Huricane Bill has made his way over the Atlantic, and what is left of him is blowing the trees about in an ineffectual sort of way.  Bill’s rain is what the Brits like to call “wetting” rain.  I know what they mean: the effort feels half hearted, but it doesn’t half soak you.

I knew Bill was coming, so this morning I lugged up the tow path my two toilet cartridges – what the boaters call, “shit suitcases”.  I thought I’d do it early because I prefer to stay dry when I sluice my effluent.

The cartridges were surprisingly heavy, and their contents were all mine.  It amazes me how much waste a body makes in a week.  I have had no other home except Pangolin since last Tuesday. 

I am still having anxiety dreams about moving out of my house and waking at 3 am in a panic.  If I can wait just a little while, at 4 am I know the BBC World Service will give me lovely, familiar, soporific news to doze by, but I have learned that the radio is not my friend in every sleepless hour.

In my last nights at Hedges (my former home) I sometimes turned the radio on too early.  One night the program was interrupted mid sentence, and there followed, for twenty minutes or more, a series of clunks, dings and fog horn type noises.  Was no one else listening?  And no one at the station to intervene, apologise, and offer me “a little music” while they sorted it out?

There was no such intervention, and when I next heard a voice it was speaking a language I did not recognize, except intermittently when it shouted “Afghanistan!”  “Pakistan!”  “Taliban!”  The voice, whose unfamiliar syllables sounded to me angry and aggressive, continued for another fifteen minutes.

With insomniac logic I calculated that the whole point of the BBC World Service was that it was English, the Language of the Empire, the Common Language of the World, and more importantly, the Language I Understood, and which ought to be lulling me back to sleep. 

If the radio wasn’t speaking English, something must be badly wrong.  I began to be certain that terrorists had taken over – if I imagined World Service studios at all I imagined them remote and vulnerable.  The terrorists were now broadcasting to their brethren (and me).  How many more times were they going to say “Afghanistan”?

While I was wondering what to do next – surely I should call someone – I heard the words “BBC Swahili” and then English, and normal service, resumed.  Okay, fine.  But next time before the Swahili program comes on don’t break the tape first.  And maybe try throwing in a few comforting, international words, the sort that terrorists always eschew, like Disneyland, weekend, and Big Mac.

Meanwhile, no one on the towpath can get phone, tele or internet reception.  Leaves on the trees, apparently.  I can sometimes get connected if I wander around outside and point my screen hopefully at the sky.  So I need to brave Bill, and the wetting rain, to post this.

When I get back inside, I think I’ll read Mansfield Park.  I packed it near the top of one of my boxes, because I thought I might need it.  It’s a comfort text, with nice dry pages, reliably in English.