. Would I have the energy to tackle another six miles of this? Another three hours? I looked at the raging weirs opposite and imagined myself weakened from exhaustion with no strength left to prevent myself being pulled over. Or if I did manage to push on past those cataracts, would I slowly grind to a halt further upstream without the strength or the will to go further? I couldn’t sit still for days on end in the vain hope of the river subsiding. There had to be some time limit to my trip.

More importantly, I didn’t want to give the lock keeper the satisfaction of reading in the local paper about my broken body being washed up downstream in a tangle of splintered plastic. I didn’t want my epitaph to read, ‘He should have listened’. My arms drop to my side and my shoulders sagged. I felt my breath fall to a whimper and disappointment flooded through me like a wave of acid.

I suddenly realised that this was how it was going to end and I knew I wasn’t going to be happy about it. I had planned a gentle paddle up a benign river while raising money for my favourite charity. A to B. Teddington to Lechlade. Nothing more demanding than that. What had happened was an unexpectedly challenging journey that had turned into a dual between nature and man. In a fight, nature always won. It had today.

I turned to the lock keeper. “OK, you win,” I said but knew that I was really talking to a river that had betrayed me.

I trudged back to the Karot, slumped on the wet metal walkway and, eyes stinging with regret, phoned my wife.

After five days, ninety five miles, forty eight bridges and thirty two locks, I was stopped by the English weather. An unseasonable September storm sweeping up the west coast of England had turned my idyllic meander up a gentle Thames into an increasingly exhausting battle against a raging monster. It was the end of my Thames odyssey. The conclusion of my relationship with a river that I thought was my friend. Suddenly, all my memories had no celebrated ending to glorify them. Memories of talking to the ducks, chatting to pretty blondes, cursing rude fishermen and shouting at the tempestuous heavens. Of listening to winged monsters flying overhead in the night. Of sleeping with honking geese and hurrying trains. Of dining with my family and friends. Of locks. Oh the innumerable locks and countless bridges! Slowly crawling up to the next bridge, slowly creeping under it, slowly pulling out the other side. Of lock keepers and assistant lock keepers. Some friendly, some formal. Charming and chatty, gruff and gloomy in turn. Memories of paddling up to those dank grey gates. The long wait. The opening inwards and paddling through. The idle banter while it fills and the cheery goodbye as I emerge from the other end.

So my expedition came to a grinding halt on the damp bank of an unremarkable lock in a unmemorable back street of a city whose only relevance to my life up until now was being the temporary home of my second son.

Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in a nearby pub, shivering with cold and exhaustion, watching unemployed men playing pool and waiting for Carolyn and her brother Andy to collect me.

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Epilogue

Chapter Four

2008-12-22T07:45:00.000-08:00

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Five

Epilogue

Day Four

Meetings and monsters

The geese had gone the next morning but the rain hadn’t. It continued to drizzle as I sat in the mouth of my tent, eating my banana and muesli bar breakfast and planning the day. I hadn’t kept to my schedule for yesterday which dictated that I should be at Benson lock eleven miles upstream by now. Looking at my well-researched itinerary, I could calculate that another twenty miles would take me to Clifton lock. That was the long stretch of the Thames through Goring, Wallingford, Benson and past the Roman town of Dorchester. Then a big loop southeast to the campsite that I knew was beside the bridge at Clifton Hampden. It looked daunting. It looked uphill. But that’s only because it was running up my map, heading northward. Furthermore, the wind was in the northeast. Great. Uphill, headwind, double trouble.

It was seven o’clock and I needed the toilet. Up until now I had been reasonably relaxed about the whole toilet thing. Up until now I had been in campsites, so knew there wasn’t going to be a problem with access and availability. But here, alone on the bank of the river, things were going to be a bit more makeshift. But, not wanting to upset my regular morning routine, I had come prepared. I had a Swiss Army knife and a roll of toilet paper. Those of a sensitive nature should block their ears.

With toilet roll and Swiss Army knife in hand, I climbed the bank at the back of my tent to where Karot was still lying in the wet grass. Behind that was a rough pasture with a row of trees beyond. Looking up and down the pathway in each direction to make sure no-one was out for an early morning stroll, I quickly searched for a good spot, exposed though it was. As it turned out, the pasture was perfect, made up of large clumps of wild grass. Remembering an old trick I learnt in the army, I opened the long blade of the knife and plunged it into the ground at the side of a suitable tuft of grass. Then, with a careful sawing action, I moved the knife around the clump until it had been entirely circumnavigated. All that remained was to grab the long grass in a bunch and lift it out of the ground. What was left was a bowl-shaped indentation that would suit me perfectly. When I had finished, I simply placed the tuft of grass back into place. All very environmentally friendly.

I washed my hands in the river, finishing off with a sprinkling of clean water from my flask, before cleaning my teeth and packing up.

As I settled carefully into the cockpit and gently pushed off the low bank, the river looked calm and still under the light drizzle. My waterproof plastic watch told me it was seven thirty as I swung the Karot’s nose upstream. Although the river looked flat, the current was deceptively strong. I rounded a gentle right bend and paddled up a long straight stretch for about a mile, past the wildlife park on my left where I observed the places I could have camped the night before if I had the energy and inclination to push further on after Whitchurch lock. I felt I had the better deal where I was as there was no shelter on the grassy left bank where the lock keeper had suggested I might camp. A few pleasure craft were pressed against the wet grass.

At the end of the long stretch, fields on either side and a left bend ahead, another paddler emerged through the drizzle. He was a mirror image of myself, togged up against the weather and in a bright orange kayak. A sense of relief flooded through me. Another like me. A friend on the water who understood what I was going through.

He drew closer. I slowed my paddling, although not stopping entirely lest I was pushed backwards by the stream. As he drew level, I could see he was wearing a light waterproof parka and his boat was an ‘expedition’ kayak like mine, equipped with fore and aft waterproof holds and deck strapping holding down various items of equipment.

I opened the conversation with the usual, “Hallo there! Where are you headed?”

“Greenwich. And you?” he replied. He was younger and looked fitter than me. Slim and athletic with a small black goatee beard. He looked like a proper kayaker. He probably wore sandals as a fashion item and did this every year. I wondered what I looked like to him. A disoriented old duffer going the wrong way up an increasingly turbulent river? A middle-aged fool? Lost and alone?

“I’m heading for Lechlade, then on up to Cricklade as far as I can go.”

“Where did you leave from?”

“Teddington,” I replied. “On Monday.”

“Monday? You’ve done well. How’s it been so far?”

“Not quite the weather I wanted. I’m not making the distances I expected. The current seems to be getting up a bit. How long has it taken you to get here?”

“I left on Tuesday,” he said. That was two days ago.

“You’re not doing too bad yourself. But then you’ve got a little help,” I replied.

“Yeah, it does make it easier. You should try it.”

“Hah ha! Maybe next year,” I laughed. “Good luck.”

“You too.” And he stopped back-paddling and let the current carry him swiftly away downstream.

I checked my well-researched itinerary and quickly did the calculations. He had drifted comfortably downstream averaging something like thirty two miles a day while I had been finding it hard to cover only twenty. And I bet he was enjoying a paltry four hour paddling day too. That meant a nice lie-in in the morning and an early stop at a comfortable campsite for an afternoon at a local pub. I was jealous.

As he receded into the distance, he looked more and more isolated and alone on the vast expanse of the river. Did I look so vulnerable I wondered? I didn’t feel it. With all the wildlife, lock keepers, boaters and blondes, I had not spent one minute of my journey so far thinking I was alone. Geese honked at me. Coots yelped in alarm and ducks softly scolded. Besides, I had the voices in my head.

Baby great crested grebes were the most vocal. I had come across several family groups comprising a female (a great crested grebe with no crest) and her young. These were precocious little balls of black and white stripy fluff that darted around their mother and showed no signs of caution. When I approached too close, the mother would dive, and the young would be left on the surface looking bereft and bemused, wondering where their mother had gone. Eventually they would set up a strident alarm cry that cut through the silence with surprising vigour. ‘Chiddley, chiddley, chiddley, cheep, cheep, chiddley, chiddley cheep!’ until their mother resurfaced a short distance away. Seeing that the orange menace was still bearing down on her family, she would submerge again as if demonstrating their escape strategy.

I picked up my stroke and pulled myself further upstream to the second of three magnificent Brunel bridges I was to encounter on my journey. Smaller than the Brunel bridge at Maidenhead I had passed under two days previously, Gatehampton railway bridge nevertheless strode the Thames in four red brick arches with the same grandeur and style. A First Great Western train thundered over it as I approached then whooshed on through the fields and villages beyond.

At this point I realised I would be paddling into the unknown because at this point, the river ran off the western edge of my Ordnance Survey Landranger map No.175 a couple of times and looped back on again further north. When I had been planning my journey, I had thought it a waste of £7 to buy the adjoining map for the sake of a couple of aberrant meanders. The Thames continued northwards on my map to connect with Ordnance Survey map 164 above. Which I possessed. And which covered the next forty-five miles of the Thames from Benson to Radcott lock in the Cotswolds. So, I had to take the risk that I would not fall off the end of the world in the next few miles.

As if presaging some end-of-world disaster, the sky darkened further as a great blanket of grey nimbostratus clouds crept over the landscape and the wind picked up. The rain started falling again as I disappeared into the white obscurity of the map margins.

“There be monsters in them thar waters oi reckon,” a voice in my head warned me. “Go there at your own peril young master,” it intoned. “Those who venture beyond oft never return. Heed my advice, me hearty!”

Looking out for plesiosaurs and kraken, I moved tentatively forward through the mist of rain. Ravaged old trees draped desolate limbs into murky water as I struggled past. I was now instinctively adopting the tactic of taking the line of least resistance to the current, irrespective of which side of the river it meant I had to use. The ‘port to port’ rule was long since abandoned. If I confronted another craft, so be it. I would salute it and hug the illegal bank guiltily until it had drifted by.

Around that first right hand sweep into the unknown, I met no-one. I was clinging to the left bank as I approached the bend, then cut across midstream fighting the stronger current there, to embrace the slower water on the inside bank of the curve where I made slow but steady progress under the dripping branches. At the next leftward bend I would drive forward straight ahead and rejoin the left bank, expecting to see at any moment the river disappear over the edge of the earth in a giant cataract.

It didn’t, and I soon reached the safety of Ordnance Survey map 175 again, briefly, at Goring. I only had a few hundred metres of respite through that town however, but first I had to negotiate Goring Lock, where the lock keeper was annoyingly absent. It was a quarter to nine, so I could either wait in the rain for him to come on duty at nine or find a portage place and drag the Karot over. I pulled up against the temporary mooring pier at the right of the lock and lifted myself from the boat. A flight of steep concrete steps led up to the bank above. I could see that I was on a promontory protruding from the riverbank that created a small inlet over the other side. The lock island itself was on the left. There was no sign of life, so I decided to tackle the portage, rather than open the lock myself, figuring it would be quicker. If I could get Karot up the concrete steps, I could then drag it across the grass and drop it in the water at a suitable spot I had discovered on the other side.

Which is exactly what I did. Except the dragging up the steps didn’t work out very successfully. Concrete is hard. Karot, soft. I noticed that a thin strip of plastic lay curled on the top step as I flopped the boat down on the grass at the top. Angry, I struggled to lift the boat and limped unsteadily to the drop point ahead. Once I had positioned it on the grass, I gently shoved it nose first into the water a metre below. That wasn’t very successful either. Such was the weight of the craft that it dived nose first into the river and kept on plunging down until water was pouring into the cockpit. By the time it had stopped bobbing about on the surface, the inside was awash with water. Great, I thought, I’ll have to bale it out again. The trouble was, I couldn’t reach from the bank, so I took off my oil skin hat and dropped it onto the seat. Then, I lowered myself carefully down into the boat, gripping a root protruding from the bank in case I lost my balance standing on the seat. I managed to drop down into the cockpit successfully and squelched as I sat on my hat on the water-sodden seat. I spent the next few minutes emptying out as much water as I could with my plastic cup before I set off up stream in the rain, cursing silently and struggling to keep the bow pointed in the right direction against the wind.

If I only had someone to help carry the boat, none of this would have happened. It was about now that I started thinking about my brother. Where was he? Sunning himself on some coastal island out of Auckland Harbour, no doubt. Happily eating his day’s catch of shellfish on a white sandy beach under a bright blue sky enjoying the company of friends.

The rain had settled down to a relentless sheet of drizzle that steamed my glasses and soaked through my thin nylon parka. Fortunately I wasn’t cold - all that exercise was stoking my engine and warming my body. If my brother was here, as he had promised, we would be laughing at this together. Oh how we would laugh! Instead, I was laughing alone, on a dismal day in a damp kayak after four days of paddling against the current. A flock of Canada geese parted at my approach, honking in alarm. “Kraank! Kraank! Kraank!” they went. “Honk! Honk! Honk!” I replied in my best ‘goose’. Doctor Doolittle, eat your heart out. I whooped with hysterical laughter again just to let the world know I still had a voice. But there was no-one about to hear, no-one to wonder why. This was my brother’s loss. I bet he wouldn’t get an experience like this in New Zealand. I bet he wouldn’t want to.

“Let’s kayak the Thames,” he had said on my last trip to New Zealand. He was a keen kayaker. So much so, that he spent all his free time in his sea kayak, exploring Auckland Harbour and the coastal islands. Of which there were many. From what I read in his emails, he spent most weekends paddling around beaches and bays, finding new scallop and mussel beds which he would collect and either take home and cook, or consume there and then during an overnight camp. I had always spent time on, in and under the water when I was growing up in New Zealand so had readily agreed that we should kayak the Thames now that I live in England. He was planning a trip to the UK the following summer, he said, so let’s do it then.

That left me with a year to buy a kayak, practise on the Thames and plan the trip. I seem to have always lived on or near the Thames without actually getting out on it. Firstly in London, when I lived in Chiswick (on the Thames) and enjoyed the riverside pubs from Kew to Hammersmith. Then I moved to Berkshire and lived in Cookham (also on the Thames), then Bourne End, on the Buckinghamshire side of the Thames opposite Cookham. It seems that I have been drawn instinctively to water.

So the months flew by during which time I bought a bright orange ‘Easky Venture 13’ and took it out as soon as the weather permitted. This occurred in March for me and I paddled as much of the Thames and as many local lakes and rivers as I could throughout that summer. Bray Lake, Black Swan Lake in Hurst, the Beulieu, Lymington and Cuckmere rivers on the south coast. I covered them all that summer.

However, it soon became apparent that my great kayaking brother wouldn’t be able to make it. He was having staffing difficulties at work. His partner at his law firm had only recently returned from maternity leave and his legal executive was taking a few months sabbatical that year, leaving him understaffed for the duration. His absence from his company looked more and more unlikely and the time came when I took it for granted he wouldn’t be joining me. I nevertheless continued with my plans with renewed enthusiasm as the idea of making the journey in the wrong direction took hold. If I was going to paddle a hundred and thirty five miles, it might as well have an element of the unusual about it.

There was an element of the unusual about the house that appeared on the left bank. I had paddled uneventfully through Cleeve lock a few hundred metres upstream from Goring. The lock keeper was on hand to let me through and I plunged out upstream at twenty past nine. The day was young and I had already gone through two locks and covered five miles.

I was still in uncharted territory. Off the map and in the unknown. I was paddling uphill towards Moulsford when I saw the unusual house. At first I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I even swung across to the left side of the river to take a closer look. There it was, all Egyptianate and glorious, fronted by palm trees at the top of a beautifully-manicured rolling swathe of green. Like a decorated dolls house straight from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, resplendent with lotus topped columns, magnificent blue arches and falcon wings. I was astonished at the sheer incongruity of the thing. So out of place yet sitting in its own little environment shrugging an indifferent shoulder to the world as if to say, I don’t care, I’m proud to be Egyptian and I have money. Lots of Money. Who would build such a thing? My first thought was Mr El Fayyad, the owner of Harrods, but as he was the only wealthy Egyptian I knew, I thought that was probably an unfair assumption. I took a photo, thinking they’re not going to believe this back at the pub. Naturally enough, the sleek river launch moored in front was called ‘Nefertati’ (sic). What else? I decided it was a thing of beauty and wished the owner good luck.

The margins of the map continued to surprise. As I regained the right bank and continued on towards Moulsford, a sumptuous living room on stilts thrust out from the river bank in front of me. Its walls were made of glass and inside were soft sofas and shelves of books. A carved wooden lamp stand stood behind a leather armchair dimly lighting one end of the room. A path led from this riparian retreat back up to a modest house behind. They say people in glass houses shouldn’t, so I assumed it was not a secret love nest, but a relaxing summer house with unrivalled river views.

This was truly a land of wonder and I was reluctant to leave it and rejoin the map further ahead. Neither cataract nor kraken threatened as I passed through Moulsford and the incongruously-named Beetle & Wedge pub. I rounded the next bend and was once again confronted by my old friend Brunel. He strode the river under leaden skies in three great red brick arches outlined with white stonework. Weeds grew unchecked from the buttressing pediment of the centre arch. It looked larger than the bridge at Gatehampton, but I knew it was still not as big as our Brunel bridge at Maidenhead. I passed respectfully under its cavernous ceiling and emerged into the drizzle upstream.

I returned to the map a short way on and continued through North Stoke and Wallingford. Passing under the stone bridge there, I came across the second, but not yet my last, river encounter of the day. The Thames path, which runs uninterrupted from its source in Gloucestershire to London, was on the left bank here. Under an avenue of trees, two walkers with their heads down against the drizzling rain strode into view. Because of the large packs each carried, I assumed they were more than just day walkers. I shouted out to them.

“You look as though you’ll get there faster than I will! Where are you headed?”

They stopped and looked around, not expecting a voice from the river.

“London,” the woman replied.

“Wow! You’ve got a fair way to go yet! Where did you start from?”

“The source. Kemble.”

“How long has it taken you to get here?”

“We’ve been walking for six days so far,” the man answered. “We’ve allowed ourselves another six to get to London.”

“And you camp at campsites or on the bank?”

“Anywhere really. Pubs, campsites. We were at Clifton Hampden last night.”

There was nothing much more to say. I was impressed by their stoicism and their relaxed approach to their twelve day odyssey. I envied them their mutual comradeship.

I shouted good luck and watched them hike their back packs into position and stride off purposefully along the towpath together. The poplar trees lining the riverbank stirred in the wind, showering them with heavy droplets as they passed beneath.

A short way on, I encountered two Canadian canoes weaving uncontrollably across the river as they swept towards me. It was an amusing distraction. I’m sorry to say that I could tell they were paddled by girls. I could hear their squeals and shouts as they came closer. The lead canoe seemed almost to be in control but was having difficulty trying to hold back to guide the rear boat, which hadn’t quite mastered the art of paddling on different sides. The result was that they were pulling the boat first to the left, then, as they both changed to the other side, to the right. Oh dear, I thought, I hope they’re not planning on going far.

“Going far?” I shouted across at them.

“Oooh hallo!” one of the girls replied as she swivelled around to see who was talking. “We want to get to Pangbourne. We are being met there with the cars.”

“Do you mean there’s someone sitting there waiting for you?” I asked.

“Oh they’ll be sitting in a nice warm pub probably,” the other girl in the forward boat replied. “Is it far? Ooooh!” she squealed as the bow swung wildly across the stream.

“Well, I left there at seven thirty this morning,” I replied, “so I guess you can do it in three hours going downstream.”

They groaned in chorus and returned to the task of getting their craft pointing the right way. In a confusion of paddles, they were carried off downstream on the rolling current. I laughed to myself. As long as they didn’t capsize, they would certainly get to Pangbourne with no help from their poor paddling. I wondered, however, whether they would recognise it when they did. If they didn’t have any maps, or didn’t have any hands free to look at one if they did, they would either pass through the town without knowing it, or stop at Goring and wait in vain for their return ride.

It was encounters like that brought a little light relief to my day. A half mile ahead, I pulled up outside Benson lock wondering if I was going to have another wait, or another damaging portage, when the doors swung open and I encountered three men in a boat. They emerged in all their theatrical glory straight from the pages of Jerome K. Jerome. Striped blazers, straw boaters, each pulling on the oars.

“Guten tag,” one of them smiled over at me. Figuring these weren’t your common or garden English swanks, I replied in my best German.

“Guten tag.” Considering I had never studied German at school, that was pretty impressive. Enough to get the conversation started anyway.

“Where are you going?” I asked in amazement.

“Ya, we are going to Henley. We are going to Henley every year. It is our tradition.”

“You look good,” I laughed. “So you have read Jerome K. Jerome?”

“Ya, we know the boat story. It is tradition.”

Thinking they weren’t as fluent in English as I quite obviously was in German, I shouted ‘auf Wiedersehen!’ and waved them goodbye as they picked up their stroke and plunged downstream on their homage to tradition.

I was smiling happily as I entered the lock and the gates swung shut behind me. The lock keeper was laughing.

“At least they’re going the right way! You look as though you have a journey ahead of you. Where are you off to?”

I told him I was, indeed, on a journey and I was headed for Clifton Hampden that night.

“It’s only eight miles upstream, so I should do it in a couple of hours,” I said.

“You know the stream is getting up, don’t you? There’ll be warnings out soon.”

That put a damper on my spirits. Not really knowing whether to react to this piece of news as merely information or as an order, I said “Oh, OK, I’ll look out for them.”

By ‘warnings’, I knew he meant the yellow and red notice boards that lock keepers displayed at either end of their locks to advise boaters of the condition of the current. A yellow notice states that the stream is increasing and implies caution. Red means a strong stream, get off the river!

Nevertheless, my shoulders and arms felt relaxed and I was convinced that I could take anything the river threw at me. Even after four hours non-stop hard paddling, nothing hurt except the twinges I was experiencing in my sprained right wrist. Admittedly, at the end of each day I was fatigued, but my muscles weren’t aching nor my arms tired. Just a general feeling of exhaustion that warned me I was running out of energy and to be thinking about stopping.

I looked at my watch as I sat in the lock waiting for the waters to rise and the upstream gates to open. It was midday. I was getting hungry, so under lowering skies I paddled on upstream searching for a suitable spot where I could pull up and picnic. I found it in the form of an impressive set of sweeping stone steps dropping into the river from a landscaped lawn above. I cut across the river to the left bank. The stream wasn’t as fierce here because I had just left a lock. It wouldn’t pick up again until I approached Day’s lock at Dorchester, four miles ahead, when the torrent from the weirs would surge against me for the last mile.

Above the steps, some hundred metres off at the far end of the lawn, was a private house, so as I pulled up to the steps, I kept my head down. It was easy enough to hoist myself out of the cockpit onto the bottom step. I found a broken slab which I put on top of the rope to hold the boat, then settled down to rummaging through my supplies for something that took my fancy. Quite frankly, nothing did. It was all getting a bit boring, eating Pepperami sticks and pork pies followed by dried fruit. And that’s another thing. I was beginning to feel just a little bit queasy with all that diuretic fruit inside me. I had been nibbling bits of apricot and dates for four days now figuring it was an important source of energy and fibre but it was starting to have an undesired affect on me. I forced another Pepperami stick down. Then some cheese followed by a swig of my ginger cordial.

The river was broad and flat here. The house behind me notwithstanding, I was in splendid rural surroundings. The current was only visible midstream as it swept past but each side looked deceptively still. The far bank was bare of trees. Just reeds broken by outcrops of nettles with fields beyond. The sky was lightening but no blue was visible between the layers of grey. I rested for three quarters of an hour before packing up and pushing off into the stream. A little way on, a fisherman sat hunched under a green umbrella on the opposite bank. Keeping a respectful distance form his line and thinking I would try to learn something about his solitary pastime, I shouted out.

“What do you catch up here?” I was thinking roach, chub, pike. Maybe carp. I know nothing about this sort of fishing. They were just names to me, but I wondered if there were different fish this far upstream than down at, say, Teddington.

Without looking up, he replied: “fish.”

It was something in the way he said it that told me he wasn’t trying to be amusing in an ironic kind of way. He looked dour and miserable. Deciding to give him the benefit of the doubt, I pressed him a bit more.

“Ha ha! Do you know what they are called?” I asked innocently.

“Some of them.”

Oh dear, I thought, someone got out of bed the wrong side this morning.

“What, like ‘Collin or Trevor’? I suggested. “Or maybe ‘Smartass’?”

“F*ck off!”

He definitely wasn’t having a good day but I couldn’t help thinking that he wasn’t making much of an effort to be civil. After all, I had only tried to be friendly. To bridge the cultural gap between normal humans and saddos who sit in the rain for days on end because they have no friends.

“Well that would probably explain why you are sitting in the rain on your own, you miserable bastard,” I replied as I started paddling again. I had gone only a short distance when a stone landed with a splash in the water beside me. I didn’t have one to throw back, so I laughed out loud instead.

It started raining again as I paddled on for another hour towards Day’s lock. Under Shillingford bridge and through several meanders, passing lush islands and wet grassy banks. I noted a number of good camping spots here. On the islands as well as along the river bank. The prerequisite for a good camping spot being an easy mooring for the kayak and a bank low enough to hoist myself onto. Then a bit of flat space for a tent, hopefully hidden from possessive farmers by sheltering trees.

I also noted that this was the first part of my journey where the wind was at my back. It had started in gusts then settled down to a steady blow that propelled me forward and counteracted the strength of the current. Paddling on up past where the River Thame joins its big cousin, I finally reached Day’s lock, where I had learnt when I was planning this trip that the campsite on the lock island was closed this year due to tree felling. That had been a shame, as Day’s lock had been the original option for the end of my third day. With my well-researched itinerary now well behind schedule, that possibility was out of the question anyway. I was rethinking my day’s end as I went along, depending on the progress I was making. Today, I would be happy to get to Clifton Hampden. Then I would have to resign myself to reaching Lechlade on Saturday afternoon instead of Friday. Not too much of a problem, but I might have to reconsider the foray up to Cricklade.

The lock keeper was obviously sitting in his warm little shed, eating doughnuts and listening to Girls Aloud on his iPod when I pulled up at the gates. I waved my paddle in the air, hoping he would catch a glimpse of yellow above his Daily Mirror. I held it standing upright on the deck for a while, but still no signs of life from the lock. No torrent of water from the sluices to tell me he was on the job. Five minutes passed as I sat huddled in the wind and rain holding paddle aloft. Eventually I fumbled for my waterproof pouch and phoned him. I could hear the outside telephone bell on the lock island ringing loudly. Surely that would be heard over the music in his ears? Eventually Girls Aloud came to the end of their song and the telephone bell intruded. After half a dozen rings he answered the phone.

“Hello. Day’s lock.”

“Hello,” I replied testily. “If you look out your window, you’ll see one very small, bright orange kayak sitting in the rain, wet, miserable and waiting to come through your lock.”

Pause.

“Oh, right. I didn’t see you. I can only see big boats with masts. Coming.”

What? Masts? How many sailing boats does he get through here, I wondered? Perhaps his lock keeper training only stretched to square-riggers and feluccas? Wondering what he was talking about, I patiently waited while the gates yawned open.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Not such a nice day for it.” He was large and bewhiskered like a walrus and wrapped up in the traditional storm jacket under a sou’wester. He lumbered to the other end to open the sluices while I braced myself midstream for the torrent.

Day’s lock was at a sharp right angle bend in the river where it turned northward again after a temporary westerly stretch upstream of Shillingford. Then a great arcing curve that would take me to my campsite at Clifton Hampden. That was just under three miles away. It was twenty past two.

Across the fields on the right somewhere was the Roman town of Dorchester, a one-street village lined with antique shops, estate agents and pubs I had visited many times. The left bank was dominated by two hills, called Whittenham Clump and Castle Hill with its outline of an ancient fort. I had taken the children there to fly kites when they were younger and spending time with their father was an exciting adventure. From the top of the hill, the kites would launch easily into the sky, pulled by a wind that had raced unimpeded across the flat countryside beyond and was forced upwards by the steep slopes.

I wrote in my journal that night that the wind and rain set in as I exited Day’s lock for the final push around that sweeping curve to Clifton Hampden.

‘Rain. Westerly wind pushed me onto the right bank. Flat fields offered no barrier. Wanted to hug left bank where the current was less strong but was stung by nettles. Power strokes, pitiful progress. Bow of kayak pushed relentlessly to the right. Carolyn and I had walked around this stretch of the river last year when the skylarks were singing. A gentle amble in bright sunshine. Now a mad thrashing of the paddles. Head bowed, foggy spectacles, clothes sticking to me in sodden layers. Crawled sluggishly passed familiar gates and stiles. I recognised houses on the opposite bank from that sunny day in June. Rain turned torrential. Creating a haze over the surface of the water. Clouds so low there was no view ahead. Progress was interminable as I inched closer to the campsite. Somewhere on my right was Burcot village. Still no tell-tale view of the bridge at Clifton Hampden. Heard a car on a road. After a while, wind began dying down. Gusting. Finally saw the red brick bridge ahead. Reminiscent of Brunel, but not. Pointed arches. Built thirty years after Maidenhead, Gatehampton and Moulsford. Arrived campsite 3.45. Nearly 1 ½ hours to go three miles. Not good!’

Upstream of the bridge was a large area of lawn with a few caravans and tents. I cruised the length of the bank for a suitable embarkation point and settled on a small inlet under a large poplar tree. Beaching the nose of Karot up the muddy slope, I heaved myself carefully out and stepped into the warm water. Figuring a campsite called ‘Bridge House Campsite’ involved a house beside a bridge, I dragged Karot up onto the grass and wandered over to find the owner.

The lawn was sodden with the recent downpour. Ducks and chicken scattered underfoot. Treading carefully to avoid the puddles and the poo, I reached the house and knocked on the door. A voice like gravel cried out. “THE WINDOW!”

Standing back, I looked for the appropriate window. Not this side of the house. I walked around the other side and saw a small kitchen window open. Leaning forward on the sill to squint into the gloom, I saw a monster of a woman, red-faced and rolling with fat, sitting on a specially-designed, reinforced high chair, eating various items of food. I say ‘items’ because none of it was recognisable. Possibly bits of meat, or fruit. Wait, that might be bread. The house looked bare, unkempt. Stone floor, no ornaments. She barely paused in her eating.

“Twelve pounds,” she barked.

“Pardon?,” I said, taken aback at her brusqueness. “Oh yes, right. OK, I’ll get it. Where can I pitch my tent?”

“Late lunch,” she grunted.

“What? Yes. I‘ve already had mine,” I replied.

“Anywhere you like!”

“I’ll be ten minutes,” I replied, wanting to unpack and put my tent up first.

“Pub up the road!”

“Yes.” My well-researched itinerary had told me that the Barley Mow next door was another landmark in the Jerome K. Jerome saga. I backed off and returned to my kayak. The tent always came first. I wandered across the lawn looking at the shrubs and trees dotted around. I decided on a particularly leafy tree that would give me shelter from any wind and where the ground beneath was reasonably flat. I released the tent from its zippered nylon bag and it instantly ‘sproinged’ into shape. I could then lift it into any position or angle I wanted. When I was satisfied, I unzipped it and placed inside the dry bags I had brought up from the kayak.

It took only one more trip back across the lawn to the river’s edge to retrieve the rest of my possessions. Once meticulously stowed in their proper place inside the tent, I hung my wet nylon parka and buoyancy vest on a branch of the tree behind, blew up my Lilo and laid out my sleeping bag. As it wasn’t very cold, I had been using it unzipped as a duvet as it was more comfortable in the night. Lying back, I pulled off my wet clothes and changed into my warm and dry cotton ‘civvies’. I pulled a slightly soggy twenty pound note from the Velcro compartment of my buoyancy jacket and splashed across the grass back to the window. A heap of what looked like regurgitated sardines lay on the windowsill. For a cat, I assumed.

Jabba the Hutt lurched out of her high chair and waddled over to the window.

“Twenty pounds!” she barked, picking at the sardines and licking her fingers.

“What? I thought you said twelve?”

“Eight pounds change.”

“Oh. Right.” I was having trouble keeping up with this sophisticated rhetoric.

“Haven’t got a fiver. Skint.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but, um…”

“Have to give you coins.”

I asked if there was anywhere I could dry my clothes.

“Dryer in the toilet block. Takes pound coins. Showers, 20p.” As she had only given me pound coins, I would have to get some change at the Barley Mow. Tough.

Feeling refreshed and dry, I zipped up the tent, squelched across the soggy lawn with my laundry to the toilet block. I discovered that I could have a cold shower for free, so I locked the door, undressed and let the chill water wash off the labours of the day. After a painful shave with soap that didn’t quite lather, I quickly dried myself and dressed. I was shivering, a sure sign that my energy reserves were a bit low. The laundry room was at the other end of the toilet block. I loaded my saturated shirt, shorts, gloves and towel into the dryer. It would take twenty minutes on a pound coin, so I wandered out the gate and back along the road to check out the Barley Mow. It was only twenty metres away and it had a menu board of such range and variety, I wondered how I would get through it all. This was rapidly turning into my best night. A condemned man ordering his last meal couldn’t ask for more. I had also been told the campsite boasted a breakfast café, but couldn’t find it. I returned and walked between the tightly-packed mobile homes that occupied the far end of the grounds where I came across an old bloke tending his pot plants.

“No mate. Not that I know of. You’ve got the Barley Mow. They might do breakfasts.” I had been misinformed.

The clothes took another pound coin to dry, during which time I returned and sat at the door of my tent smoking a cigar and planning the next day’s itinerary.

By the time five o’clock came around, I was hungry and keen to relax in the pub. I lay my dry clothes in the tent, zipped it shut and walked back through the gate and up the road to the pub. The warm air embraced me. It smelt of soggy carpet and camaraderie even though there were no customers yet. It was a bit early for after work drinkers or for diners. I wanted to savour the occasion so I ordered a pint of cider.

“Can I get you something before the mad rush?” I asked the barmaid casually. She wasn’t a pretty blonde this time, but a pretty, dark-haired girl instead. She was slim yet buxom enough to fit the job description. I was glad I had taken the time to shave earlier and that I hadn’t yet lost the art of stringing a coherent sentence together.

“Well, thank you. I don’t mind if I do. I’ll join you with half a pint of cider,” she smiled.

“Is the kitchen open yet?” I was actually starving, but didn’t want to order too soon otherwise I would be back at my tent ready for bed before six o’clock.

“Yes,” she replied, handing me my pint and taking my money. “Will you be wanting to eat?”

“You bet, I’m starving,” I said, then added for no other reason than to keep the conversation going, “I’ve been paddling up the river all day.” I know it sounded a bit of showy-offy but I had nothing else to talk about except lock keepers and Brunel railway bridges. Call me old-fashioned, but she didn’t seem the sort of person who would be interested in Brunel’s brick arches. I may be wrong.

“I hope you’ve got something big and hearty?” I continued, trying to keep my eyes off her swelling cleavage as she handed me my change.

“Ooh yes, you’ll be wanting the chef’s pie then,” she suggested as she pulled her half pint. “Only it isn’t the chef’s, he walked out this morning. But it’s hearty, and big.”

I looked up. “He walked out? Why?”

“Oh you know, temperamental chefs!,” she said dismissively, taking the first sip of her cider. “He disagreed with the owner about something. I don’t know, but there was a big argument.”

“He was probably having trouble with such a big menu,” I ventured. “You know, too much cooking for too few people?”

“The owner isn’t happy. He has to do all the cooking himself now.”

“Where did the chef go?” I asked. “Has he been seen since the argument?”

“Oh no. He’s gone.”

“Not into the pie I hope,” I said. She laughed and took another sip of her cider. “I’ll get the menu for you.” I gulped down the rest of my drink while she returned with a large sheet of parchment-coloured card printed up with a myriad delicious dishes. We chatted some more about how far I had come today and what was it like on the river, until another customer came in and demanded her attention. I moved over to a small table by the window to enjoy the rest of my pint and study my map.

The river continued looping on south from Clifton Hampden, before meandering westward through Culham and on up north again through Abingdon. I had never been to Abingdon. Who had? Don’t they make carpets there? After Abingdon it was a long haul northwards up through Oxford to my next campsite at Eynsham on the northernmost reach of the Thames. That was twenty miles away. From there on, it would be a gentle wander through the green fields of the Cotswolds to Lechlade another twenty five miles further on. If everything went according to my continuously revised plan, I would arrive on Saturday evening instead of Friday but that was OK as it would be easy enough for Carolyn to reschedule the welcome party she was planning. On Saturday night I would stay at a campsite beside the Trout Inn a couple of hundred metres downstream of Lechlade. The next morning, Sunday, the plan went, I would pack up and make my foray upstream towards Cricklade as far as I could go.

I had attempted this before during a sunny day in summer when the water was warm and clear enough to swim in. I had paddled against an increasingly strong current as the river grew shallower and narrower the further upstream I pushed. I was still ten miles from Cricklade when I gave up and turned back, satisfied that I had taken the journey as far as I sensibly could. I glided back to Lechlade on a speeding stream in half the time it had taken me to go upstream. I was so warm and relaxed, enjoying the glorious isolation, that I stopped a couple of times along the way for a swim. I lay on the grass afterwards, letting the warm sun dry my skin.

I had visions of doing the same on Sunday, although I was realistic enough to realise the swim would not be on the agenda. I figured I would be able to return to Lechlade in plenty of time for lunch and to meet the welcome party at the Riverside pub.

The slim and thoroughly buxom barmaid came over to take my order. “So,” she smiled, “do you see anything you fancy?”

Biting my tongue, I said, “Hmmm, it all looks so tempting, but I’ll go for the pie then.” I ordered a starter of sardines done Mediterranean style and settled back while she topped up my glass again.

The pie was as warm and fulsome as the barmaid. A huge bowl of wholesome beef swimming in rich brown gravy underneath a flaky golden crust with green and orange vegetables piled precariously around the edge of the plate and accompanied by a generous side order of buttery mashed potato. I made short work of it, but must admit to struggling a bit towards the end. It was delicious and I was in paradise. It was barely dusk and I had no desire to return to my little tent so early.

I walked over to the bar and complimented the barmaid on her menu choice while she filled my glass again. It was a pleasant way to spend an evening. I was warm and dry, well fed and feeling fit. I am sure a charming little village with its church spire lay over the bridge and we were surrounded by beautiful countryside, although I was in no mood to go wandering now. That, for another time. I would return here one sunny summer’s day with Carolyn under less pressured circumstances and perhaps take a room upstairs in memory of tonight.

The bar was slowly filling up. A number of locals were sitting at tables and leaning on the bar engaged in lively conversation as if the whole purpose of their day was to be here doing this now. They looked relaxed and natural in that low-ceilinged, dimly-lit room surrounded by familiarity and friends. The barmaid finished her cider in between serving customers and came over to thank me again.

“No, thank you. It’s been nice talking to you,” I said, “I’m Andrew, by the way, just in case you read about me disappearing over a weir in the local paper.”

“Ooh, I hope not,” she replied. “I’m Rosie. I live in the village. Good luck with the rest of your trip.”

I left the embrace of Barley Mow pub and walked across the squelching grass to my tent. It was twilight and I hadn’t needed the torch I carried with me. I sat in the entrance of my tent smoking a cigar and sipping my whisky while a couple of ducks eyed me warily, wondering if I was going to offer treats or threats.

I received another visitor too. After offering the ducks no violence (I was, after all, well fed myself and not inclined to break out the orange sauce), they settled down on a puddle a little way off and watched as a woman approached from the caravan opposite.

“Hello, I saw you arrive in that kayak over there,” she said conversationally. She was dressed smartly, in her sixties and spoke with an accent from somewhere south of Watford Gap.

“Hello,” I replied, “yes, that’s me. Is that your caravan?”

“Yes. We saw you sitting here and thought you might need warming up. Would you like to come over for a drink?” She was being genuinely kind and I was touched. However, I could see me sitting in their warm caravan trying to maintain a conversation and slowly dozing off. I thought it would be rude to be that rude, so I regretfully declined her invitation. Besides, I didn’t want to break my routine. I was fed and relaxed and ready for sleep. We talked some more. Her name was Gill and she and her partner loved caravanning and walking and touring the country staying at campsites. They were from Kent. Nothing wrong with that, it just vindicated my guess at her accent.

The fourth night

After Gill left, I sat for a short while finishing my cigar and looking out over the expanse of lawn to the river beyond. The light was on in their caravan and shadows moved about behind the curtains. Further on, near the water’s edge, a van had pulled up earlier beside a tent. A young couple had got out and disappeared inside. Other than that, the campsite was devoid of any other signs of activity. The river slid inexorably on, carrying it’s brown burden down to London.

‘I get weary and sick of tryin’, I’m tired of livin’ and scared of dyin’. But ol’ man river, he just keeps rollin’ along’.

Sun or rain. Night or day. Relentlessly rolling along.

I sat there listening to the sounds of the night and wondering what the world was doing beyond the river banks. My world was confined to the thoughts in my head and my thoughts never ranged beyond the reeds and trees on my left and right. A breeze stirred the leaves above me and drops of water splattered noisily onto the taut nylon. A car crossed the bridge beyond the river bank where the Karot was lying. Its headlights casting a green illumination on the underside of the willow trees that lined the opposite bank.

I had heard no news for four days yet everything still seemed to be operating OK. The locks opened and closed the same as they presumably did last week when the media was weighing me down by the melancholies of the ‘credit crunch’ and impending recession. The sun would still rise tomorrow, albeit covered by a blanket of grey nimbostratus clouds. Carolyn would wake in the morning, alone, thinking of me as I have been waking, alone, thinking of her. I was looking forward to Lechlade.

For some unaccountable reason the ducks in the puddle in front of me took it upon themselves to wake up and make a fuss. With gentle quacking, the pair dithered for a while before tentatively deciding that I was worth another investigation. They waddled closer looking for food or warmth. They would get neither, but it was nice to have their company. I talked to them softly, expecting some form of understanding on their behalf, but they just looked at me stupidly and murmured a few desultory quacks to each other before twitching their tails and moving further afield for sustenance. Try the caravan, I suggested, blowing a puff of smoke in their direction.

It was still dusk when I crawled into the tent and zipped it shut. I had never gone to bed so early, but I didn’t want Gill in the caravan to think I was making excuses when I said I was tired. Besides, the time between paddling and sleeping was a rare moment of unlaboured reflection. I could think over the incidents of the day then drop off to a colourful sleep where characters and events scrambled to find their right places in my brain before settling down as comfortable memories.

It had been a long wet slog today. From my ‘free’ camp at Whitchurch lock, I had risen early to cover the big northward climb through Goring, Wallingford and Benson, past the confluence of the River Thame and under two Brunel bridges to rest on the shoulder of the river at Clifton Hampden. It had been a day of meetings and not-quite-met-monsters. I had talked to walkers and wankers, Germans in costumes and girls in canoes, and wandered off the map into uncharted territory before arriving here and being embraced into the munificent bosom of Jabba the Hutt. Yet I had only travelled seventeen miles. It was the shortest day so far.

I often wondered, as I was splashing along, if any of my children would have maintained the pace I was keeping if one of them had joined me. They were all big enough. In fact, Ed had said that he wanted to join me, but the idea fizzled out under the unremitting pressure of his active social life. Other than a short paddle at my canoe club in Windsor one weekend in summer, he subsequently hadn’t found time in his diary to come out on the river again with me. It would have been good. Maybe he’ll want to paddle the Thames when he is older and, remembering that his old dad had done it once, invite me to join him?

I plugged in my iPod and lay in my warm tent letting Meat Loaf and Duffy serenade me to sleep and wondering what tomorrow held in store.

Chapter Three

2008-12-22T06:50:00.000-08:00

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Epilogue

Day Three

Alligators and ghosts

It wasn’t. I awoke the next morning to the same oppressive sky. After a banana, a muesli bar and a tin of baked beans for breakfast, I used the toilet block before decamping and packing the Karot. I was out of the side channel and paddling up flat water by seven thirty. Thinking I must get to Wargrave quickly so as to make up lost time, then forge on to Benson tonight, I almost missed the lock keeper walking across the weir bridge over to my right. He had a small dog with him and waved over to me. To be honest, I don’t remember what he looked like from the previous night, but I raised my paddle in acknowledgement just in case. Then he confirmed to me that he must be the lock keeper by shouting across to me: “Did you remember the key?”

“Of course,” I shouted back. “Above the door.” I didn’t break stroke as I was keen to keep moving, but he seemed satisfied. I had placed the key on the top of the door frame as instructed after I had used the bathroom and packed the Karot. There was only one other tent, a large family one, around the other side of the small wood but I hadn’t seen any comings or goings since I arrived. Once everything was stowed away and I had crossed the bridge to return the key, I relocked the heavy iron gate with the massive padlock and dropped into the Karot.

I was soon paddling between tree-lined river banks and passing under the shadow of Danesfield house on my way to Hambleden lock. The serpentine river snaked between flat fields and wood-covered hills. It was a peaceful time of day, still and strangely empty. Just me and the river. That’s the thing about this trip, I thought. My universe had shrunk to the confines of the river bank, focusing my mind on the immediate vicinity. There may be villages, towns and cities beyond, but they didn’t impinge on my reality. Like a blinkered horse, I progressed through the landscape in blissful ignorance of the world beyond. Large cities were only a distant hum beyond my horizon. Adjacent villages were only visible as a church spire behind sheltering trees - a small part of the silently passing landscape.

Sometimes, walkers or fishermen confronted my silent world. On several occasions, I had come around a bend, hugging the bank, only to draw up abruptly as I encountered long fishing poles thrusting out from the bank. With a bit of furious back-paddling, I swung out into the channel to give them a wide birth, only occasionally getting a nod of thanks in return.

On one occasion on the stretch up to Hambleden, I rounded a bend when a stick splashed in the water in front of me.

“Oops, sorry,” a lady on the towpath exclaimed. She was walking her dog and was getting it to fetch. “I didn’t see you.” She was an attractive blonde. In her forties, slim, wearing jeans, a quilted jacket and a smile.

“That’s OK. As long as you don’t expect me to fetch it,” I said, slowing down respectfully. The dog had blissfully plunged in and returned to the bank where it dropped the stick at the lady’s feet and shook the water off its coat. She stepped back, gasping at the shower of water. The dog pranced happily around her encouraging her to throw the stick again. She picked it up and looked up at me.

“You can if you want to,” she smiled. “You look as though you can handle the water,”

“Ha ha, thank you,” I replied. “You look pretty fit yourself.”

She smiled and threw the stick beside my boat. I laughed, shouted “Missed!” and powered on to Hambleden Lock, wondering why there seemed to be a surfeit of attractive blondes on this trip. I heard, then saw, flocks of ring-necked parakeets shrieking overhead. There’s quite a population of these extravagant escapees in the south of England where they have been breeding successfully for decades. We get them around Maidenhead and I know there’s a big population in Windsor Great Park. They originated in Kent where they escaped from private collections and have spread north and west across the country since.

The still morning delivered more denizens of the river. Several jays, our most colourful crow, flashed past overhead and disappeared into a wooded island midstream. A short while later, having just emerged around a bend, a green woodpecker with its distinctive undulating flight cut across the water ahead of me and disappeared into the dense foliage of a large oak.

I paddled on. The metronomic splish splash of my paddles lulled me into a poetic reverie. Running out of things to occupy my mind, I turned to the difficult task of putting a more onomatopoeic sound to the noise of the paddles. ‘Splash’ was a start, as was ‘splish’. But they failed to capture the surging sound, the churning noise, as the paddle pulled backwards through the water. Maybe a kind of amalgam of ‘surge’ and ‘churn’? ‘Surn’? ‘Churgh’?

I slid past several islands on the way to Hambleden lock. I noted that one in particular would have been ideal for camping because it had grassy pull-up places used by large river craft for overnight moorings.

I continued my rhythmic strokes and, with nothing better to occupy my peaceful mind, I felt a little ditty coming on. I played with the words in my head. Slowly, verse at a time, I began to build up something that fell into rhythm with my motion and the relentless ‘splurgh’ of the paddles.

Splish splash
Ahead I dash
To never stop
Nor ever drop
To carry on
And on and on
Further on
And then some more
Always strong
Always sure

Splurgh, splurgh
I forward surge
Against the tide
I gamely glide
Passing swan
I carry on
Passing boat
And duck
I note
My arms don’t tire
No aching dire

Splish splash
My paddles flash
I feel so good
I knew I would
Thru waters cool
My paddles pull
O’er surface green
I live my dream
To make a splash
To be quite rash
Up and down
My dipping oar
Drives my hopes
In rhythmic score

Splurgh splurgh
I hum my dirge
About the tide
And testing ride
I had the thought
As well I ought
That the hard way on
Is better done
Than easy life
That’s never fought
Nor easy race
That’s always won

Splish splash
I’ll have a bash
To end my strife
With goal achieved
And live my life
A man believed

I ran out of rhyme at this point and moved my attention to the names of boats once more. I was passing marinas and small jetties lined with moored craft. I had already noted ‘Fuda’, ‘Freda’ and ‘Fifibelle’ today before I came across an enclave of working class names: ‘Robbo’, ‘Len’ and ‘Matt’. They sat solid and self-effacing, with their sleeves rolled up ready for a bit of hard graft. Narrow boats slid silently downstream trailing a cloud of blue smoke. I had passed many with romantic names of Celtic origin. ‘Penpergwm’ and ‘Pantygasseg’ after villages in some Welsh valley. Many, such as ‘Mallard’, ‘Bandy Coot’, ‘Corncrake’ and ‘Widgeon’ had water fowl connections. The drivers always gave me a cheery wave or shouted some jokey remark such as: “You’ll go faster backwards if you stop paddling!” Or: “No wonder you’re not getting anywhere, you’ve lost your motor!” Some of these traditional craft were obviously holiday hires, a fact that was proven watching the occupants clumsily negotiating a lock. Others were riparian residences that plied the waterways on an endless journey for the next mooring. These were driven by grizzled, unshaven men in baggy moleskin trousers and tartan shirts, usually with small dogs standing statuesque on the roof.

I covered the four miles to Hambleden lock in one hour and forty minutes. Not exactly fast, but the current seemed to be pushing harder. I looked at the sky: heavy, white rain-bearing cumulus clouds drifted across an otherwise blue sky. There’s still the possibility that it will pass overhead, dump its burden further north and leave me with fine weather this afternoon and for the remainder of the trip.

At Hambleden lock, I knew there was a swift current from a series of long weirs off to the right. I had negotiated it one day back in June when we had some particularly heavy rain for a few days and the Thames was swollen and turbulent with brown floodwaters streaming in from the dozens of tributaries that laced the countryside. As I had approached, the force of the weir stream had hit my kayak and pushed me towards the left bank. It had taken all my strength then to keep on course and maintain forward momentum. But it was a day trip and had been an adventure with no consequences, so it didn’t matter if I made it or not. I did, though, grunting and sweating until I reached the lock.

Today, the weir stream was as strong as it was in June, but I had the advantage of knowing it was there and preparing myself by sneaking up on it from the right bank before plunging through the cross current and reaching the shelter of the mooring jetty before it swept me against the opposite side. I had to wake up the lock keeper though, even though it was past nine o’clock. There is a fold-down sign on lock gates that tells river users if the lock keeper is on duty or not. Folded down to reveal the orange disc for no, he’s not on duty. Folded up covering itself, and therefore white, for yes, he is available to operate the lock. The orange disc was still displayed. It seems they knock off early and start late in this neck of the woods. After whistling loudly and waiting patiently for five minutes, I accepted that he wasn’t going to show, so I reluctantly climbed out of the Karot and heaved myself onto the jetty. I tied the nose rope to a bollard and trotted up the steps to see who was around. He walked out of his comfortable little shed as I reached the top step.

“I didn’t think you were here,” I said. “Your orange board is still showing.”

“Sorry, didn’t see you there,” he replied.

“I can do the gates if you like,” I offered. I was a dab hand with lock gates now, after operating them at Old Windsor.

“No, that’s OK, I’ll do them. Where are you off to?” he asked as he pressed the button that opened the downstream sluices.

“Lechlade. I’m paddling up the Thames for charity. Started at Teddington on Monday.” I told him as I turned to walk down the steps to the Karot, grimacing as I heard the familiar: “Most people do it the other way”.

Once out the other side, I continued around the great arching curve of the river at Remenham where I encountered more rowers and scullers out practising their sport. Not school children these, but fit-looking girls and muscular men intent on their strokes and moving at a pace I could only envy, even going upstream. It occurred to me that they were from the famous Leander Rowing Club at Henley ahead. I made steady progress around that bend, then up the long mile of the Henley Regatta course to the bridge and the familiar Little Angel pub on the other side. It was just gone ten o’clock when I entered Marsh Lock another mile further on.

I realised that I was travelling through smaller and smaller towns as I progressed. Windsor was smaller than London. Maidenhead was smaller than Windsor. Marlow smaller than Maidenhead, and Henley smaller still. Then on an ever-decreasing scale, I would pass through Sonning, Benson and Eynsham. Of course Reading up ahead was an unhelpful anomaly and illustrious Oxford, although large, could be excused anything. Oxford would be my last urban sprawl before reaching the sun-kissed wheat fields and rural splendour of the Cotswolds where otters romped and damselflies danced along the river banks. In this Oxfordshire idyll, the Thames took on a much more humble aspect, not yet the huge historic waterway known to the world, but rather an unassuming local stream largely untouched by man. No urban sprawl or unsightly industry along the river bank. No noise or nuisance. Just sparkling waters tinkling through a pastoral paradise.

It was ten thirty and I didn’t have to wake the lock keeper up at Marsh Lock. He was a she, another assistant, she informed me. Marsh Lock seemed quite narrow, hard up against the left bank and overshadowed by towering trees. A wide weir raged noisily off to the right and a long, high footbridge connected the lock island to the Henley bank. I went through by myself, chatting to the lady as she walked its length to operate the buttons that opened the head sluice and gate. I steadied the boat as the turbulent water rushed towards me, all the time telling her about my trip and exchanging pleasantries. The water was flat and peaceful as I glided out. It was always a joy to be on the upstream side of a lock where the waters were calmer, stilled, as they were, by the gates and the weir system. Once released downstream, the current became much more urgent for half a mile of so until it once again settled down to a more sedate pace.

Half a mile upstream of Marsh Lock was the Hennerton backwater, a narrow side stream that left the main river and skirted around the back of a large island to enter the Thames another mile further on. I decided to take it, hoping that my well-researched itinerary was accurate when it said it was canoable. Once I pulled off the main stream and plunged into its dappled shade, the wind dropped and an eerie stillness settled around me. There was no discernable current and the dank, green smell of rotting vegetation hung in the air.

You know those American films set in the Everglades where an unwitting hero paddles through a dripping swamp hung with vines and ringing to the sounds of cicadas, only to be attacked by a giant alligator he has to wrestle before fighting his way to shore and rescuing his girlfriend who is being tortured by a family of slack-jawed in-breds? Well, it was like that, in a more gentle, English way. And without the alligator. Or the in-breds. Hopefully. It probably wasn’t even deep enough for an alligator of any threatening size and the ducks seemed quite happy to float on the surface of the clear, clean water.

After a time of silent, gentle paddling, I came to smooth, manicured lawns that rolled down to the bank. Set high up at the back, large expensive houses gazed commandingly over the countryside. Gardeners were at work in several of them, mowing acres of grass and trimming hedges. I paddled silently on, not wanting to disturb the tranquillity or the alligators. On the right was the broad flat island created by the backwater, where cows grazed and birds flew between the trees. A quick flash caught my eye and I looked up just in time to see a hobby wheeling above the treetops and out over the fields to disappear across the river beyond. That’s another ‘tick’ for this trip. A ‘B-list’ bird. Birds on my ‘B-list’ birds are not particularly rare or out of season in any way, but nevertheless always a joy to see. The hobby joined a list that so far included green woodpeckers, grey wagtails and jays; flashy but shy birds you need patience to spot. ‘B-listers’ were a cut above the ubiquitous ‘C-list’ birds such as mallards, swans and wood pigeons that surround us every day. I wasn’t expecting to see any A-list birds. I would have to go to the Isles of Scilly in spring to see those.

The gentle backwater wound its way through willows and reeds and saucer-like lily pads, past a pleasure craft small enough to navigate the narrow channel. It was a relaxing and other-worldly experience, only tempered by a nagging doubt that I wouldn’t be able to enter the Thames upstream. That there was a weir or some sort of low bridge or other man-made blockage that would force me to turn back. An irritated duck quacked at me as I slid silently by. I quacked back as it floated to the side of the stream out of my way. It returned my sound with another, more muted quack. Not realising I could speak ‘duck’, I quacked again, twice. It fixed me with a quizzical eye from the safety of the bank and decided to let my last comment pass. It was obviously aware that I was the alpha duck here and wasn’t prepared to debate the point.

I continued on. I had lifted the skeg to negotiate better the tight zigs-zags between private back gardens and secluded houses hidden amongst the willows. The stream was little more that a shallow ditch at some points and my paddles dragged the grass and lilies that grew on the bottom.

After twenty minutes, I came to a low arched footbridge which I could only just duck under as I glided through and out into a working marina where boats were moored along both banks. Up ahead was the St George and the Dragon pub at Wargrave where I would pause for morning tea. It was a quarter past eleven and I had only eaten a banana and a muesli bar for breakfast at Hurley Lock that morning. Still sheltered from the main stream by a small island, I paddled the few hundred metres to the mooring steps below the pub. It was intermittently sunny and cloudy with a gusting wind that sent crazed patterns skimming across the water. I ate another muesli bar and a pork pie on the steps. A young lad was mowing the grass verge behind me and the smell brought back memories of childhood. I had earned my pocket money mowing our family lawn and washing my father and mother’s cars. I had hated it when dad had bought a large American ‘Rambler’. It was so wide, I couldn’t even reach across the roof and didn’t think it was fair that I was being paid the same money as his previous, smaller, Vauxhall.

Upstream a short distance was Shiplake lock. This was where I was going to start my theoretical day but it was already eleven thirty and to set the clock to zero now would mean I would have to paddle until seven thirty to reach the destination I had scheduled. I had my doubts I could do that on top of the four hours I had already put in. Besides, I would have to paddle the last hour or so in twilight and pitch my tent in the dark; something I didn’t relish. I knew I would have to rethink my itinerary yet again and either find a closer campsite or free camp somewhere along the way. I knew free camping, in itself, wouldn’t be difficult as there were plenty of islands and fields after Reading which I could surely reach.

I wasn’t looking forward to Shiplake Lock. It was here that my mistrust of lock keepers originated. I had paddled up to it on a couple of occasions in the past with the intention of going through, only to have the lock keeper ignore me. The first time, I was a hundred metres behind a boat that was entering from downstream, so I paddled like mad to catch up only to see the gates swing closed behind it when I was only a short distance away. All my whistling and shouting didn’t seem to attract the lock keeper’s attention. On another weekend in summer, the gates were already shut so I waited tactfully downstream to see if anything came through from upstream. After 10 minutes, I figured not. I couldn’t rouse the lock keeper that time either nor could I be bothered to get out and see if he was around, so I turned and headed back to Marsh Lock at Henley where I had parked my car.

Hoping I wouldn’t have a rude welcome this time, I paddled towards the lock in an increasingly blustery head wind. As I rounded the bend, I spied a large floating gin palace lumbering slowly towards the lock. Here we go, I thought, as I increased my speed, pulling harder on the paddles to catch up. I’ll show that lock keeper. He can’t stop me from getting through the lock if I ride tandem with a boat. I leant forward to get a stronger pull on the paddle. In this position, I could not only put more leverage into the stroke, but increase the length and therefore my speed. Normally I lean back so the top of the seat supports the small of my back and puts less strain on it over an eight hour paddling day. However, this was different. After a few minutes I was actually gaining on the boat as it crept slowly towards the lock. I could see that the gates were already open in anticipation. But something was wrong. The boat swung unexpectedly to one side, before righting itself and swinging precariously in the other direction. I was behind it now and the lock keeper was standing above me overseeing the operation.

“Keep back!” he shouted. “Hold up over there!” I pulled up against the mooring jetty while the huge pleasure craft hit the reverse throttle in a cloud of diesel. Its nose was touching the side of the gate and a man was trying to push it free as it lurched forward again and attempted to swing right. As the boat tentatively inched its way inside the lock, scraping the lock wall along the way, the lock keeper shouted something else at me. I released my hold on the jetty and pushed off into the lock behind the boat.

“See what I mean,” he said as the boat pulled forward into the lock. I realised he was referring to the amateur attempt at steering the large craft. I noticed that the woman was driving and her husband fending off. That’s not something that usually happens on the water. It’s usually the only time brow-beaten men can dress in uniforms and order their wives about. Not so here. He seemed content to take a back seat and let the wife do the driving. Albeit not very well. Maybe he was giving her lessons, I thought. The lock keeper rolled his eyes at me.

“Yes,” I said conspiratorially. “Not the best bit of navigating I’ve seen today. I’ll stay back here shall I?”

Once the gates were shut and the water had risen to near full, I inched my way forward, intending to break free ahead of the boat. Sure enough, I was out of the lock and a few hundred metres upstream before it had managed to exit the gates. I could only imagine what the conversation must have been like on board that day.

On the other side of the lock, the sky opened up and the rain began falling in great heavy drops that calmed the turbulent river and created concentric ringlets across its surface. In a few seconds, my glasses were dripping with water and vision became difficult. The gin palace motored idly past, its occupants relaxed and dry, waving cheerily. I thought I should put on my nylon parka. I looked along the bank for a place to pull up so I wouldn’t be left drifting back downstream as I got dressed. I spied a low footbridge over a ditch that entered the river ahead. I swung the bow into the gap and edged under the sheltering arch where I pulled my parka out from under my splash guard and put it on over my sodden life vest. The hood gave my glasses some protection. Not ever wanting to give in to the rain (I had a feeling there would be more of it to come) lest I waste valuable time from my schedule, I immediately pushed backwards out into the torrent in time to see through the curtain of rain a large party boat drift past downstream on its way to Henley where, no doubt, the revellers would disembark to continue their merry-making in a warm hotel. Misty figures on deck under the sheltering awning looked down on me casually, perhaps wondering what a bright orange kayak was doing out in this weather – perhaps not. Just looking at me and then at the swans that were moving toward shelter at the side of the river behind me. Then perhaps casually observing the rolling lawn that ran up to Shiplake House and the college before idly turning to their companions and refilling their glasses.

I battled on to Sonning lock in the rain. It didn’t make much difference to my progress, it just made it wet. The thing with Sonning is that the channel divides, with one fork going off to the right under a high footbridge that boats wouldn’t have too much difficulty passing under. The channel straight ahead passed under triple-arched Sonning road bridge, built in 1775 by the way, which was quite low and narrow. Unfortunately, the Environment Agency must have run out of funding here, as they couldn’t afford a simple sign directing river users up the correct channel. I had learnt the hard way earlier in the summer when I thought the main channel went off to the right towards the French Horn Hotel & Restaurant. I was wrong. After several hundred metres, I came to a large turbulent pool surrounded by impenetrable banks of weirs. Luckily I wasn’t in a hurry and could return downstream to take the correct channel under the arched brick bridge. Oh how I loved the thought of paddling downstream. No effort, no wind or rain in my face. Time to pause and rest and still make progress as I drifted indolently with the current, enjoying the wildlife, observing the changing landscape.

I shook these mutinous thoughts aside and continued on upstream under Sonning Bridge. The other thing about Sonning Bridge is that it provides a man-made barrier for the larger boats that wouldn’t fit under its low arches. The woman driver was still at the wheel as the gin palace turned in defeat and headed back downstream. I crawled through and pressed on upstream to Sonning lock. It was a quarter past eleven.

“Hold on to the chains,” the lock keeper ordered.

“That’s OK,” I replied. “I prefer being midstream,” The chains hung down the sides of the lock like the equipment in some medieval torture chamber, dripping with green slime and ominously threatening. I didn’t want to soil my gloves.

“No, I’d rather you held on to the chains please.” Oh, here we go, I thought. Someone who has never sat in a kayak telling me how to do it.

“No, really, I’m OK,” I insisted. “I have done this before you know.” This is my nineteenth lock, including two duck sluices, so I knew I could handle his little lock without holding onto the chains. The lock keeper glowered down at me.

“I’m sorry, but I must insist. It’s the law,” he replied.

The law?! Who makes a law that tells a kayaker to hold on to the chains in a Thames lock? It might be a recommendation or even good advice, but I doubted there was such a law. It sounded more like a little Hitler complex to me and I didn’t like being told what to do by someone who thought pushing buttons was taxing.

“So let’s get this straight. You’re telling me that I would be breaking the law by not holding on to the chains?”

“Yes sir.”

This was a fruitless argument and I realised that I didn’t have time to play it out. What’s more, a few weeks earlier I had heard on the news about a lock keeper who had phoned the police when a canoeist went through his lock without paying some sort of fee. I’m not sure what this ‘fee’ was, but the police had arrived and locked this guy up for 24 hours and confiscated his boat all for the sake of a reported £4. I bet that lock keeper was patting himself on the back for saving humanity from terrorist paddlers.

Anyway, I had made my point, so I laughed in disbelief and paddled to the side where I reluctantly grasped the slippery chain. The lock keeper walked to the top end to open the upstream sluices. As the gates opened, I washed the slime off my hand in the water before exiting. “Have a nice day,” I shouted.

It continued raining lightly as I passed an island and several bends in the river towards the biggest urban conurbation of my journey outside of London. Not that you would know you were passing through Reading. A long row of large glass and steel buildings presented themselves across the river meadow. I recognised the out-of-town business park where I had been employed in the marketing department of a large multi-national for three months earlier in the year. A break in the clouds heralded a brief break in the rain as I glided past those dark satanic mills and on past the giant gasometers next door.

It was then that I came across the ghost lock. Just past the gasometers on my left, the Kennet & Avon canal joined the Thames after a long and gentle meander through the shires. After passing through a final lock and under a railway bridge, it emerged into the Thames between concrete walls amongst a confusion of boats. For some reason that makes no sense to me, this final lock, called Blake’s lock, was counted as one of the forty five locks on the non-tidal Thames. As I hadn’t actually used Teddington lock, I would only be passing through forty four on my trip. Yet when I highlighted them on my Ordnance Survey maps, the number only came to forty three. I went through the named list of locks from the Environment Agency handbook and carefully ticked them off as I traced the course of the river. That’s when I arrived at the ‘Blake’s Anomaly’ in Reading. It wasn’t actually on the Thames and I wouldn’t actually be going under it. So as far as I was concerned, it didn’t exist. It was a ghost lock.

I continued on past a Tesco sign on the riverbank that hinted at a large supermarket behind, past Kings Meadow and finally pulled up to Caversham lock. I went through it with none of the histrionics of the previous lock and wasn’t ordered to hold the chains. I had lunch above the lock on the grass towpath almost under Reading Bridge (built in 1923). A pork pie, baked beans and some Roses chocolate. A couple of kids wearing hoodies walked along the towpath towards me. They can’t have been more than fourteen. I was sitting a few metres away from the Karot in a rare splash of sunshine. On the grass beside the Karot was my bag of food and my day bag containing my Swiss army knife, waterproof hat, polarised sunglasses and my money. The kids paused in their stride as they drew level, looking at me then at the items on the bank a short distance away - gauging whether they could snatch anything and run before I could stop them. I couldn’t believe it. They were fourteen year old kids. I looked at them with what I thought was my best confident, yet threatening, glare. They continued walking past, slowly, whispering to each other and casting conspiratorial glances at the items on the riverbank. I stood up to show them my full majesty of my stature. Hopefully they were seeing a fit-looking bloke who looked as though he would take them on and toss them in the Thames. A short way past my belongings, they paused and tried to look nonchalant. Cheeky little buggers! I thought. Deciding to play it safe, I idled casually back to my bag and took out my hat. It was a wide-rimmed oilskin affair that kept the rain off my glasses. The kids walked on and I began loading up the Karot, feeling not quite as threatening and awesome as I would have liked.

It was three o’clock and I had mentally revised my schedule to get to the campsite at Cleeve lock six miles before Benson. However, I had Mapledurham, Whitchurch and Goring locks to negotiate before that. I estimated four to five hours taking into account waiting at locks for the gates to open. That would be eight o’clock at best. I wasn’t sure that was possible now.

I love that feeling of security I get when I drop into the snug little cockpit and fasten the splash deck securely around me. I feel as if I could go on forever and look for new rivers to conquer. I surged past the island before sweeping under Caversham Bridge with its muted drone of cars above. A grey blanket was sliding across the sky from the west covering the last vestige of blue. The wind was picking up. I knew I was leaving Reading (no big loss) as industrial estates and business parks gave way to the open fields and wooded hills beyond. Mapledurham was four and a half miles away and I hunkered down for a long haul against the current and the wind.

I followed the curving river around to the left where I was joined by the railway line on its way to Didcot where it branched off to Bristol and Birmingham. Trains seemed to thunder past every minute. Goods trains and sleek passenger carriages. It reminded me of the steady departure of flights from Heathrow when I was sitting in the door of my tent on Old Windsor lock that first night. Then, my whisky-induced stupor had romanticised those flying beast, but now the trains were a grating distraction that only added to my annoyance at wind and current. I was headed up a long straight expanse of river with the wind funnelling down it into my face. I clung to the bank scarcely making any progress. On several occasions, my paddle was caught in the reeds that grew close to the bank. I pulled my broad-brimmed oilskin hat onto my head to keep the rain off my glasses.

It seemed to take an age to complete the length of that straight bit. I had developed a continuous rolling stroke to keep me moving forward. This ensured there was no pause in between pulls of the paddle when the stream would stall my forward motion. I kept this up for forty five minutes until I reached a marina off to my left where the river hooked to the right before turning again into Mapledurham lock. I left the rumbling railway line and cut across the stream to the opposite bank. The final stretch up to the tight little lock at Mapledurham was completed in fifteen minutes. It was twenty to five. One hour forty minutes to go four and a half miles. Pathetic. I raged at the wind and sky. “Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!” I shouted with each stroke. I had covered that distance in half the time last month. The sky lowered down on me, casting a bruised brown glow on my world.

I limped through the lock gates, impatient to camp before darkness fell.

It took me an hour to plough on to the lock at Whitchurch. The wind was no longer gusting but a constant force in my face for the remaining two miles of that sweeping leftward arch. Past endless and seemingly unmoving trees lining the river bank. Past flat fields and wretched geese sheltering from the rain. I swear it took me a full ten minutes to pass one particular landmark. I was hugging the left bank, cursing the fact that this side of the river wasn’t lined with sheltering trees, and heading for a small island. It was only a few metres long, populated with no more than a few trees and lined with overhanging nettles. I paddled on rhythmically, my sprained right wrist sending shafts of pain up my arm at each pull. I had taken to counting my strokes. Once I got to a hundred, I would pause, flex my wrist and hang it in the soothing water, and carry on. I had lost interest in my surroundings, save getting past that island. Eventually I drew level with it. Leaning forward, rain dripping off the rim of my hat, I counted another hundred strokes. Then another. Then looking up to see the island was still beside me. It was depressing. I could do better than that.

I eventually passed the island and reached Whitchurch Lock. The Reading suburb of Pangbourne was on the left bank and the Berkshire village of Whitchurch was on the right. So was the lock. I lurched under the bridge that carried the A471 and slid gratefully through the lock gates. It was six o’clock and the light was failing. The lock keeper, wearing a sou’wester and storm jacket, stood high on the lock walls operating the gates in the rain. I asked him if there was any camping on the island. My well-researched itinerary told me there wasn’t, but I thought it was worth the try. Maybe he would take pity on me and invite me into his cottage to dry myself by a nice warm fire. No such luck. He suggested anywhere on the stretch of the river ahead. Not official, mind, he pointed out, but plenty of places to pitch a tent on the left bank, on the Beale Estate, about a mile upstream.

As I paddled slowly out of the gates, I noticed the houses lining the left bank ahead. I would have to continue past those and around the bend in the rain before I could even begin looking for a camp site. On the right, however, were trees broken by little pull-in areas that previous vessels had used for temporary moorings. This looked much more likely. More to the point, much more immediate. I slid slowly along the tree-lined bank looking for a suitable opening. I started relaxing as my paddling became less aggressive and my muscles slowly loosened. Soon I found the small opening I was looking for. I was only a short distance upstream of the lock and opposite the long ridge of hills looming across the river. I swung in under the sheltering trees where the bank shelved at water level to create a low, flat platform ideal for the tent. I pulled in beside it and lifted myself out of the Karot for the first time in three hours. The rain hadn’t penetrated the tree canopy much, so the grass beneath was not yet sodden. I dragged the boat onto the land and up the sloping bank behind, where I lay it in the grass under a tree. I wanted to set up camp quickly in case the rain began falling in earnest. It took me only five minutes to open the tent out on the low shelf directly by the water’s edge and unpack my possessions. I quickly stripped off my damp shorts and shirt and changed into my reassuringly dry cottons.

The third night

It was a miserable night full of noises and rain. I tossed and turned on my plastic Lilo, waking myself with each squeaky turn. I dreamt fitfully of holidays in New Zealand. Paddling to the pub up an estuary near my brother’s bach. Weird dreams in which I raced him back to the house only to find that he had taken a shortcut and was barbecuing fish when I arrived. I couldn’t get out of my kayak, so I spent the evening sitting in the cockpit on the beach eating mussels I scooped out of the sand beside me.

At one point in the night the drizzle had turned to a steady downpour which played noisily on the tent. But it was the din of the trains that intruded most. Every five minutes, it seemed, another would rumble along the line on the opposite bank, the clatter of steel wheels on steel track carrying across the flat surface of the river. No sooner had one faded into a quiet murmur in the distance, than the next would rumble past.

I repeatedly emerged and sunk into periods of sleep where I found my children and Carolyn playing cards on an aeroplane. “Dad can’t play if he’s not here,” Oliver said with authority. Carolyn dealt the cards and the children lined up in the aisle taking turns at playing their hand. Edmund came forward and placed his card on the pile, except it wasn’t a card, it was photo of his bedroom, showing me what posters he had on his walls and where he sat to do his homework. “Come on Dad, you can do it,” he said enigmatically. Next it was Roddy’s turn. Except it was a pre-pubescent Roddy as he was five years ago with curly hair; playful and cute. Everybody loves Roddy. “I love Roddy-dods,” Amelia said. “He’s sooooo cute!” and pinched his cheeks. Roddy said, “Snap!” and picked up the pile of cards. “I win,” he said triumphantly, adding: “Again.” In those days, Roddy took pride in his success at school, in reading, in his knowledge. I had always known that Roddy had a brain the size of a planet. Oliver, too, had gone on to get a masters in rocket science at Manchester university. A ‘Master of Physics with Astrophysics’.

Amelia took Carolyn’s cards and began playing them. “I’ll play for Daddy,” she said and placed a map in front of everyone. “See if you can find where he is,” she said. Carolyn said, “I haven’t seen him for days. He’s hiding somewhere,” and she began to cry. I felt sad. I tried to comfort her but she couldn’t hear me. Oliver said, “He’s always doing that.” I wanted to say that I didn’t, but the rattling roar of the aeroplane’s engines drowned out my protestations. I yearned to be there, to hug and comfort them. To let them know that it wasn’t my fault I was on the river. It was something I had to do. There were things they didn’t know about that forced me to say goodbye at the airport. How could they know that things happen despite all our efforts to prevent them? Things outside my control. I saw them walking down the ramp to board the plane while I was led away by uniformed airport security guards who tied me on to the roof of their car and drove me to the river. I tried phoning Oliver, but he couldn’t hear the ring over the noise of the engines. I rang and rang but he didn’t answer. It was a strange ring tone. It sounded like a series of soft honks. ‘Honk’, ‘honk’, then ‘honk’, ‘honk’ again. Slowly the noise of the engines subsided to a whisper and the ringing grew louder. The children stopped playing cards and scrambled for the phone.

The trains must have stopped because I began hearing strange sounds outside my tent. A sort of soft grunting. Getting slightly irritated at the disturbance, I sat up, fumbled for my torch and quietly unzipped the flap. I waved the torch in the direction of the noise only to see several bemused Canada geese curled up on the bank beside me. They stirred and murmured a few desultory ‘honks’ at the intrusion. I switched the torch off before they got really upset and quietly lay down on the Lilo again.

What a night! It was a jungle out there! I slept OK from there on, knowing I had my own personal guard-geese protecting me.

Chapter Two

2008-12-22T06:11:00.000-08:00

Day Two

A day of firsts and family

It didn’t. I woke at five o’clock to the sound of rain. Unzipping the front flap of my tent, I peered out into a drizzly grey gloom. I fell backwards and dozed until eight o’clock when I was woken by the sound of silence. No pitter-patter of tiny droplets. I quickly ate a muesli bar and banana before deflating the Lilo, rolling everything up and placing them all into their respective waterproof bags. When that was done, I used the shower and made myself a cup of tea in the little kitchen across the lawn from the tent. I relaxed on a chair outside the kitchen door overlooking the lawn and the weir stream below while sipping my tea. At the lock keeper’s advice, I then walked through the gate and around the side of the lock house to open the downstream gates.

“It’s a foolproof system,” he had assured me the previous night. “You can’t open the downstream gates while the upstream gates are open. It won’t let you.”

He was reassuringly right. I pressed the button on the control panel that said ‘Open Gates’ and the great grey doors swung open with a reluctant groan, creaking and complaining like an old man. Left open, I could paddle straight in when I had loaded up. I returned to the camping area and folded up the wet tent before carrying everything down the metal ramp to the boat. The splash deck that I had left secured to prevent rain getting into the kayak hadn’t done its job and was collapsed inwards by a heavy puddle of rain water. This had spilled over the seat and onto the floor. I started baling it out using one of the two plastic tumblers I had brought with me. It worked OK, but in my haste to scoop out the water, I released the tumbler as well as the water and saw both disappear into the river. I finished the task using the spare tumbler. At this rate, I mused, I would be drinking my Laphroaig out of the bottle. The seat was made of sponge and would be damp all day.

In the grey light of a still, damp morning that felt much earlier than it was, I paddled back around the side of the lock, relaxed and safe in my uncomplaining little Karot. To my dismay, the lock gates had been shut. Bother, I thought, the lock keeper is on duty early and must have shut them. So I had to unfasten the splash guard, heave myself onto the pier and climb the slick steps to the lock side. The lock keeper was in his little ‘shed-cum-office’ when I approached and came out to see who I was and what I wanted. It was a different lock keeper from the previous day. Who are all these assistant lock keepers, I wondered? Where do they all come from? It seems like an unnecessary expense to employ so many for what is really quite a simple and undemanding job.

“Hi, I’m Andrew, I camped here last night,” I said by way of introduction. “Sorry, but I opened the gates so I could get through. Martin told me to help myself if I wanted to go through before nine o’clock.”

I stood there in my yellow nylon parka, red plastic splash guard dangling below my knees and bright cloth bandana I had bought on a recent holiday to Lanzarote. He looked at me as if I had crawled out of the lock to prey on his children.

“You look as if you have come a long way,” he observed. “How come you’re going upstream? Most people do it the other way.”

I was running out of retorts, but thought it worth informing him about the charitable status of my expedition.

“Exactly,” I replied. “I figured I would raise more if I did it differently. This way gets people talking.”

“Well good for you. I’ll open the gates then,” he replied. I thanked him and gave him the £5 for the campsite fee before returning to the boat, by which time the doors had swung open and I could pass through.

Today was a day of firsts. I saw my first kingfisher as it streaked low along the river ahead of me and smelt my first cows in fields I couldn’t see. I saw my first castle. I had passed under Albert Bridge (surprisingly, built as recently as 1967 to carry the A3021 across to the little village of Datchet on the other side) and rounded a bend. Datchet was on my right and the Crown Estates land of Windsor Castle was on my left.

According to my well-researched itinerary, somewhere along here lay the foundations of the first and original Thames crossing at Windsor. It was a farcical story of two counties at war. Buckinghamshire and Berkshire were at each other’s throats in the 18th and 19th centuries over who should pay for the bridge that connected their two counties. Bucks on my right argued that the original bridge was built for the convenience of Queen Ann and was therefore a royal responsibility assumed by Berkshire on my left. Berks, on the other hand, refused to pay for the whole bridge as the local worthies claimed it also benefited Datchet on the Bucks side. It was a silly squabble. At one stage, Bucks built half a bridge out to midstream while Berks built their half out to reach it. That way, they reasoned, each county could be sure they were only paying for repairs to their own side. The trouble is, the two halves didn’t quite meet up and a small gap remained. To compound the stupidity, Berks has build their half with iron railings while Bucks had favoured wood. So a more hybrid bridge was hard to imagine. Luckily the whole thing only lasted forty years before it was demolished and the Victoria bridge and the Albert bridge were built across different stretches of the river upstream and downstream respectively.

Once past the Albert Bridge, I observed small notice boards at intervals along the left bank confirming it was Crown Estates land with no mooring permitted. Then slowly, between the regularly-spaced trees, above incongruous fields of maize, the grey silhouette of Windsor Castle came into view. I knew it was surrounded by the bustling shops and streets of Windsor, but from my perspective low on the water, it was impressive, imposing and appropriately isolated. Home Farm and the Home Park was all that lay between me and the castle. A grey Crown Estates Land Rover, with a royal crest on its side, moved quietly along the bank, perhaps checking for illegal night mooring. I took a photo of the castle because, from my position on the river, it was a view you don’t see every day. It required as much elaborate care as the self-timer photograph under the M3 bridge yesterday, with the added challenge of a light drizzle. Once I had positioned myself for the best angle, I had to quickly take the shot before I drifted too far downstream and lost the composition. It took me three attempt to get the angle I wanted, slowly losing ground each time. Putting the camera back into its waterproof pouch also took time as the pouch had three strip seals and a button-down Velcro flap to contend with. By the time the whole exercise was completed, I had lost fifteen minutes and had a few hundred metres of water.

The river was smooth and glassy as I continued up to Windsor. I saw my first mandarin ducks on the bank, still within sight of the castle. How appropriate that these colourful ‘royal’ birds should be here, I thought. Now all I had to look out for were ‘queen’ bees, ‘king’ penguins and ‘emperor’ butterflies.

I passed under Victoria Bridge and Black Pott’s Railway Bridge. I now felt I was on the real Thames, not the muddy brown tidal monstrosity that Londoners thought exclusively theirs, but the Thames for the rest of us. The familiar and much-loved river that runs past Cookham, Benson and Clifton. Places most Londoners had never heard of or only knew as weekend destinations. The Thames of fields and reeds, tree-lined towpaths and flashing, dashing, honking, stinging wildlife. Where country pubs were both in the country and on the riverside. The sparkling Thames that meandered through the Cotswolds where I longed to see otters. After Eynsham, which I would reach on my penultimate day, the river was a local event. It twisted through fields and villages where fêtes and fairs occupied summer weekends. Where farmers on tractors and fishermen under green umbrellas quietly farmed and fished while nevertheless living rich and rewarding lives without the dubious allure of London and its sheep-in-formaldehyde, congestion charge, pigeon poop on the pavement culture.

The drizzle had passed by the time I reached Romney Lock but my thin nylon parka still clung sodden to my arms. I was the only one entering from downstream, but surprisingly, a pleasure craft and a narrow boat emerged through the opening gates. I exchanged a few pleasantries with both as I plunged eagerly through. Everyone on the river was wearing wet weather gear because it had been drizzling all morning. The weather was the main topic of these exchanges.

As I glided through the gates, I pulled up against the lock wall and gripped the slimy green chains that hung down like in some medieval dungeon.

“I’ll hang on to these shall I?” I said.

“Suit yourself,” the replied nonchalantly as he pressed the button to close the gates behind me.

“Do you mean I don’t have to?” I asked disingenuously. “I thought I had to with duck sluices.”

“You know about duck sluices do you?” he smiled. “It’s not compulsory. Depends on how well you can control your boat.”

“OK then, I’ll do what I did at Bell Weir lock.” I rinsed my green-stained glove in the cool water and pushed myself away from the wall to take up a position midstream where I waited for the eruption of water that I knew would turn a normally routine lock event into a brief white water experience.

I shouted “thanks for that” as I popped out of the lock upstream and cruised up the long, narrow cut on still water under dripping trees. At the end, Windsor came into view. The trees that had closed in on me in the cut gave way to the commercial buildings of the royal town. I continued between hotels and office buildings. On the left bank, the Windsor side, two tourists under umbrellas stood feeding a flock of swans. A cluster of white feathers on a brown carpet. I passed by the posh Christopher Wren Hotel on my left and the expensive House on the Bridge Restaurant on the Eton side. Then I edged close by a pontoon in front of a canoe club before paddling past the great ‘Windsor Wheel’, the local Ferris wheel that attempted to rival the London Eye. It was unmoving and bereft of tourists, yet still looked commanding against the slate grey sky.

Karot was equipped with a pull string that raised and lowered the skeg underwater at the back. This is a thin retractable keel, like on a surf board, that adds stability and direction to the craft in a wind or strong current but makes turning more of an effort. For the first time on my journey, I had to use it as I left Windsor behind me and confronted my first sharp bend on the river. I yanked the skeg up and pulled hard on my left paddle for several strokes to make the hard right-hand turn opposite Windsor Marina. I was immediately much more manoeuvrable and could negotiate the turn with ease. Ahead was a sharp left hand turn around Windsor race course, so I left the skeg retracted. Once I had negotiated the corner and saw the straight stretch of water ahead, I released the cord from the grip and heard the clunk as the plastic blade dropped reassuringly down once more.

Loudspeaker announcements and the tantalising smells of fried onions and steaming hot dogs testified to a local event taking place at Windsor race course. It reminded me that I hadn’t actually had a proper meal since Sunday night. The rain let up and I tried to convince myself that this was evidence of a transitional summer weather system and it would be sunny and warm again for the rest of my journey.

I was in familiar territory, I felt good, and my wife and friends were waiting for me at Cookham. I had the alliterative Boveney, Bray and Boulter’s locks to negotiate before then. Then Cookham lock and lunch at the Ferry pub. I had promised to meet everyone there at twelve thirty. It was eleven fifteen as I approached a deserted Boveney Lock and saw that it had a roller portage on the left of the lock gates. That made it only the fourth lock since my journey began to feature these helpful devices. Teddington had one, as did Molesey and Sunbury, but as far as I was aware, and from asking some of the other assistant lock keepers, none of the remaining six locks I had passed through had roller portages. Some claimed to have portages, but it turned out that they were no more than steep flights of steps up to lock height and a long carry to the other end. Others had only slopes, with no steel rollers, which was, I suppose the next best thing. Many, I discovered, didn’t advertise their presence at all, so in the absence of a simple sign I had no way of knowing until I asked the lock keeper. I decided to use the rollers at Boveney as I knew that there were few on the remaining length of river and I wanted a genuine ‘canoeing experience’. I disembarked onto the low ledge beside it and unfurled the blue rope wrapped around the nose of the Karot. Even fully-laden, it wasn’t as difficult as I had imagined and the four metres of orange plastic containing all my necessities dragged up the steep slope quite easily. At the top, I see-sawed it so that it was pointing down the shorter, upstream slope and gently nudged it towards the water. I was in the Karot and on my way again before you could say ‘open the gates please’.

Apart from a few wiggles, the river slowly unfurled in a straight line northwards all the way up to Cookham, where I would loop through the lock and arrive at the pub. Four miles ahead, I had Bray Lock to negotiate. Then another four miles to Cookham. Based on my reckoning of paddling at four miles an hour, that would have taken me two hours on a normal summer’s day. This wasn’t turning out to be a normal summer’s day as I was experiencing a bit more of a current and a stronger wind than I had expected. So I allowed for at least three hours to get to Cookham. I fumbled for my phone and suggested to Carolyn that I might be a bit late. That would make ETA at half past two. I rounded the loop of the river where I knew from my map that the Olympian rowing lake at Dorney lay off to my right, then continued on up past the fabulous houses of the wealthy. Many were owned by retired TV and film personalities as well as, I imagined, rich Arabs and corporate fat-cats. They were splendid and varied in their architectural styles. Lawns like green carpet gently rolled down to the river where steps dropped down to a pleasure craft - either a small tender, a polished slipper launch or a larger cruiser. Some houses were Tudor in style, large rambling edifices of turrets and balconies, while others were in modern red brick sprawled across swathes of green like an oversized Lego Land. Some of these pockets of prime real estate were occupied by relatively insignificant little lodges or bungalows, but all nevertheless shared an air of relaxed gentility, like an old man in a faded cashmere cardigan relaxing on a deck chair on the lawn, smoking a pipe and reading the Sunday papers. Most of these houses were on the left bank, the Berkshire side as I called it, although it wasn’t that simple. It was also Berkshire on the right bank until past Maidenhead Bridge and Cliveden where the river once more separated Berks from Bucks.

The day of firsts continued. It was the first time I passed under my last motorway. I had paddled past the gothic Oakley Court hotel, scene of many a Hammer House of Horror film produced at the adjacent Bray Studios, then slipped along the quiet banks of Monkey Island with its grand white hotel and flocks of Canada geese. I heard, then saw, the M4 ahead. I really felt I was in my own back yard now as I passed through its shadow and out the other side to Bray Lock. It was twenty past twelve and there was no portage as far as I could see, but steps and a low wall where canoeists could disembarked and carry their craft. I hadn’t bothered to ask lock keepers to phone ahead today. There seemed no point and I had broken the chain at Boveney where there was no-one around to talk to anyway. If I encountered a recalcitrant lock keeper who insist I portage, then I would have to argue my case, lock by lock. But I was hoping I didn’t have to.

I was pushing quite hard now. With a schedule to keep and the pressure of reaching Cookham for lunch, I was never more conscious of the time. The sun came out intermittently but great white clouds rolled across the sky and repeatedly blocked it out. That was the signal for the wind to pick up but I wasn’t sure if it was a help or a hindrance. By rights, it should have driven me northwards because what wind blows southerly this time of year? But it was swirling in every direction, seemingly influenced more by the course of the river than the weather system that drove it. As a result, I was being constantly pushed to the right by gusting squalls. Progress was only achieved by an unequal stronger pull on the right paddle to keep on course.

It was a long hard haul up to Brunel’s great bridge at Maidenhead. According to my well-researched itinerary, this marvel of brick engineering was built in 1839. That was a busy year for Brunel, I was to learn as my journey progressed, but nothing crowned his achievements that year more than this giant-arched red brick Victorian triumph. I let out a high-pitched ‘whoop’ of excitement as I passed under the echoing arch and laughed as the ducks scattered ahead of me. They say a duck’s quack doesn’t echo, but an echo sure makes the ducks scat!

I was coming up to another familiar landmark. A block of thirties apartments on the Bucks side below Maidenhead bridge where I had attended lavishly-catered garden parties hosted by Ken and Liam, old friends of Carolyn’s. Ken a retired airline steward and Liam, master chef extraordinaire. I wanted to call them up and urge them out onto the balcony to wave as I passed. They had supported me in my thespian aspirations in the past by enthusiastically attending a couple of plays I had appeared in locally. I appreciated that. They had also greeted me, a month earlier on one of my practice paddles as I passed their favourite watering hole opposite, the Thames Riviera bar. ‘Andrew, halloooo!’ I had heard as I swept by downstream. Barely in time, I had turned and recognised them sitting by the riverside with their Pimms in hand. ‘Hallo! See you when I come back!’ I wasn’t sure then that they had even heard me, but now the effort of stopping and maintaining my position plus the urgency of my schedule decided me against phoning them. So the best I could do was silently wish them well as I struggled past.

Majestic Maidenhead bridge spanned the river a short way upstream of Brunel’s triumph. This graceful carriageway was built in white-stone in 1777, surprisingly when you would expect the British Empire to be distracted by more important issues such as losing its greatest colony in the American Revolutionary War.

A little further on, an acquaintance and a regular at my local pub in Bourne End, the Garibaldi, was waiting to greet me at another Thames-side hotel. He crossed the road and, leaning on the iron rail, shouted a greeting and waved. I was surprised to see him and was amazed at the coincidence. Then it occurred to me that Carolyn might have told him about my journey and he had timed it deliberately.

“Francis, hi! What are you doing here?” I shouted back. “Why aren’t you at the Gari?”

“I live here,” he replied, indicating the leafy suburbia behind him known by estate agents as ‘the river area’. “How’s it going?”

“Fine. I feel good. Could do with less rain and wind, but it’s been good.”

“See you for a pint when you get back to earth,” he laughed as I resumed paddling. A short way ahead, I was greeted by another friend, a lovely blonde lady of Carolyn and my acquaintance, walking her dog along the tree-lined avenue that accompanied the river to Boulter’s Lock.

“Hello handsome,” she called. “Is this it? Is this the trip then?”

“Hello gorgeous. Fancy meeting you here. Yes, I’m on my way. Day two. Thanks for the sponsorship,” I said. Carolyn had told me that Wendy had donated money on my charity website, so I was pleased I had remembered it and thanked her. “I mustn’t stop, I’ve got people to meet, places to go. I’ve got to be at the Ferry at two thirty.”

“Bye then,” she waved, “good luck.”

“Nice to bump into you. Must do it again soon,” I replied and paddled the remaining short distance to the lock where I was in for another surprise.

Boutler’s Lock was shut when I got there. On one of the busiest stretches of river and dominated by the large Edwardian hotel of the same name, it was surely one of the smallest locks on the river. Certainly the smallest one I had paddled through so far. But the gates obstinately refused to open. A couple of elderly ladies were looking down at me from the palisade of the small footbridge that crossed onto the lock island.

“Hello,” I shouted, “Is the lock keeper about? Can you see him?” Of all the places to waste time, with my only social schedule to keep to, this was the least favourable. One of the ladies disappeared for a few minutes and came back.

“The lock keeper’s down the other end and knows you are here,” she shouted down at me.

“Thank you,” I shouted back. “I’m paddling up the Thames,” I added as they continued leaning on the bridge gazing down at me expectantly.

“Oh, that’s nice,” one of them responded. “How far have you gone?”

“Well, from London actually. I’m heading for Lechlade in the Cotswolds. Only four more days to go.”

“Oh.” Conversation seemed a bit strained, so I changed the subject. “Can you see any boats coming into the lock?” I enquired. She disappeared again, longer this time, then came back with the news that the lock keeper was waiting ten minutes in case something came along upstream. That annoyed me. After all, I had paid my river licence and had as much right to a helpful service as any other craft on the Thames. This was the scenario I was dreading, where I was being treated like a second class citizen simply because I was only an annoying little canoe. (I was convinced lock keepers didn’t know the difference between kayaks and canoes.) I bet the lock keeper would have opened the gates immediately if I was an over-priced gin palace with a retired CEO on board to suck up to.

I resigned myself to an irritating wait when suddenly, another figure appeared on the lock bridge. Great, maybe something will happen now. It took me a second or two to recognise my son, Oliver. Tall, dark and suitably scruffy, he waved down at me with a happy grin and the expensive camera I had bought him for his 21st birthday last year.

“Hi Dad,” he beamed.

“Hi Sport. How did you get here?” Just then, my brother-in-law, Andy, appeared at the balustrades.

“I picked him up,” he shouted.

“Hi Andy. Fantastic! Good to see you. Thanks. Brilliant.” I was touched. As Oliver proceeded to take photos, it made me think that I must paddle up the Thames more often. He turned the camera every angle, clicking away like a pro. Bending down or moving sideways to get a better angle. I knew I was going to get some good pictures out of this, as well as rare ones of me in the boat, mid-stream that I couldn’t have taken myself. I had seen Oliver’s holiday photographs and he had a creative eye. Not being content with people with their heads chopped off, he created arty shots of people and landscapes. Pictures of observational detail with unusual elements juxtaposed, such as a shot of the Empire State Building framed beneath a ‘No Walking’ sign. Or a view of a gondola in Venice cleverly distorted through an empty beer glass. He had learnt all that from me, of course.

The lock doors finally swung slowly open and a lone pleasure craft glided nonchalantly out. Bother, I thought, all this waiting just for you. Shouting ‘see you the other end’, I hurried into the lock, Oliver snapping away all the while.

The lock keeper, or assistant lock keeper, as I am sure she was because no female lock keeper was mentioned on my well-researched itinerary, charmingly apologised for the delay. “There was a boat upstream I was waiting for, sorry,” she explained.

“That’s OK,” I conceded. “Is there portage here?” I asked so as disguise my irritation. After all, I still had to get out the gates at the top.

“Yes, around there.”

“Where?”

“Around the side. Up by the weir.” I know Boulter’s Lock island well. It contains a park with an ice cream van and an aviary housing exotic finches and budgerigars, with twisting pathways where small statues lay hidden among the shrubbery. My recollection didn’t stretch to a portage ramp. Besides, the island was quite wide.

“Is it a roller portage or just a ramp?”

“It’s a slope you can drag your canoe up and only a short distance across to the upstream side.” It sounded like a poor excuse for a portage to me and not one I would have wished to attempt. I still couldn’t picture where on the island this portage place was and didn’t care.

“But there’s no sign. How would I know that? You should have a sign here so we can see it.”

“You just have to ask and we’ll tell you,” she replied.

“But I had to wait ten minutes before I saw you,” I said. “If there was a sign, I would know to go straight around.”

I tried to sound good-natured and jolly but probably failed. As I passed through the lock, Oliver accompanied me trotting along the path taking more photos. Coming out the top of the lock, he directed me to position myself behind a flock of swans that had gathered there optimistically waiting for morsels from moored boats. Photo taken, Oliver and Andy walked back to the car and we raced each other up the two mile stretch to Cookham bridge. There was a strong probability that they would beat me.

For all its familiarity and for all my urgency to achieve my goal, I was conscious that I was on one of the most beautiful stretches of the river. Not so much in the dank gloom of today’s indifferent weather with the thick brown waters streaming against me, but in the summer, when I had easily glided upstream along fresh, bottle-green waters under the sheltering canopy of the trees, threading through the little islands and smelling the fresh hay from the fields on Widbrook Common.

It was a glorious river here, with Cliveden towering imposingly on the hill above. I didn’t need my well-researched itinerary to tell me that Cliveden in general, and the secluded cottage on the river bank below in particular, had been the site of many a scandal. It is here that the Profumo affair between the minister of state and the prostitute, Christine Keeler, was fostered during nights of debauchery in the ‘60s. Also, there were, and still are, the Astors. The Astor family have long since sold Cliveden to the National Trust, which now runs this magnificent palace as a hotel. I think Lord and Lady Astor now rent and live in one of the wings. I met a Lord Astor once, about twenty years ago when I was on the committee of the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham when I was helping with their leaflet design and printing. I’m not sure which Lord or Viscount he was, but that’s how he was introduced to me. He was probably in his mid to late-thirties then, slim, very polite and approachable, I remember, and happy to get involved with Cookham’s heritage.

I finally rounded the left turn into Cookham lock, praying there would be no delays. I pictured my wife and her parents staring anxiously down the lock cut opposite the pub, waiting for me to appear. I did, eventually, get through the lock without any impedance and make my way up the gloomy lock cut before bursting out into the wide basin in front of the pub.

I spotted Carolyn first, bouncing up and down and squealing with joy. Then they were all there against the railing waiting for me. I put on a turn of speed that I hoped would impress as I swung over to the pub and pulled up against the steps below.

After one night in reasonable comfort on a lock island, I was hardly Odysseus, but I nevertheless received a hero’s welcome. A quick handshake and congratulations from Senan as he leaned down to help me stand. Then hugs and sighs from lovely Carolyn, whose aching pride I felt in every fibre of her body as we walked up the steps to the gathered group. The in-laws were there, full of calm admiration; a hug and a kiss from Joan once I had taken my wet life vest off and an understated ‘well done’ from quiet Geoff. A tacit wave of acknowledgement from Andy across the table who had, indeed, beaten me to the pub in the car. Oliver, bless him, even took time out from his photography to give me a hug. ‘Dad,’ he grunted in shy acknowledgement. I really must do this Thames thing more often.

“Poor you,” Carolyn cooed, “you look exhausted.”

“I’m not,” I said indignantly. “I feel fine.” I didn’t want to look exhausted, I wanted to look fit and fresh. Rippling with untapped vitality and ready for anything. Obviously my wind-ravaged face belied my feeling of well-being.

A pizza arrived. “I ordered it for you. Eat it, you need the energy,” she said, urging food into my hand. I didn’t want to eat too much as I knew it would get uncomfortable sitting in the kayak for the next four hours.

“Go on,” Carolyn insisted, “you need a hot meal to keep you going.” I felt fine, but loved the attention.

I ate most of the pizza, but Senan left, as is his wont, to attend an undisclosed commitment elsewhere. It was good to have his cheerful company for a short while.

Everyone was studying the map to identify the length of river I had covered so far. I was on to the second map by now, but the first map, Ordnance Survey Landranger map number 176 for West London included the river from Teddington, south through Shepperton, up through Chertsey, under the M3, then the M25 and on up to Windsor, where map 175 takes over.

“You went all that way?!” exclaimed Oliver. “That’s well far!” That made me feel good. It was satisfying to know an old dad could still impress a cynical son. That casual praise alone would have made the whole trip worthwhile.

Time was marching on and so should I. Joan and Geoff and Oliver watched with fascination as I kitted up. First my life vest, zipped and buckled tight, then my splash guard pulled up like a skirt. “Nice fashion statement, Dad,” Oliver said. Then my fingerless mittens were pulled on. These were nylon, waterproof ‘Crew-Savers’ that I wore to prevented blisters. I had modified them slightly by cutting the fingers even shorter to allow for an easier grip on the paddled. Making sure I had lifted the skirt of the splash guard high around my waist so I wouldn’t be sitting on it when I lowered myself onto the seat, I carefully dropped into the cockpit and stretched it around the rim. Oliver was back in ‘David Bailey’ mode along the towpath as I waved goodbye to wife and family. I swung out under Cookham bridge and cut a line to the opposite side where I hugged the right bank until I was out of sight around the bend and on my way to Bourne End.

The weather continued changeable with white clouds covering the scant blue and raising a breeze with annoying regularity. The current on the long four mile stretch through Bourne End and past Cookham Reach on up to Marlow was quietly trying to hold me back as a gentle reminder that it had something to say about my progress. I passed the gravel pits at Spade Oak where I spend many a quiet morning on the lakeside with my binoculars and telescope. Apart from the usual water fowl, I have spotted black tern, bar-headed geese and a ruddy shelduck here on my bird-watching vigils in the past. Although more common, I was no less impressed by the exotic Egyptian geese that lined the bank at the end of Coldmoorholme Lane. I had first seen these handsome birds actually in Egypt. It was many years, decades, ago on my first trip to that scorched country as I sailed the Nile from Luxor to Aswan in a hired felucca with a group of fellow travellers. I remember, too, that a large Nile monitor lizard was the highlight of that gentle journey. No such distraction here. Just fishing poles thrust out from the river to avoid and youngsters in sculls passing up and down under the watchful eye of a row master in a small motorised dinghy. “I’ll race you,” I shouted to one of the fit young girls as she drew level. She smiled nervously and raced on ahead. Her parents had probably warned her about talking to strange men in kayaks. I chatted to one of the lads, however, because I knew these were pupils from the Sir William Borlase school in Marlow.

“Are you Borlasians?” I shouted when a scull next drew level.

“Yeah,” came the reply. “We’ve got a club at Marlow.”

“I know. My son used to row with the Borlase club a couple of years ago. What year are you?”

“Year six,” he answered. “Just done my GCSEs.”

“Oh, my two have just finished their AS levels. What’s that then, year seven? Maybe you know them, they’re the twins, Roddy and Amelia?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “No, I don’t. That’s a year above me.”

“Well, good luck, only four years to go. See you in the London Olympics,” I called back as he powered off upstream.

By rights, it should have taken me no more than an hour to reach Marlow lock, but by the time I had passed under the Marlow bypass, fighting the strengthening wind, and turned the corner towards sheltered little Marlow lock, it was five o’clock. That was nearly an hour and a half. A shameful time for a distance I had regularly covered in forty minutes early that summer. Less, coming back downstream. I was the only one into the lock this time. A couple of pleasure craft came cruising out with scarcely any effort in the rushing current. I gave them a wave and pulled my way into the lock. According to my well-researched itinerary, the lock keeper here should be someone called Duncan.

“Hi, are you the lock keeper?” I shouted.

“That’s me,” he shouted back.

“You’ll be Duncan then,” I ventured.

“Last time I looked. How did you know,” he asked suspiciously.

“I’ve got your name down here. You’re the first lock keeper I’ve met who is the actual lock keeper, not an assistant.”

“There’s lots of assistants about this time of year,” he said. “Not so many as a while back in the holidays though,” he continued.

I explained my journey and passed up my charity card for his inspection. Mindful of the time, he asked: “You got anywhere to stay tonight?” To be honest, that question had occurred to me on the stretch up to Marlow. I had intended to free camp on an island up at Wargrave that I had discovered on a previous recce. But that was eleven miles and four more locks upstream and I didn’t have four hours of daylight left.

“No, not really. I was heading for a free camp up near Wargrave, but I don’t think I’ll make it now.” It was a hard admission to swallow and the first occasion where things wouldn’t be going as planned. It meant that the remainder of my schedule would be put out by four hours. The knock-on effect would be that I would have to completely review my camping arrangements unless I could make up the time the next day. I was thankful that I had incorporated enough information into my well-researched itinerary, including all the available campsites and lock islands where I could pitch my tent. For now, however, I knew that the only option between here and Wargrave, was a campsite an impossible half a mile from the river at Henley. I had long since discounted that one as being far too impractical. But I had forgotten something.

“Try Hurley,” Duncan offered. “There’s good camping at Hurley.”

“Hurley? I said. “I forgot Hurley.” I was nevertheless thinking about the large, commercial caravan site on the Hurley bank of this tiny Berkshire village. It hadn’t featured as an option as I would have had to join the Camping and Caravanning Club and book in advance, but they might let me in if I pleaded and paid them vast sums of money.

“The lock there has all the facilities and it’s very secure,” Duncan continued as he opened the upstream lock gates.

“On the lock island?” I said disbelievingly. “There’s camping on the lock island?” The realisation slowly dawned on me. Yes, of course. I remember now. “The lock island. Great. I’ll head for there. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” he said and waved me off as I headed upstream with a new-found vigour. Hurley was only two and a half miles and two locks away. I could make it by six o’clock. Lock keepers knock off at six now that the summer holiday season has ended and I didn’t particularly want the inconvenience of operating locks myself. I slid past the Compleat Angler Hotel just below Marlow Bridge where Carolyn and I had our wedding reception back in 2004. That event was the last time all my family had been together under one roof. Both brothers and my sister had made the trip from New Zealand and stayed at our house for the duration before heading off to various unvisited parts of Europe and America on their way back to Auckland and Wellington.

I skimmed under Marlow’s stone and cable bridge built by William Tierny Clark, the same engineer who designed the suspension bridge over the Danube in Budapest. My children had told me this little-known and quite interesting fact gleaned from a local history lesson at school. I covered the two miles to Temple Lock in thirty-five minutes, pulling hard all the way and keeping close to the bank to avoid the sculls from the nearby Marlow Rowing Club. Happily, Duncan had taken it upon himself to phone ahead to Temple Lock to let them know I was coming up, so the lock doors received me with an open welcome. I quickly explained that I wanted to get to Hurley for the night.

‘You’ll have to be quick, he’ll be knocking off now,” I was told. I looked at my watch. It was five forty-five. Fifteen minutes to go.

“What? It’s a quarter to six,” I said. “I thought you guys finished at six? There’s fifteen minutes to go. Can you call him up for me please? I need to camp there tonight.” He contacted Hurley while he operated the sluices and opened the head gates, chatting all the while and occasionally laughing at some private joke.

“He says you’ll have to go like lightning, he’s got some paperwork he needs to catch up on.” So barely waiting to say thanks and goodbye, I exploded out of the lock like a cork from a Champagne bottle. It was only a short half mile to Hurley and I sprinted all the way. I built up a steady rhythm with each stroke pulling me closer to camp and comfort. I ploughed past the little riverside marina development and slid to a halt outside the lock gates beyond.

“Whew! That was hard work,” I gasped as the lock keeper came out to man the gates. “Thanks for waiting, I’d like to camp here tonight.”

“Come in,” he said, meaning, come in to the lock. I entered slowly giving my arms a chance to rest.

“That’ll be £12 for the night and £10 deposit for the keys,” he told me at the lock side.

“What keys?” I asked.

“You’ll need these keys to get over the bridge to the lock island if you want to go to the pub tonight,” he explained. “You’ll get the deposit back in the morning when I come back on duty at nine.” I immediately spotted the flaw in this arrangement.

“Actually, I’d quite like to leave before nine, if I can. How can I get the deposit back?” Actually, I didn’t give a damn about £10 deposit and would have willingly left it for the prospect of a decent rest tonight and an early start tomorrow to make up my lost time. “Couldn’t I just paddle to the pub and not worry about the bridge?” The pub was my reward for a hard day’s paddling and I longed for a pint of cider.

“I don’t think you’ll want to be doing that late at night,” he warned gravely. “Tell you what, forget the deposit, but you must remember to leave the keys out for me before you go in the morning. We go through a lot of keys here when people don’t return them.”

“I wouldn’t do that. I promise,” I said, “where can I leave them?”

“OK then. Over the door on the hut there. Just put it on the eave. Can you see?” He indicated a narrow shelf above the door frame wide enough to conceal the keys.

“Sure, no problem. Thanks. I won’t forget.” He showed me a map of the complex of islands that adjoined Hurley Lock and where to moor and find the locked bridge. The campsite was on the second island out from the Hurley bank, the next one beyond the lock island. The map also included the village itself, with its two pubs prominently marked. I paddled out of the lock gate and pulled a hard right around the upstream point of the island then coasted down the short channel to pull up just before a small weir deliberately blocked by a barge. I moored and unloaded. A feeling of relief came over me for the second time. An unaccountable sense of comfort and security like arriving home after a long flight back from a holiday. Knowing that my hours of paddling were rewarded in some small way by my success in finding a safe haven where I could sleep off my fatigue and recharge myself for tomorrow’s effort.

I paced the island, looking for the best place to set up my tent. The lawn area designated for overnight camping pitched and rolled, offering few options for a level base for my pop-up tent. I finally settled on a relatively flat area against the trees at the edge of the campsite. I carried my provisions from the mooring to the tent in two trips, being careful to arrange the splash guard on the Karot in such a way as to prevent water puddling on its surface overnight and filling the boat. With everything arranged in the narrow space between the inflated lilo and the tent walls, I awkwardly pulled off my damp clothes and put on my dry ‘civvies’. This comprised a pair of cotton trousers and a striped polo shirt. I kept on the sandals that I had been wearing in the boat all day as I had deliberately not packed a pair of shoes. I wasn’t expecting to socialise much on this journey, but Carolyn had invited two of my other children, who couldn’t be present at the Ferry earlier in the day, to meet me in Hurley tonight.

Walking up the single street that is Hurley a short time later, I was practically run down by a small blue car driving towards the river. My daughter, Amelia, was at the wheel and I fleetingly recognised Carolyn and Edmund, my number two boy, as terrified passengers. Sweet Amelia had only passed her driving test a few weeks earlier and was keen to show off her nascent driving skills. By the time they had parked and joined me in the pub, I was finishing my first pint. I got a happy embrace from my little poppet and a manly hug from my tall second son, Edmund, the only other of my four children who had a driving licence.

The second night

Sitting at the mouth of my tent that night, smoking my cigar and drinking my whisky, I mused contentedly on the events of the day. I had left the pub and my wife and children half an hour earlier and walked down Hurley High Street to the narrow path beside a high wall that connected it with the river bank. Then, using my torch, I carefully climbed the steps of the footbridge that took me over to the lock island and my tent. Around the other side of the small wood, the yellow light outside the toilet block cast a pale glow across the lawn. From where I was sitting, I could just make out the gates to the footbridge opposite and the low bank where the Karot was moored. The wind stirred the branches above me and the reassuring call of a tawny owl sounded from somewhere in the woods nearby. I cupped my hands and blew a reply. A few seconds later, the owl called again, closer. I loved playing this game and often spent warm evenings sitting on my patio at home replying to owls with my imitation hoots. It must have been disappointing for them to follow the call of a prospective mate, eventually landing nearby, only to find a whisky drinking idiot sitting there in a haze of cigar smoke blowing through cupped hands.

I sat there in the mouth of my tent in a haze of cigar smoke, relaxed and happy, soaking up the sounds of nature, the murmur of the weir and the smell of the damp grass. I was once more well fed and ready for bed. It was a good time to reflect on my progress and plan the next day. So far, I had travelled forty miles up the Thames, passed through fifteen locks, met my children in circumstances that I hoped would set a good example and give them a new perspective of their father - and survived. Surprisingly, no aching limbs or bruised buttocks. No desire to call it a day, not regrets. Just a quiet pride that I had taken the first few steps on what was to be a personal adventure. I knew others had undoubtedly done this before me, although most did it the other way, but I didn’t know them, so they didn’t count. The important thing was that no-one I knew had paddled the Thames the wrong way. I hadn’t even read books about it. So it felt like a pioneering first. It was for me, and that’s all that mattered.

That, and my children. And Carolyn. It was wonderful seeing them today. I missed Roddy though. He wasn’t at the Ferry at lunchtime with Oliver nor at the pub in Hurley. He was either working an evening shift at the supermarket or working on his seduction techniques at his girlfriend’s place. According to his siblings, no-one was ever quite sure with Roddy these days. The hormones had struck, so he was either abstruse or absent. Still, I looked forward to seeing him when I get to Lechlade. Perhaps.

Together with Carolyn, Amelia and Ed, we had spent a pleasant evening over a bar meal with me telling them about my adventures over the last two days. It was when I got to the story about the duck sluice at Bell Weir lock that the children started drifting off to sleep over their medium-done hamburgers. Which just goes to prove, you can take the teenager out to the tavern, but you can’t take the torpor out of the teenager.

That’s easy for you to say, I thought as I poured another whisky, wondering why the plastic bottle was unaccountably low. I would have to wrestle a bear and stop bullets for them before they took any interest. And even then, it would have to be on a reality TV show to give me any credibility. Except that didn’t work either because I had done that, without the bear wrestling obviously, when I appeared on a TV look-alike show several years back. Us ‘look-alikes’ were so manipulated we all put on very stilted performances. It didn’t impress the children and it didn’t impress me either. I ‘appeared’ on another ‘live’ show shortly after that, also involving look-alikes, in which the fake-tanned, gay presenter kept asking the audience to ‘keep your votes coming in’. Us look-alikes spent a day in the studio recording a show that was to be aired some time in the future. The exhortations to ‘vote now by calling this number’ after we had all done our piece to camera rang a bit false by the end of the day when our orange host said to camera, with a perfectly straight (sic) face that the votes had been counted ‘and the winner is..... Eddie Murphy!’ That wasn’t me. I was ‘Jack Nicholson’. I found it amazing that anyone could 'phone in to vote' when the show hadn't yet been broadcast. I left with a cynical view of so-called reality TV.

This was followed by several years of intensive amateur dramatic performances where I appeared in four plays a year at various venues around the county. That was fun and proved my brain hadn’t totally atrophied in my old age, but the jury is out on what my children thought. Of all my children, only Roddy saw one of my performances, once. But at least I have shown them that it can be done, which is the best thing. One day, I bet, one of them will tread the boards.

I reviewed my camping arrangements. Tonight I should have been on that little island I had previously discovered at Wargrave. I reasoned that if I got an early enough start in the morning, maybe I could make up the lost distance and still camp tomorrow night at Benson as planned? But that was thirty-three miles upstream and I had averaged only twenty miles a day so far. What’s more, I had taken an unexpected eight and a half hours of paddling each day to achieve that. However, my thinking was that if I got the ten miles to Wargrave out of the way early enough, I could then consider the day started from there and finish the remaining twenty miles to the campsite at Benson. That was the theory. It turned out to be far from the practice.

I passed another revivifying night on my squeaky Lilo dreaming of blue skies and no wind. It was early September for goodness sake. It should be sunny and fair.

Chapter One
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue

Chapter One

2008-11-11T06:50:00.000-08:00

Day One

Blondes and Swans

The last view I had of my wife was of a slim blonde figure on the river bank at Teddington lock waving energetically like a piece of fluttering bunting. As the distance between us lengthened and she grew increasingly more diminutive, I felt a pang of sadness. A kind of aloneness at the thought that I would be spending the next five days on an adventure that she wasn’t participating in, from which I alone was deriving all the enjoyment.

She stood there waving, colourful and familiar in a turquoise fleece top and white slacks, looking lost and lovely as I pulled away from the river bank in my kayak. I was headed up the Thames for Lechlade in Gloucestershire. Against the current. Don’t ask me why. It had sounded good in the pub at the time and once I had made up my mind, I didn’t give it a second thought. It was a trip that had been a long time in the planning. I had covered practically every mile of the Thames at weekends in the summer in anticipation of this day. Except for the Teddington lock stretch.

Teddington lock. That wasn’t right for a start. As the biggest lock on the Thames, Teddington lock isn’t just one lock but three locks side by side. All the others, except Sunbury as I was soon to discover, get by perfectly well with only one lock chamber apiece. But not Teddington. It has a Barge lock, a Launch lock and a Skiff lock. This was one of the first and least expected items of information I was to learn on this voyage of discovery.

The Barge lock is against the London bank and is long enough to fit 12 average length narrow boats in a row. The Launch Lock, so called, I suppose, because it takes launches, is a standard-sized lock directly in front of the Lockkeeper’s cottage and is the one most commonly used.

The Skiff lock, if you can call it that (Martin, the assistant lock keeper, did), takes, well, skiffs, I suppose. And canoes, kayaks and sculls. It’s for when the other two locks are sitting idle and a paddler, rower or sculler comes paddling, rowing or sculling along wanting to be let through. Why waste eight million litres of Thames water in the Barge Lock on someone in a plastic kayak? Or 2.2 million litres in the Launch lock? Hence the Skiff lock is brought into play. It fills with a piffling fifty-six thousand litres of water in only three minutes and is so narrow I wouldn’t be able to use my paddles in it.

However I didn’t use any of the Teddington locks as I started my journey. That’s because I launched from a floating pontoon twenty metres upstream of all three locks. This blue metal platform was chained against the London bank at the end of the little lane we had driven down to get to the towpath. With my car pulled up beside it, I was able to lift my kayak off the roof rack and directly onto its deck. My kayak was bright orange, long and pointy. Like a carrot. So had named it ‘Karot’.

There were three wooden steps on the pontoon to make the transition from the tow path less of a drop. I lurched down these with the Karot bouncing on my knee at each drop. Even unladen, the four metre boat was unwieldy. I had inadvertently lifted it off the car pointing the wrong way, so had to turn it around to point upstream before I laid it down on the steel decking. This was unfortunate. My wrist twisted as the long craft swung around, causing a twinge of pain to shoot up my arm that made me curse. Good start, I thought. Once I had lain it lengthways along the pontoon in anticipation of the final drop into the water and flexed my sprained wrist, we began packing it.

‘We’ being my soon-to-be-abandoned wife, Carolyn, and our reliable friend, Senan, erstwhile owner of our local pub in my village in Buckinghamshire.

It had been a real problem finding someone who would commit to driving me to Teddington on the day I had planned. Before I had thought of Senan, I had asked everyone else in my address book with a Buckinghamshire or Berkshire postcode but they all displayed a polite reluctance or pleaded a prior engagement. With no other choice, I had reluctantly asked my London friend, Jerry. I say ‘reluctantly’ because it was such an imposition expecting him to come all the way out of London just to drive me all the way back in again, that I had felt really guilty calling on him. But I had no other choice and, of course, Jerry willingly agreed.

Then along came Senan who lived not much more than a quarter of a mile from my front doorstep. Senan hadn’t occurred to me because until recently he was gainfully employed in the IT industry. Then I found out he suddenly wasn’t. His contract had come to an end. As a result Senan was, as he so eloquently put it, between jobs at the moment, so had nothing better to do.

“I’ll do that! Of course I will!” he volunteered when he had heard about my dilemma. “If it means spending time in your car with your lovely lady wife, wild horses couldn’t keep me away. Now, when’s it to be, what’s to be done and how much does it pay?”

I heaved a sigh of relief. Thanks to Senan, backed up by a willing Jerry, the trip was back on again. Carolyn welcomed Senan’s offer with the same relief as myself. With eyesight that had long since succumbed to the affects of diabetes, Carolyn, of course, is unable to drive now. Which was why I was using this trip to raise money for this hardworking and thoroughly worthwhile charity.

Stowing my possessions for the next six days in the waterproof compartments didn’t take long. In the rear compartment I neatly stacked the three large waterproof bags containing my sleeping bag, my big beach towel and a roll of clothes so I could look reasonably civilised when I stopped at pubs and campsites along the way. I also stowed two smaller waterproof bags containing electrical bits and pieces such as a radio, torch, batteries and toilet bag. On top of all this (it was the larger of the two holds) I squeezed in the plastic swimming pool lilo I would be using as a bed. Once the items were in place, I crimped the waterproof rubber lid shut around the rim. On top of this hold, I tied down the pop-up tent that would give me shelter for the week.

In the forward hold I put two plastic shopping bags of food and my drink bottles containing water and a sugary ginger cordial to quench my thirst and give me much-needed energy along the way. I also sneaked in two plastic bottles filled with my favourite whisky in case I didn’t get to a pub every night.

‘Bloody hell Andrew, you going to the Antarctic or something?’ Senan quipped. ‘I bet Scot didn’t take that much.’

‘Yes, but look what happened to him,’ I replied as I tucked my maps and laminated itinerary under the stretchy ropes on the deck in front of me. I had cut four sheets of the Ordnance Survey Landranger series of maps into strips to act as my route guide and had sealed them in a waterproof plastic sleeve.

All that was left was to say my goodbyes and leave. It wasn’t as if I was going to get a fanfare or a Red Arrows fly-by, so I hugged Carolyn and shook Senan’s hand, thanking him yet again. I swung the heavy craft off the edge of the pontoon and dropped it into the water below. Sitting on the pontoon above, I lowered myself carefully into the seat with a sense of relief that I didn’t embarrass myself this early in the proceedings. Like an aircraft, where take-off and landing are the most tricky parts of a flight, so too is getting in and out of a kayak. Especially getting out after five or six hours of knee-numbing cramp spent paddling.

And so, after fastening my splash guard around me, I pushed off into the still stream and paddled my way across the river to take up my line along the right bank. On the rivers and waterways of the world, all vessels travel on the right. ‘Port a port’, they call the manoeuvre in which you pass an approaching vessel with your port side facing the opposing port side. Overtaking is different. Just like on a road in Europe or America where the overtaking vehicle uses the outside lane. Although I didn’t think that would apply to me. I didn’t anticipate doing much overtaking.

As I passed under my first bridge, albeit a footbridge, a short way up the lock cut, I twisted in my seat and waved back at the two receding before they were cut off from view. I could imagine Senan saying, “What’s that madman doing? Why can’t he rattle a tin outside Waitrose like everybody else?” Carolyn would be gazing after me, eyes moist with love and pride. “He’s my hubby. That’s what he does,” she would reply.

I paddled along the gently curving right bank, past moored pleasure craft and families of swans that glided over to greet me. Soon, Teddington’s three locks and my two well-wishers were out of sight. I looked ahead at the first of the big bridges coming up. By now, I had settled into a steady rhythm with each paddle dipping and pulling with a comfortable ease, powering me forward through the glassy water – leaving a satisfying ‘Vee’ behind.

The sun was in the sky, joy was in my heart and I had a whole day ahead of me. The sinking sense of separation I had experienced as I was pushing off was now being replaced with the uplifting feeling of freedom. I savoured the strangely familiar dank green odour of the water. It was an evocative smell of my childhood. Innocent times spent splashing in bush streams in New Zealand. Happy hours spent sitting on the harbour wall in my home town with a line and hook lowered expectantly into the muddy waters of the tidal estuary below. The splash of salty spray from the surf of an ocean beach. I loved the smell of water.

I played along the surface, close to the right bank and began taking in my surroundings. I passed a small island. I noticed several imaginatively named boat clubs: the Thames Sailing Club, the Thames Rowing Club and the Thames Canoe Club slid past. Soon, the commercial buildings of Kingston lined the banks while leisure craft sat complacent on the edge of the river. Turning, I could see small dinghies and tenders bobbing gently on my wake. I passed under Kingston railway bridge, just as a train rumbled overhead. What kind of a coincidence is that, I asked myself? Isn’t that supposed to be good luck? Like stepping on a butterfly or walking under a black cat or something?

However, by the time I passed under Kingston’s road bridge a short way ahead, with its hum of cars and red double-decker buses, three more trains had used the railway bridge behind me – so I figured the odds weren’t that astronomical after all.

Not wanting to miss anything important, I leant forward and consulted my itinerary on the deck in front of me. This ‘itinerary’ was a series of A4 sheets of paper I had researched, written, printed out and laminated. It was full of distances, times and interesting facts I had compiled throughout the summer. All it told me at this stage was that I was two miles into my trip and that the Kingston road bridge was first built in 1828 then widened in 1914 and again in 2001. I suppose that will do for a start.

I looked around for something to capture my interest. Names of boats suggested themselves. I slipped past ‘Fair Maiden’ moored against the bank. It was a faded off-white old pleasure craft with cracked hull and ruptured grey fenders hanging limply along its sides. The proud vessel of a not-so-proud owner who obviously spent more time talking about owning a boat on the Thames than caring for it. I saw many craft in far from ‘fair’ condition that made me wonder why. Why spend all that money on mooring fees, fuel, fitments and maintenance then leave it rotting on some obscure mooring on the Thames?

Some craft were new, others ancient but nevertheless more cared for. Names glided by like a litany to man’s aspirations. ‘Morning Glory’, ‘Proud Mistress’, ‘Perfumed Garden’, ‘Dream Lover’ – all seemingly testifying to something that couldn’t be mentioned at home. Others echoed the humour of their owners. These were often imaginative and inspiring. ‘Piston Broke’, ‘Cirrhosis of the River’, ‘Eyemin Charge’. Names that needed thinking about, then a brave commitment to actually have them painted on the sides of vessels that would have cost the owners tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of pounds to buy.

I was aiming for Old Windsor lock that night. According to my well-researched itinerary, it was twenty one miles and seven locks on from Teddington. I had told Martin, the assistant lock keeper at Teddington, what I was doing. He seemed politely quizzical about the upstream part of my venture. ‘Most people do it the other way,’ he said. It was to be a typical comment on my expedition from those I talked to along the way. I asked Martin if he would phone ahead to let the lock keeper at Molesey know I was coming. This, for purely selfish reasons. I thought that it would help me get through the lock without having to wait for a larger, more visible vessel to approach. And it would also give me a degree of status that I thought I needed as a lone paddler.

“UP the river?! Wow! Congratulations. You are brave. And for charity. Well done.” I imagined these bored custodians of a monotonous job would welcome the distraction as they opened the lock gates to let me through.

Nevertheless, for all my careful planning, there was always the nagging worry that some lock keepers would get complacent and not bother opening the gates for me, as if it wasn’t worth the effort for such a small craft. The problem was, if I was told to portage over the lock, there would be nothing I could realistically do. After all, isn’t that what these cleverly-planned portage ramps were for? Well, yes and no. Yes, if there was, in fact, a portage ramp. No, when there was only a steep flight of steps up from an impossibly high mooring bank. Then a long haul along a lock that could be anything from fifty to a hundred metres long. With an unloaded kayak, maybe, but I was painfully aware that I couldn’t realistically carry my fully-laden Karot any great distance, let alone haul it up a flight of concrete steps. So if I could gain the goodwill of as many lock keepers in advance, I would. And that meant talking to each as I passed through their care and convincing them I was a decent bloke on a mission of charity who deserved to have his way ahead smoothed for him.

The day continued intermittently sunny and cloudy as I plunged on down the great southerly sweep of the river, past boat houses and apartment buildings while sharp-winged sand martins wheeled and dived overhead, skimming the surface of the river for a gulp of water. It took me just over an hour to reach the base of the southerly loop by which time I was aware of the vast expanse of Hampton Court gardens cradled by its embracing curve on the right. Apartment buildings and boathouses had given way to a low concrete wall which lined the river from here on up to Hampton Court bridge (built in 1933) a mile ahead. No buildings peered above its horizon nor tree intruded over its banks. The well-laid lawns, ingenious topiary and magnificent maze lay beyond. The monotonous churn of my paddles all but a background melody. Carolyn and Senan would be home by now.

To think, I mused, over four hundred years ago, a corpulent king had sailed up these very waters on his royal barge to escape a plague in London. Farting and belching, his royal fatness had heaved his syphilitic body onto a mooring ramp and had his rotting flesh transported to the palace for another orgy of drunkeness and debauchery away from the prying eyes of his court. And his wife. Or at least that is what I liked to imagine. Ah, I thought, isn’t history wonderful. Mostly it was grubby, grunting and gory. Blood and power. Sex and politics. Sometimes little actions effecting big changes. Such as a single gunshot in Sarajevo in 1914. Other times it involved bigger undertakings such as the invasion of the Kent coast in 43AD. But there is hardly a spot on this land that doesn’t celebrate some event in history. This particular spot had more history than most. Architects and artists, barons and barmen, courtiers and courtesans, kings and queens all came to Hampton Court. It was permanently staffed like a small town. It rose in glory as a symbol of a king’s vanity and wealth to rival similar extravagances in Europe.

Opposite Henry the Eighth’s holiday hideaway, just before Hampton Court bridge, my notes told me that the River Mole enters the Thames on the left as a little stream. As I slid by, I observed it briefly between two concrete walls and a cluster of moored boats. This little stream ends its happy life here, as a mere culvert emerging into the muddy waters of the Thames. It is a sad end to a joyful journey through the leafy vales of Surry, where it has been twisting and turning through a sylvan landscape of picturesque villages and tidy towns. Winding past cottages and rural pubs, fields and woods. Until it arrives here, lost in the inevitable anonymity of the big city. Nothing surviving of its charm and character except for its name confused in the name of the suburb where it ends its heroic little life.

I arrived at my first lock at Molesey at a quarter past ten. I had left Teddington at five past nine. Just over an hour as I had expected.

As I approached the open lock gates, I automatically increased my stroke rate in case they were just starting to shut. Will I or won’t I be in time to get through? If they are shut, will the lock keeper or won’t he, open them? My orange kayak, red life vest and yellow paddles would be hard to miss. The lock keeper obviously saw me coming and obligingly opened the gates. It was a nice day and he probably didn’t mind standing at the end of the lock looking down the empty river wondering what he was being paid for.

“Thank you,” I shouted cheerily up at him as I glided, small and insignificant, into that dank chamber. He pushed the button that closed the gates behind me and I hovered mid-stream towards the back of the lock. This was the best place to be. A position far enough back where the on-coming rush of water through the front sluices had weakened and wouldn’t twist and turn me every which way and where I could control the boat midway between the two slimy walls.

“Did Martin down at Teddington call you?” I shouted as he passed me to walk to the top of the lock where the controls for the head sluices stood.

“Yes, he told me to expect you,” he replied. I was impressed.

“Great. Thanks. It’s just that I would have difficulty portaging. I’m loaded up with a week’s provisions and the boat’s a bit too heavy to carry.”

In fact, there was a proper portage at Molesey. A roller ramp that I would have been able to negotiate if obliged to. I didn’t want to, however, as I felt I had just got into the kayak and was nicely settled. The sluices ahead let in the waters in a great underwater surge that erupted onto the surface ahead of me. With no other vessel in the lock, it was easy enough to keep the front of the Karot pointed directly upstream and not be twisted sideways. I was raised silently upwards until I could see the clean cut lawn and hedges of the lock island. As the turbulence lessened, I paddled slowly forwards to where I drew level with a strange topiary on the left bank. A small tree shaped in the form of a laughing face. Once the water levels had equalised, the lock keeper pressed the button that opened the upstream gates.

“Someone’s got a sense of humour,” I said, indicating the tree.

“That’d be the wife. She’s handy that way.”

“Quite a tourist attraction. Do you get funny remarks from boaters?” I replied as I took out my camera and took a quick photo.

“All the time. It’s the most photographed shrub this side of Hampton Court.”

“I hope you don’t charge for it.”

“I’ll let you off. How far are you going?” he asked.

“All the way,” I replied. “I’m heading for Lechlade then on up as far as I can to Cricklade. It’s a solo paddle for charity. Here, here’s my charity card.” I fumbled in my life vest and handed him one of the dozen or so little cards I had printed off with the address of my fundraising website. He leant down and accepted it.

“Have a look at it. It tells you all about me,” I urged, as if he would be interested.

“Thanks, I will.”

“Are you Steve, the lock keeper?” I asked, wanting to make it sound as if this was a professionally-planned event.

“No, I’m the assistant lock keeper. Steve’s back this afternoon,” he replied.

“Oh, OK. You couldn’t phone ahead to Sunbury for me could you and let the lock keeper there know I’m coming? It would help if he was expecting me.”

“Sure, no problem. Good luck. Have a nice day,” he offered as I shot out of the lock into the calmer waters beyond like a horse from the starting gate. The small pause in the lock had rejuvenated me and I felt a new energy having conquered this first obstacle so easily. I glided on up the loop of the river in a nor’ westerly direction with a slight breeze coming over the waters from my left, insistently pushing me sideways. I increased the power on my right paddle to compensate.

I spent the next hour passing big islands lined with large houseboats. Many of the houseboats were floating on permanent moorings. Others were anchored to the river bottom on piers; legs of concrete and steel that held them inches above the water. They were fully furnished and ready for occupancy, yet looked tired and empty. As if they were recovering from a summer season of parties and picnics.

I also passed small islands covered with small houses; pretty, chalet-style cottages fronted by tidy lawns. Like a replica Lilliput representing a rural idyll only just far enough from London to pretend it is, indeed, rural. Each house frontage of this dainty paradise was decorated with exotic plants in quixotic urns on little paved patios that reached to the water’s edge. They were planted up with Phormiums and Cordulines from my native New Zealand, now so popular in the northern hemisphere. All very neat and pretty.

As I approached the prow of one small island, whistling the chorus from March of the Toreadors (as I do), I saw ahead a pretty blonde lady watering her plants. She was enjoying the sunshine and fresh air in her little haven on the tightly-packed island. She saw me coming and straightened up and waved. I shouted hello, nice day for it, referring, of course, to her gardening.

“Isn’t it,” she agreed. She brushed a strand of hair from her face and smiled at me with what I liked to think was encouragement and admiration. “You look as if you are enjoying yourself.”

“What’s not to enjoy?” I smiled back. “The sun is in the sky, the ducks are on the water and all is well in the kayak.”

“You look well-equipped, where are you going?” she asked.

Ignoring the obvious innuendo, I replied: “Lechlade in Gloucestershire.”

“Ooh, I know Lechlade. I love Lechlade. It’s a lovely village. I’ve got an aunt in Lechlade.” She had a happy, open smile, lightly freckled cheeks and very pale eyes. With the sun glowing off her crisp white shirt and blue jeans, she looked like a yummy mummy in a washing powder commercial.

“Have you? What a coincidence, ” I replied. “It is lovely isn’t it. I’ve done quite a lot of paddling up there. I’ll say hello to her for you if you like.” I was holding my position on the water by now, not four metres off her riverside lawn and enjoying the conversation.

“That would surprise her. I’ll tell her to look out for you.”

“I should arrive on Friday afternoon. I’ll push on to Cricklade on Saturday and return,” I told her.

“Will you get there by Friday? How far is it?”

I checked my well-researched itinerary.

“Forty four locks and a hundred and twenty-seven miles,” I replied.

“That’s fantastic. Well good luck and maybe I’ll see you then.”

“Tell her my name is Andrew,” I shouted back as I resumed paddling with what I thought was an impressive, muscle-rippling power stroke. I surged ahead and over to the right bank to take the channel at the back of Platt’s Eyot. I turned in my seat and saw her standing there staring after me, empty watering can hanging by her side. Who is she, I wondered? What is she doing in a little chalet on an island on the Thames? It was Monday, shouldn’t she be at work?

One of the advantages of this little craft was that I could explore backwaters and channels behind islands that were, perhaps, only navigable to manpowered craft. I passed the blue ‘Channel’ sign pointing to the left of Platt’s Eyot as I ventured into the alternative channel on the right. At the back of the eyot and out of site of the pleasure folk were rough working yards and marinas with none of the genteel refinement of the previous residential Thames. Derelict iron structures and dilapidated buildings wasted valuable residential real estate on the eyot itself. I glided past in cool shade to emerge in the main channel a couple of hundred metres upstream.

I was being spoilt. Sunbury lock had a roller portage too, but I didn’t use it. With two locks side by side, it was also a double lock. I pulled up in front of the one closest to the left bank. Apparently the lock keeper here had been informed by the assistant lock keeper at Molesey that an idiot in an orange kayak was on his way upstream.

“Yes, he called me,” he shouted. “Said you’re going all the way up. Most people do it the other way!”

“I know,” I said, thinking I’m going to have to get used to this. “But where’s the fun in that?” I was feeling fit and notorious. I had put on a final spurt of speed as I neared the lock when I saw a pleasure boat entering a hundred metres ahead and I feared the lock keeper would shut the gate before I arrived. However, it had stayed open until I had passed through and I was grateful. I stretched my arms and flexed my sprained wrist as I sat in that cool chamber chatting to the people on the pleasure boat. It was an anonymous blue and white gin palace for all the family. A large jolly woman was holding the aft tether while her husband, a mature man of military bearing in a tight grey pullover with epaulettes, held the forward rope. I held on to a dangling tender. Most of my conversations started with: ‘Nice day for it,’ and this one was no different. It sounded the right pitch of casualness and inquisitiveness. You can chat back or ignore it as a mere pleasantry. The jolly woman agreed but added that the weather was on the turn.

"I hope it holds," she observed. "It’s been nice so far."

“Where have you come from,” I enquired.

“Just down there, Teddington,” she replied.

“Me too,” I continued. “Going far today?”

“Oh, we’re going up to Shepperton,” she replied. “Where are you going?”

Exchanges like this were fairly typical of my journey in the early days when I was actually talking to people. For me, they served the purpose of letting me know I wasn’t going ‘bush’ and that I still maintained some shred of civility. I imagined myself in days to come, bearded, mosquito-bitten, thin and reedy with arms like Popeye and communicating in salivating grunts when confronted with a fellow human.

But perhaps not. I had packed a razor after all.

With a promise from the lock keeper to phone ahead to Shepperton lock, I surged out of the upstream gate with a cheery goodbye to the lock keeper and to the jolly woman and her military husband. The blue and white gin palace for all the family overtook me further along the long sheltered lock cut and I rolled precariously on its trailing wake. Upstream wakes are much more uncomfortable that those of boats coming downstream. Downstream wakes pass quickly and I am only left with the smaller ripples that bounce off the river bank and slide under my hull unnoticed. Because I am travelling in the same direction, upstream wakes take longer to pass and I surf their small crests and roll sideways for some time after the boat has motored on ahead.

The four mile stretch to Shepperton Lock started with a steep southwest run followed by a series of wiggles surrounded by a confusion of backwaters, side streams and reservoirs. At least it looked confusing on the map and I just hoped I kept on the right channel. By my reckoning, it was another hour’s paddle, by which time I would be ready for something to eat.

I passed bungalows and boathouses, swans and sailing clubs. Marinas opened out into the channel from left and right and the day remained fair. I continued paddling southwest for another mile until I came to the ugliest bridge I had ever seen. It was at Walton and it was a rusting, riveted metal monstrosity of a bridge that looked as though it should have fallen down years ago. I ducked under it, holding my breath until I was safely out the other side, wondering who bore the shame for its construction and continued presence.

I glided up the long, dank corridor of the Desborough Cut. This was a manmade shortcut to Shepperton lock that avoided the twisting wiggly bits I had observed on my map. At the end, the blue ‘Shepperton Lock’ sign hoved into view and I only had to pause by the mooring bank for a few minutes while a boat entered from upstream. Then with a satisfying whoosh, I saw the water churn out of the downstream sluices. Two boats came through and motored gently past to their next destination with a wave and a nod.

Shepperton also surprised me with my first female lock keeper. Or assistant lock keeper, as my well-researched itinerary noted that the actual lock keeper was another Steve. So whether this was Steve’s wife or a summer temp, I don’t know, but she was cheery enough and had also been forewarned by Sunbury Lock of my coming. I asked her if there was anywhere on the lock island I could pull up and have lunch and she suggested the other side of the lock where there was a pub.

“Just through the gates on your right, love, you can’t miss it,” she said. Then added, “so you’re going upstream. Most people go the other way.” As she stood there, finger on the button powering the gates open, she looked as though she wanted to add: “Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

I left her my charity website card and thanked her as I pushed through the gates and entered a large basin with a thundering weir to my left. Expensive houses lined the river bank and weir island. On the right was a stretch of grass and, as I rounded a slight bend, there was the Thames Court pub with its tables and chairs and lunchtime businessmen sipping diet cokes and virgin Marys in the chill sun. I glided to a halt beside the low wall in front of the pub, praying that my first exit from the Karot would be uneventful. It was, luckily, and I afforded the idle audience no spectacle except that I sat on a small nettle growing between the cracks of the paving which gave me a warming glow on my upper leg.

It had been a morning of steady paddling. Of observation, conversation and elation. I passed inquisitive swans which sailed gently towards me, trailing grey fluffy cygnets, hoping for a morsel. Ubiquitous mallards took off and landed in a flurry under blue and white skies reflecting off a dank green Thames. Cormorants avoided me, while coots hooted in alarm before fluttering and stuttering across the water leaving a trail of splashes like a small outboard motor. Wood pigeons regularly flew across my path and a grey wagtail had erupted from the bank near the weir at Sunbury lock and fluttered in undulating flight to find shelter further up.

For lunch on this first day, I had the luxury of a store-bought sandwich, still fresh in its plastic container. Barely had I sat on the public seat overlooking the river and taken the first bite, than a couple ambled up and began chatting to me. They had seen me get out of my kayak and thought I looked harmless enough to approach. That was encouraging. I thought I looked quite weird in my bright yellow and red water gear. I shuffled along and offered them a seat. He sat with his little white dog on a lead while she stood and fiddled with her camera. It was a large expensive affair, heavy and black, with little pouches on the shoulder strap containing various items of photographic wizardry. The normal conversation about the weather revealed that it wasn’t, in fact, sunny enough for them as they were shooting the weir. By this, they didn’t mean, shooting the weir in a canoe as in ‘shooting the rapids’, but photographing it. She was a professional photographer and was getting the shots for her client, the construction company that built the weir system. Her name was Ros and his, Vince. The small white dog, I was proudly informed, was Muppet. I felt an interesting conversation coming on, so welcomed the company.

“No, I’m not a photographer, just her duty slave,” Vince elaborated good-naturedly. “I arrange everything and make sure she gets everywhere on time.”“Shame you can’t arrange better weather,” she observed. “We’ve been here all morning trying to get some sunny shots, but it’s not looking too good. We might have to give up soon, can’t wait much longer.”

I agreed about the dodgy weather. “The sun comes out occasionally though,” I offered hopefully, “but I suppose you have to be on the spot waiting for the exact moment.” I told her I had worked with many photographers in my career, which elicited the question of what I did. I explained that I was in advertising and marketing, self-employed, and had art-directed a few photographic shoots in my time. Which led on to what I was doing on the river, why upstream, surely most people go downstream etc etc.

We sat there observing the weir island, along with the weir itself and the footbridges that crossed various channels at oblique angles.

“My client has rebuilt the weir system and walkways over the last few years,” Ros informed me. “The project included reinforcing the banks all around the island and along the far side for the residents. They didn’t have to pay. It was part of the agreement with the Environment Agency.”

I considered the engineering company’s unlikely altruism as I looked at the new reinforced banks in front of me, thinking these will last a good few decades. But nothing is for free. There’s always something in it for someone, usually the big boys at the top.

Dragging little Muppet along on the retractable lead, Ros and Vince left me to take advantage of a spell of sunshine for some more photography. I put my rubbish in a nearby bin and slipped down into the Karot without mishap. It was twenty five past one. Feeling fed and fit, I pushed off for the second leg of the day’s journey. Chertsey lock lay two miles ahead. Based on my morning’s performance, that would take thirty to forty minutes.

I was at the bottom of the Thames. This loop at Shepperton was the lowest point, the most southerly part, of the entire length of the river. It would be uphill for the next ninety miles to King’s lock near Eynsham in Oxfordshire, where I would celebrate being at the most northerly reach of the river. Along the way, there were a few southward loops and turns that would get the sun off my back and into my eyes. However, I had to get today’s twenty one mile stretch under my belt first. I was looking forward to my first night’s camp. Between me and Old Windsor Lock lay Chertsey, Penton Hook and Bell Weir locks.

I paddled around several more loops and curves to get to Chertsey. I was looking forward to my first motorway beyond that. Passing under the M3 would be followed by the M25 that day, then the M4 tomorrow. These were important landmarks in a trip which would otherwise be defined by locks. As it transpired, going under a motorway was not an earth-shattering experience.

The wind started to pick up in irritating gusts after Shepperton. At first it was on my back, pushing me northwest, but then in my face as I turned down the south west stretch of the river with Chertsey Meads on my left and parkland on the right.

On up to Chertsey Lock, with a gusting breeze in my face, where I asked the lock keeper, as always, if he would mind phoning ahead to Penton Hook. “Sure,” he replied casually, and I popped out the top of his lock. It was five past two. My timing was spot on. A few hundred metres ahead was the awesome M3 bridge, my biggest bridge yet. To celebrate the event, I went to great pains to take a self-timer photograph of myself underneath it. This involved pulling up against the concrete wall under the giant steel arches, taking my camera out of its waterproof sleeve, rummaging around under my splash guard for the small tripod and placing all strategically at head height on the bank above. The trick then was to press the aperture button and push myself away from the bank to look as if I was casually paddling past at exactly the same time the thirty second delay clicked the camera. It worked. At least to the extent that I was the right distance away and somewhere in front of it grinning like an idiot as the camera flashed. When I checked the photo, it was all right. I was coming into shot on the left and the arches curved above me like the vaulted roof of a gigantic wine cellar. That would do, I thought, wondering if I would do it all over again for the next two motorways. To be honest, it wasn’t that impressive. Nothing from the river really is, except the river itself. I had no sense that thousands of tons of metal thundered above me. I had no idea what they could see on their horizon from their high up position. All I knew was that, according to the notes on my well-researched itinerary, Laleham Golf Club was on my left and Laleham Abbey off to the right as I slid in a nor’ westerly direction to the hook at Penton that gave the area its name. All I could see was the river bank gliding past. A duck’s-eye view. Or a swan’s-eye, perhaps. But no more. There could have been naked girls dancing around maypoles in those fields but I couldn’t see past the towpaths and grassy banks.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t go around the eponymous hook at Penton because a cut had sliced through the neck to set it adrift as a kind of man-made ox-bow with an impassable weir throttling one throat. So I sliced up the main channel and into the first lock where the lock keeper hadn’t heard of me.

“Didn’t you know I was coming?” I enquired.

“No,” he replied.

“Oh,” I was disappointed. “Didn’t the guy at Chertsey call you to let you know?”

“No.” He was obviously a man of few words. Perhaps the lock keeper at Chertsey was afraid of him.

“Oh, OK. It’s just that I’ve been asking each lock keeper to phone ahead to the next lock to let them know I was coming. I thought it would help you guys if you knew in advance that I couldn’t portage with my kayak loaded up like this,” I explained disingenuously.

“It doesn’t matter. Wouldn’t make any difference. We’d still open up for you.”

“Oh, I thought you might expect a kayak to portage if there was no other boat coming through.”

“Not if you didn’t want to. It’s our job.”

“That’s a relief,” I replied, and relaxed a bit. “I’m on a charity paddle up the Thames to Lechlade,” I added by way of explanation, and to forestall the inevitable ‘Most people do it the other way’.

“No problem,” he said as the gates opened and I was out the other side. It was three o’clock and I began fighting a gusting head wind which is a nightmare for kayakers. When it’s strong enough, the wind catches the paddle and wiggles it awkwardly before it comes down for a misplaced stroke. Also, there is a greater resistance than I would have thought on a body in a streamlined craft. So it became a bit of a slog, that stretch on up through Staines. I was bent forward for much of it trying to eke a few metres out of each pull of the paddle, noticing how slowly the river bank moved backwards beside me. Old people walk with shopping trolleys faster than this, I thought.

I passed between high rise council blocks; 1960’s monstrosities finished in various shades of white and terracotta as if splashing a little Mediterranean joy into the grey landscape of London suburbia. A teenage couple sat on the right bank, engrossed in some private conflict. He was pleading his case and her body language was saying no. When I glided past, she looked at me with bored eyes and a sigh. He was a tormented, spotty youth begging for forgiveness of some drunken misdemeanour and was too focused on his mission to notice me on mine.

I finally reached the railway bridge at Staines followed by an arched stone road bridge built, it said, in 1832. There was a small respite from the gusting wind between that town’s buildings.

The only reason I knew it was Staines, was because I had a map. There are no signs on the river informing me where I was aside from the obligatory ones the Environment Agency put up directing you down the correct channel and towards a lock. And sometimes even these are absent. I have come across a fork in the river, or an alternative channel, that may or may not simply go around the back of an island and rejoin the main stream further up. But I’m not to know from my swan’s-eye position, so I usually opt for the widest channel and hope for the best. So far, I haven’t had the misfortune of paddling for hours up a backwater before confronting a weir and having to go all the way back downstream again to join the correct channel. I wasn’t looking forward to that day.

Passing under the M25 was a watershed for me. Up until now, I had been in virgin territory, but from here on I was more or less on my home patch. Runnymede, Windsor, Bray, Maidenhead, Marlow, Henley, Wargrave, Sonning and even Reading were all local to me. I had friends, family and clients in these towns and I had spent many a day trip in the Karot along these stretches of water throughout the summer.

I decided not to take a photo of me grinning under the M25 overbridge. It looked much the same as the M3 overbridge with its featureless steel arches. It was also a bit like my local Marlow bypass, but on a bigger scale, so it didn’t offer me anything special in the way of an architectural experience. However, a little way ahead of the M25 bridge, Bell Weir Lock certainly surprised me. It was four o’clock as I slid between its hulking gates. I was the sole occupant as the gates swung shut behind me.

“You might want to hold on,” the lock keeper shouted down at me. “Grab the chains.”

“I’ll be OK,” I replied, wondering why he thought I looked like a novice. “I can control it better in the middle.” I positioned myself mid-stream midway along its length, as always waited for the gurgling rush from the underwater sluices ahead. It was a particularly large lock. In fact, the walls were nearly three metres high and the cavernous chamber was well over seventy metres long. Compared to little Shepperton lock, at only about fifty metres long, that was impressive.

“Suit yourself,” the lock keeper said as he opened the sluices. As expected, the water welled to the surface behind the head gates and the disturbance moved towards me. Then something I didn’t expect. I casually dipped my paddles gently in the water each side of me to keep steady. Then, unexpectedly, a second rush of water exploded directly under me. It was like riding a geyser. I was twisted and turned in all directions and had to work my paddles furiously to prevent myself from losing control. The turbulence continued for a long, frantic minute. Finally, the foaming eruption subsided as the levels equalised. I moved down the lock to confront the lock keeper.

“Wow! What was that?” I asked as I drew level with him. “What was going on in the middle there? I haven’t seen that before.”“I warned you,” he smiled. “They’re duck sluices. Channels that run behind the walls on both sides and open halfway along the lock beneath the surface.”

“Blimey! That was fun,” I said. “What are they for?”

“Oh, just to operate the lock faster. We’re quite a big lock here and it speeds up the filling.”

“Are there any more like that?” I asked.

“Romney’s got them. It’s the only other one that does.”

I noted in my journal that evening that I was in my ‘first bit of country’. Although somewhat manicured, green fields and parkland opened out before me after Bell Weir lock. However, the sky had darkened and the low cloud was taking on an ominous hue.

I was in familiar territory at Runneymede. Historically, this was the birthplace of the nearest thing the British have for a constitution. It was here that King John signed a piece of paper imaginatively call ‘the Big Charter’ that acceded rights and privileges to that deserving and downtrodden class, the barons.

I could smell the damp in the air as I crawled that last three miles from Bell Weir lock to Old Windsor. There was a stiff wind and it became a bit of a struggle as I continued on upstream between trees and fields. I scarcely noticed the world around me. A road hugged the river on the left and up ahead was my first campsite and respite from what was becoming a long day. Staying close to the right bank, I pushed past Magna Carta Island and on up beside lush trees until the green gave way to a towpath lined with houses. That’s when it started raining. Thin, drifting drizzle of no great volume to concern me, barely a mist, but nevertheless uncomfortable.

It was exactly five o’clock when I pulled up at Old Windsor Lock. I had phoned the assistant lock keeper a few days earlier to book my place on his island for the night. Young Matt greeted me at the tail of the lock and I introduced myself.

“Hi,” I shouted, “are you Matt?”

“That’s me,” he shouted back.

“I’m Andrew. I called you on Saturday about camping on the island tonight. Is it still all right?” I asked anxiously.

“Yes. Go round the back and tie up and I’ll meet you.”

I sighed with relief. I didn’t particularly want to go any further. I had been paddling for seven hours already, not counting the break for lunch at Shepperton, and in the latter stages, I had been fighting the wind as well as the current. The next possible campsite, at Bray, was another nine miles, three locks and three more hours of paddling away. And I really wanted a proper campsite on my first night. While I was prepared to free camp along the way, a proper campsite with water, toilets and even a shower, would set me up nicely for the rest of the journey and break me in gently to the whole outdoor living experience.

I backed up and swung around the right side of the lock towards the sound of a roaring weir. Past small leisure boats moored against a long pontoon and through a narrow gap beside the bank where there was a steep walkway reaching up to the lock island. Unpacking the Karot and setting up camp was a new experience and one I was savouring even in my tired state. I tied front and aft to the mooring bollards and peeled open the rubber lids and unloaded the contents onto the pontoon. It took me two trips up the steel ramp to the area of rolling lawn above that Matt had indicated as the official lock island campsite. Unsurprisingly, no-one else was there. It was an area of lawn scarcely the size of a tennis court with a large yew tree up against the fence at the top. I decided to pitch my tent under the tree where the grass was still dry. I sprung open my pop-up tent and angled it so the door was on the slightly downhill end and my head would be at the uphill end.

I felt as excited as a child at Christmas. The tent worked fabulously and instantly created a dry haven. I unfurled the plastic Lilo with the pillow end at the top. Then I settled down inside the doorway to blow it up, hoping I had enough energy left. After a few minutes, it lay there in all its soft squeaky splendour. Swivelling, I addressed the contents of the dry bags, placing the beach towel on top of the Lilo as a blanket before unzipping the sleeping bag and laying it on top. There was only a narrow space between lilo and the sides of the tent for my possessions, so I was careful to position them neatly for easy access. I unpacked my pyjama T-shirt bearing the Diabetes UK logo, as well as dry boxer shorts in case I was called out in the night suddenly by some unimagined emergency. Torch and night-time bottle of water were wedged on the right beside the pillow, as was the iPod I had taken to keep me company and drown out the demon voices in my head at night. When all was ready, I decided on a shower. Matt had shown me the amenities in the large shed next door. A small kitchen, men’s and women’s toilets and a lockable shower room. All perfectly respectable and very reassuring.

I turned to my food bags. Now, I thought, what morsels of culinary excellence should I indulge in tonight? Hmmm, pork pie? Why not. Tin of baked beans with pickle? Definitely. Cheese? Banana? Yes, yes, yes. I ate with relish, sitting cross-legged at the door of the tent, listening to the roar of the weir and watching the night close in.

The first night

I felt sorry for the Queen. Here I am only a mile from Windsor Castle and the jets taking off from Heathrow Airport across the river in front of me practically tipped the turrets of her home as they flew overhead. Her lead-light windows must have rattled at each fly-past.

I sat in the mouth of my tent that first damp evening watching the jets and listening to the sharp cries of the parakeets flying from tree to tree. I sipped my favourite whisky (ah, my beloved Laphroaig) and puffed on my cigar. It was the perfect way to spend an evening. The day’s work done, a smug sense of satisfaction at having kept to my schedule, and all the necessities at hand. The low hum of the weir below the lock island provided a soothing accompaniment.

I took another sip of my whisky as another jet climbed into the clouds overhead. They continued rising above the willows across the stream every sixty seconds. No sooner had one disappeared over Windsor Castle behind me, than another one rose steeply in front. Black silhouettes that rose with a roar into the darkening sky.

The lock keeper had long since gone off duty and it was only me and my little pop-up tent on the lawn behind the lock house. I thought about the sounds of my day, the muted ‘shoosh, shoosh’ of the paddles, hour after hour. The sharp cry of the coots as they flurried out of my way, the flapping, quacking ducks and the serenely silent swans. Of all the wildfowl, of all the ducks, coots, swans, geese and grebes I had encountered on the river, all but the grebes flew off in alarm. The grebe didn’t fly, but dived for safety. Everything else took to the air to escape my relentless upstream journey.

Another jet-load of tourists escaping the English weather took to the air over the drooping willows. I took another sip of my lovely whisky and watched as it grew in size, climbing steeper and steeper, undercarriage dangling redundantly, until it was engulfed by the clouds above Windsor Castle. Rending the dusky sky with a primeval groan, they punctured the low cloud layer with their headlights blazing and disappeared from view leaving a trail of disquiet until the next one climbed out of its distant lair.

I continued watching and observing, feeling a warm tranquillity settle over me. I lit another cigar and refreshed my plastic tumbler and began noticing distinct and individual characteristics in these metal monsters. The smaller ones, I observed (obviously the young of the pack) were light and nimble and gained altitude quickly and steeply with the jaunty confidence of the young, trailing their adolescent whine below the cloud layer. The big ones, the alpha males and females, I noticed astutely as I savoured my whisky wisely, were low and lumbering, heaving their considerable bulk reluctantly into the night sky with a guttural groan that rose to a great roar of defiance until they, too, were swallowed by the cloud layer.

Then there was their undercarriages. Do you know how quickly they pull these dangling things up? Very quickly is the answer to that. Time after time, every sixty seconds, every time one rises on a roar, that’s the first thing I noticed, after a while. Then, as I finished what I decided was definitely my last shot of whisky, definitely, I observed, to my amazement, that they also turn off their headlights as soon as they hit the cloud layer. How incredible is that!? They really do turn off their headlights when they hit the cloud layer, these primitive beasts of burden with their tourists going to far-flung places and warmer climes that are far flung. They always turn their headlights off when they get to the clouds. Why is that? Maybe it’s out of consideration for the Queen. Maybe she protested about the bright lights shining in her windows at night. I mean, she might as well live on a motorway, if that’s going to happen. But then there’s the noise. No, she can’t change that, unless they move the airport, and I hear they’re not going to do that. I decided that it was her fault anyway. I mean to say, what silly bugger builds a royal castle under the flight path of the world’s busiest airport? Serves her right. I think it’s time for bed. I fell backwards onto my lovely Lilo which is exactly where I wanted to land. It was eight o’clock.

I slept fitfully. Jets roared overhead until eleven o’clock to be replaced by the gentle murmur of the weir and the squelch of my plastic Lilo as I turned in my sleep. At one point the wind picked up and I was conscious of the familiar sound of rain. Comfortable and dry in my pop-up tent, I optimistically told myself that it would pass by morning.

Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue

Against the current

Contents

Epilogue

Chapter Five

Chapter Four

Chapter Three

Chapter Two

Chapter One