A man in a florescent jacket, with his name - GUY - stitched onto his breast pouch, has just asked me to tidy up the things on my the roof of my boat. He’s part of the private security militia that patrol the newly revamped Paddington Basin area around Merchant Square. I’m guessing the sight of my narrowboat renovation project isn’t quite what the planners promised the buyers when they sold in the prospect of canalside living. I also doubt this man is called Guy, he doesn’t seem like a Guy.
A few miles East from here, where the developments are some way behind Paddington, glossy hoarding panels display rendered images of gleaming identikit (un)affordable homes, towering above a picturesque, rubbish-free waterways and lovely looking narrowboats with absolutely no stuff on their roofs. But these images ignore an important fact about boating: that in reality, all boats are fighting an unwinnable war with water.
Scientifically speaking water is the strangest substance on the planet: it has half the molecular weight of most gases and yet exists as a liquid, a liquid that actually becomes less dense as it freezes, has a neutral pH and yet dissolves almost anything. All around me, as Guy and I are talking, water is acting by process of electrochemical oxidation to corrode the steel in the hull, causing it to rust, while also providing the perfect environment for fungi to secrete an enzyme that breaks down cellulose in the wood of the cabin, causing it to rot. Water doesn’t want my boat to exist and one day it will have its way.
But choosing to fight this battle also comes with some reward: the boat offers me a means to poke around in the London’s underbelly, to explore behind the curtain. It has pulled me onto another path, jolted my awareness of the city, changed both my lens and my pattern of movement by rotating my own axis of exploration 90 degrees clockwise; now East to West not North to South, influenced not by the grooves worn by the flow of capital, but of water. I like that.
This boat has also changed my understanding of place. I link memories of time spent afloat to where I was moored rather than to the interior of the cabin itself, and I think about what the light was like, and which way my bow was facing. But the interior of the cabin also has its own character and my resulting ‘sense of place’ is somehow the result of an interrelation between the two, so it’s fuzzy, not fixed. I like that too.
So these are the reasons I choose to live on the boat, even if that choice is complicated by the mischievous actions of millions of bonded oxygen and hydrogen atoms, atoms of trouble and joy.
So I said all that to Guy but he told me I still had to tidy up the stuff on my roof.