WHAT HAPPENED WAS…

the days glide away. i’m not sure where they go but they go somewhere. waterway life is so different from real life and it has the maddest effect on me. the other day we went to bed at quarter past eight and i’ve started to wake up at about five to six thirty. then i get up and have a swig or two and then go back to bed and dream the oddest dreams that i’ve ever had. i’m not sure why this is; it might be something to do with atmospheric pressure.

john the bosh came out for a bit of a trip on the good ship charley rose. he had had a few. he did a bit of steering. he did a bit of locking. he disappeared…

i found him, eventually, lying in a ditch full of brambles. he couldn’t get up because he had his jelly legs on and i had to go and get a torch and then a bloke called billy to help hoist him up. in the morning he noticed that he had lost his mobile and specs and things. we went back and found them all. but john the bosh had a splendid time and i was very pleased for him. john the bosh doesn’t have many splendid times, you see.

SAILING SIMON UPDATE

i know that he didn’t lie to me, he’s just mad. he is coming back down south again but what he will do when he gets here i can’t imagine. oh, and some little bastard stole his chimney off the boat. it had some horse-brass thingies on that you can buy as souvenirs of your travels. all gone.

WHEN I GOT HOME AGAIN

blogger had gone mad and rejected my advances when i tried to do a blog. it seems to be behaving itself now though (emphasis on the word “seems").

i discovered the world of smell. after i had fondled my neighbour’s tomatoes (stop sniggering; one of the pots on the balcony had fallen over and i put it back and didn’t even steal one of the toms) i smelt the lovely smell of tomato plant on my hands. then, a bit later on, we had a starter of avocado and seafoody stuff. i applied the juice of a lime that trouty had obtained from tesco - she may well have shoplifted it as she is of dubious character. the smell of the lime’s juice on my hands was SO lovely.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT…

i really must get my act together. it’s the laddie’s birthday tomorrow and i must get a card in the post. the council bastards have presented me with a massive bill and i really need a wash and brush-up. i need to see the doctor with regard to insulin and osteo-arthritis. there are seventeen million things that i should be doing but i don’t want to do any of them; i want to be back on the boat.

THANKS FOR YOUR TIME

see you around.

NOTHING

there was something that i should have done today. but i didn’t do it.

what i should have done was go to the civic offices to argue the toss about a bill for 87 quids that had landed on the mat. i got increased incapacity benefit which i thought was to make me feel a bit better but apparently it is so that i can walk around in the rain giving money from the dept of work and pensions to runnymede borough council. so i would rather go back on the bog-standard rate. oh, for fuck’s sake! why can’t i just be left in peace?

so, i didn’t go. it would have ended in tears and as some of those tears would have been mine i decided to leave it until next week.

the best thing to do at times like this is to go to the pub. trouty was in london and i was at a loose end. i saw john the bosh and vodka mick. the fat was chewed and this and that. i felt dreadful and ‘got at’ by the council bods. oh well.

RAINFALL

it came down again today. it really fell down like stair-rods. but the covers are on the boat and so she should be safe and tomorrow we go back out on her again. we can go up the cut and muck about and generally misbehave and lecture people on hire-boats and mag the locks and look at the plants and the birds.

AND SO…

there really isn’t that much to report. i itch to get back on the navigation, i itch to feel the water slipping underneath me as the lister bangs away and to walk about at locks with a windlass hanging off my belt and to feel like i really belong. i yearn to help others and to tell them where they are going wrong.

this is neither big nor clever; i know this. but please bear this in mind - i do not have a lot going in my life at the moment in a careerwise kind of way and so these moments mean a great deal to me.

just a bit of peace and quiet and some self-respect is not too much to ask.

ARSE

i might well be an arse. but now i’m a happy one. and that makes a change.

goodnight, sleep well and don’t have nightmares.

DON’T GET FED UP

it must be very boring for people that have to go work to read about me having loads of fun on the waterways. but don’t get fed up, just listen to “jump around” by house of pain and realise that you too can muck about on the canal. all you have to do is give me a ring and we’ll meet up. what’s that you say? you don’t have my number? if you don’t have it already you can find it if you are a nice person. i’d like to hear from you.

SAILING SIMON

he hasn’t got cancer. what he’s got is a hiatus hernia. what he’s also got is me really pissed off with him. i was tempted to type this word: “twat". but i won’t because he is not well and so that wouldn’t be fair.

PIRACY ON THE HIGH SEAS

i made myself a fab hat out of one of the green rags that i use on the fab two-pot lister engine that runs my boat. trouty took a fab piccie of me steering said boat with my fab pirate rag hat on. well, she took the pic while i was wearing the hat, not the other way round. no. i was not wearing the hat the other way round. oh! shut up and forget it.

BOVINITY

she is still a cow. i phoned my son from the boat the other day as the rain tipped down and we spoke until my credit ran out. i really wish that i wasn’t such a rubbish dad but i just am. it’s his birthday soon on the 26th of august. he will be sixteen. the last time i saw him i put my arm round him and i was surprised that my little lad had turned into a muscular type. i love his long hair, i love his extreme intelligence, i love the fact that he was pictured on the front page of the paper leading the march against the “war” in iraq. i love the fact that he listens to classical music and i will never forget the few times that we had together up on the downs when he walked for miles and was so happy that he wanted to write poems and he tried to feed the sheep with his crisps. i remember when he was just newborn, minutes old, lying on that bed in brighton and licking his lips and looking around…

SON/SUN/SON

when he was 18 months old i realised that he could just about read. we had this game called “boggle” and this was made of die with letters on. he used to chuck them all over the place and once when i was, yet again, picking them up i asked him what the letters were on them. and he knew. he knew the lot. i pushed him in his pushchair through smith’s one day and he was pointing at the spines of books and saying “chatterton” and “oscar wilde” because he recognised books that we had in the house. a woman came up and said that she was a teacher and that she had never seen anything like it.
here’s to you my darling boy.

BOAT

the charlotte rose is a dream come true. if you are a nice person, please come and have a go on her. you don’t even have to dress up as a pirate, all you have to do is need a break and work locks.

ON AND ON…

oh, i AM going on rather so i’ll leave you now. thanks for bearing with me. i don’t know when i’ll be back because now i have the opportunity to do the very thing that i’ve always wanted to do the temptation to be even more irresponsible and just disappear is overwhelming.

CAST OFF

bye bye and you take care, y’hear?

PICK YOUR OWN…

i haven’t been around here that much so i will have to do a few blogs in one. here goes…

BROTHER LEE LOVE

i was sailing downstream when i saw my brother and his girlfriend and two of her kids. i pulled in. i took george up to papercourt lock to mag it and when we came back jackie’s front tooth had fallen out and she smiled with a nice brassy peg in the middle of her gob. it was good to see him though. there still seems to be an atmosphere between us but there is also a closeness; the boat before us had made him remark to jackie that i would be out on the river… two minutes later and there we were.

SIMPLE SIMON

no, not THAT one.
sailing simon has got madder and madder. i got frustrated with trying to call him to no avail and spoke to fg on the phone. i strongly suspect that he had turned his phone off in the hope that fg would come and find him. which she did. fg thinks that he has a hernia and not cancer and i think that she is probably right. dr the thirst must google up hiatus hernias before making an accurate diagnosis but it all seems to fit together. in short i have been….

SUCKERED

what a twat i have been. i take people at face value and i dislike being lied to and where i’m not sure that i have been i still have that nasty taste in the mouth about it all. so…

DIAGNOSIS

he’s mad. he obviously believes that he has cancer. i went to a ’sudden death’ when i wore the badge of courage in brixton to a suicide that thought he had cancer too. when the post-mortem results were revealed he hadn’t a thing wrong with him. simon is now talking about having his boat craned out and put on a low-loader and driven back to surrey and put on sleepers in his mum’s drive. lucky old mum. this makes me feel a tad fucked off. thanks to everyone who jumped in and helped and visited and all that. what can i say?

WATERLAND

i’ve started to go to bed at half past nine and waking at six or so. i then have a few swigs and a fag. then i go back to bed and dream the sweetest dreams for a couple of hours which is rather unheard of in the thirst history. one of my great delights is being snooty about other boats. last night a boat called “iron duck” came past at night and at top speed and nearly pulled my pins and i would have liked to have a fight with the, ahem, ’skipper’. there are a few people that i would like to have a fight with. let’s name a few: david essex, that stupid bloke out of e47 with the baseball hat that knobbed mono-nostril daniella westbrook, baz hunt, bliar, the little tosser in the red speedboat that i nearly smashed to bits at at stoke lock just for the fun of it but was far too responsible to do so, the little bastard that i see on a bicycle round here and basically anyone that annoys me. i want to get one of them really smashingly powerful catapults and a bag of marbles for ammo. which brings me on to this…

GRAFFITI

while i have been away sailing the seven seas (voice heard from small child: “you’re not a real pirate") there has been scaffolding up across the station opposite while the repainting has been done. now i see that there has been some more painting done. little bastards have been up on the scaffold and done their lovely work all across the front of it. it’s the usual incomprehensible squiggles but i can make out “tbs". if anyone out there knows who “tbs” in the new haw area might be, please let me know. the reason i ask is that i magged up a rusty windlass and i would quite like to try it out on his teeth.

CONCLUSION

we are all mad. simon is mad but it’s not his fault. but those little shits who have spray-painted where i have to live are the bitter end. if only i had been here and if only i had caught them. what a shame if they had ‘fallen’ from the scaffolding. but speedboaters and twats apart the life on the river is beautiful. get up early and see the mist rising off the navigation. smell the weirs and get begged off by the swans. forget real life; jump right into waterlife.

CHOONS

i only popped home for a bit but i enjoyed “debris” by the faces.

MESSAGE

you take care, y’hear?

COW

the boat seems to be relatively sorted. the engine has been gone over and is to be trusted once again. the weather is gorgeous. time for my kids to come and stay on her for a bit while we pootle up and down the canal and they can have some kind of holiday for once.

except my ex won’t let them.

so that’s nice.

not.