We were all running short of diesel, coal, gas and toilet fluid, because first Dusty was stuck in the ice at Duke’s Lock, and then he had to go north to reload his boat.  So everyone was glad to get his text message the other day.

Squirrels are searching out their nuts for a nibble, but you get Dusty’s nuts delivered. Rock on Tues, Thrupp Wed, and Dukes plus Oxford Thurs/Fri. You don’t need to nibble at my nuts – buy them by the bag.

Yesterday evening around half past five a bell jingled, a boat tied up alongside me, and I went out to greet Dusty. 

He loaded eight bags of coal onto my roof (that should do me for a fortnight), and then stepping onto Pangolin, filled the tank with diesel.

One hundred and sixty kilograms of coal, ninety litres of diesel and a litre of “green” toilet fluid was £148.50. 

Pangolin was his last call that day.  Dusty went through the lock and, not wanting to risk the river at night, moored up just by the bridge where the Cherwell flows into the canal and rushes south towards Oxford.

Dusty watches as Pangolin’s fuel tank fills.

The new year is beginning to feel old, which, I guess, is a way of saying I am beginning to feel at home again along the tow path. 

I have a new neighbour (Mr Badger) and the swan family has changed, but otherwise things are pretty much as usual:  Ratty emerged from his boat for the first time this morning (that is, the first time I have seen him since I got back), off for a toilet run.  He’s still banned from the pub.  Ferret, working on the new boat, has broken up with Dina, but she still shows up at the pub now and then, never ever without her head covered.

Wheels finally got his engine up and running, and Tad is still moored by the pub because it is easier for Chris to get on and off since she broke her hip after the particularly jolly boaters Christmas party (which I missed) when more than one of my neighbours ended up at the hospital.

Kate, who has one good arm and one shrunken by thalidomide, greeted me warmly when we met along the tow path.  But I have also met her on the street when we are each in our respectable, Oxford lives, and she has shown no sign of recognition.

James and Emma, the young archaeologists, who used to rent Cherry Lea, are gone, leaving their vintage Triumph in the car park, so I guess they will be back.  Pat the Grumpy Mechanic will have a word or two to say then.  He’s let it known to anyone who cares to listen that they owe him at least two Jack Daniels and a Diet Coke for all the work he did on that car. 

John, the new boy in the pub, is now renting Cherry Lea, squatting a mile north by Pigeon’s Lock.

John says he’s going to marry Cherry Lea’s owner, who sometimes lives in the Seychelles and sometimes in Staffordshire, and then it will be their boat together.

I point out that he has just told me he already has a wife in Bicester, Oxfordshire, and several grown children.  He shrugs and says, I’m too old for you, anyway.

When I drift over to talk to Pat the Grumpy Mechanic he nods towards John and says, That guy works on a Bull Farm.

I reply, Oh no!  He makes specialist microscopes! He told me so.

I am an unusually literal person.

Anyway, I was only at the pub because Pat earlier reminded me that on Thursday the fiddly diddlies are there, and so he urged me to come.  I asked the Landlord, Stematos, if he paid them for the gig. 

He looked astonished, and said that he didn’t charge them for practicing in his pub.

Just before I went home alone, to be in bed by eleven (according to my new year’s resolution), I pointed out to Pat, in my literal way, that there wasn’t a single fiddler amongst them: two banjos and more accordions than are probably legal in a single location.

The fiddly diddlies

There’s a guy who cruises up and down the South Oxford Canal filling boats with diesel and delivering coal.  In the way that people call each other after their boats, he is known as Dusty.  I have his real name on a bit of paper somewhere, for when I write the cheques, but I think of him only as Dusty the Coal Man.  When he is on his way he sends text messages to everyone along the route, reminding us to fill up. 

The texts are usually vaguely suggestive: “Dusty – your man for hot nuts, exotic red juice and whiffy gas…Nice! Rock on Tuesday, Kidlington Wed, and on to Oxford Thurs/Friday.”

We are the “Rock”, short for the Rock of Gibraltar, the pub on the other side of the bridge.  I have no idea why it is called that.

For several weeks Dusty was stuck in the frozen canal, and now that the ice and snow have given way to rain, we hear he is headed toward Oxford and won’t be back at the Rock for another ten days or more.  Between him and us is a stretch of the River Cherwell, now in flood. 

So I am getting fit, not just by heaving my toilet cartridge up the tow path, but by heaving bags of coal down it.  I keep the fire going all the time, day and night: the trick is to stoke it up with coal and turn down the vents at bedtime, feeding it in the morning and opening the bottom door to fill it up with fresh air.

I was getting quite smug about how well I was doing until the fire went out yesterday afternoon (I got stingy with the coal when I had to carry it), and it has been troublesome ever since.

Meanwhile my engineer friend who fixes things for me whenever I smile pathetically appeared outside my window with sixty kilograms of coal that he had pushed along the path in a cart stolen from a nearby garden centre and left by the bridge for everyone’s use.  He stood absolutely knackered and barely breathing outside my boat, and then he lit up a cigarette to give him strength to hand the bags on board.

The fire, now glowing warmly again. I lit the candles just for you.

When I am on the canal I usually sit in what’s traditionally called the saloon, almost at the front of the 62 foot long boat.  There are two chairs, and I occupy both, moving from one to the other depending on the fierceness of the fire and the strength of the cold outside.  From one chair my toes can reach the cast iron stove, where there’s a mark matching the melted tread of my slipper.

On Saturday evenings I burn candles, stew a chicken and watch a bit of tele.  When I was at school, impossible as it sounds now, the clever girls did Latin and the dim ones did physics.  The tele is dim and prefers volts and amps to ablatives and gerunds, but because I am clever I don’t know how to give it what it wants.  It splutters in and out of life. 

I watch a show in which people have brought ugly stuff from their attics to a place where antique experts will tell them what it is worth.  It’s the credit crunch and that’s the only kind of tele the BBC can afford.  At exactly the moment when the expert says, You will be surprised to learn that on the open market this item would fetch…  my tele demands more amps (or volts; I don’t know which because I am clever) and it turns off.

I’d had enough of this last Saturday so I grabbed my torch (that’s a flashlight to you North Americans) and trundled up the towpath to the pub.  I knew Stematos, the Greek landlord, and his apple-cheeked British wife would be glad of my custom.  That is, I knew Stematos would be glad.   Apple-cheeked is not at all clear that I am worth the bother. 

As I have written before, I have more than once fallen foul of the 3 o’clock Baguette Watershed, meaning no foreign muck after that hour, but she might just stretch to a slice of ham between two nicely buttered slabs of honest British bread, if I ask especially apologetically. 

The pub is about a quarter of a mile along the towpath and over the bridge, but I didn’t make it that far. As I reached the bridge I saw that a group of boaters had gathered around a bonfire.  I took a spare seat and someone passed me a glass of wine.  Faintly acrid smoke, smelling of burning creosote, drifted past me and across the canal.  At my back I could feel the night, cold and clear, but the bright heat of the flames drew us all in, and we were warm and merry.

I had seen in the new year around a bonfire with much the same crowd: people whose last names I don’t know, who are called after their boats or creatures of the canal.  The bonfire shone on shaved-headed Ratty, my first friend along the towpath; purple-haired, Emma, my near neighbour; Pat the engineer; Mar who put an axe through his foot last week chopping wood and Scotty who has to go to parenting classes on Tuesdays or else he won’t be allowed to visit his wee babby. 

Because I used to walk a toy poople along the towpath, I have also had occasion to mention the scary dogs some of my neighbours keep.  My poodle has emigrated, and the uneasy peace along the tow path, and in the pub, is breached a little less often.  We are all still variously lame, divorced, pierced, tattooed, out to lunch or gone fishiing, TV license fee evaders every one.  I am fast catching up with the others, a connoisseur of scrounged bonfires: I favour picnic tables.

Nevertheless, it still feels a little odd to find my fifty-five year old self alone in this company on a March evening in England getting drunk under Bridge 216a and warming my toes on burning fence posts.  When I was a kid there was a joke (I think it was from Maine) and the punch line was always, You can’t get there from here. 

Turns out you can.

I finally got the world wide web on my boat.

It was my project for this weekend. After two and a half years of a combination of fruitless research and fervent hope that someone would bring mobile broadband to my squatting mooring spot in rural Oxfordshire, one company was suddenly boasting absolutely, totally perfect, best of all possible broadband — at least at the pub. I read it on the internet, so I knew it must be true.

Saturday’s task was to go to the shop and buy the magic bit of kit that would connect me. But because Friday was my ex husband’s birthday and today would be my Baby’s birthday, I had first promised to make a cake (in my brand new cooker) for a joint celebration.

I am well known for my cakes. This is not because I am good at baking – I am not – but because a very long time ago in England if you weren’t good at baking everyone soon discovered it. If you were a woman over 21, certainly if you had a child at school, cakes were required. The only mixes available, a fine powder to which you added water, yielded an object designed to humiliate you, flat and tasteless with a cardboard like texture.

Proper women, women whose minor children weren’t on Social Services lists, produced something called a Victoria Sponge. It was plain and yellow and sort of vanillish in flavour and had jam in the middle and, if you were very profligate or very rich, cream or buttercream on top. Though it might be lopsided, it was homemade, and your children would therefore probably not be Taken into Care.

The skill I brought to this market was discovering which over priced specialist groceries in Oxford stocked devil’s food chocolate Betty Crocker mixes in the exotic foreign foods section. Don’t knock them till you’ve tried them. I’ve heard whole classes of children, reared on homemade, smack their lips and sigh longingly at my kids, Your Mum makes lovely cakes!

Saturday I whisked up the usual courtesy of Betty Crocker and rummaged in the cupboard for extras. There were some rather jolly decorative sugar balls in gold, silver, fluorescent green and shocking pink (best before July 06, but believe me, no germ would go near anything quite that metallic) and eight candles. One and seven make eight, so that means eight candles are just right for the Baby, who turned 17 today. And six and one make seven, plus one to grow on, makes eight. So eight is equally appropriate for the Ex, sixty one last Friday.

Sorted, as the Brits say, and I thought the cake looked very pretty.

My children were sceptical about the candle calculations, but the Ex, an economist, was impressed that I had finally acquired the important life skill of making any number mean anything I liked. If I could make 8 candles work for a birthday celebration for a 17 year old and a 61 year old I could definitely be due for a million pound banker bonus.

We planned to meet for brunch, once I arrived with the cakes and the Elder Daughter caught the bus from London. But the Elder Daughter is always a bit of a wild card, and like the Lawyer Sis, invariably has an interesting reason for being late.

This one involved emergency stops, ambulances, evacuation of elderly passengers, and replacement busses. Brunch became early dinner.

We decided on a new restaurant in Oxford so I could do my errands. Even at half past four and even in a recession, there was a twenty minute wait for a table. Meanwhile, since by Act of Parliament shops can only be open for 6 hours on Sundays I was running out of time. I grabbed a takeaway menu to phone in my selection, left the family queuing for a table, and raced around the corner to the mobile phone shop to sign up for technology afloat.

That took a bit of a while and the shop might just have traded over time, what with the Angry Man screaming that his phone didn’t work and it wasn’t his fault that his phone didn’t work and the shop assistant shouting back that it wasn’t his fault either and the customer replying what about his bus fare? and then several more shop assistants plus the manager getting involved and everyone shouting, You are not listening!

It turned out that though I was requesting only a 30 day contract they had to run a full credit check on me and besides had to prove that I wasn’t someone pretending to be me asking for a full credit check for a 30 day contract. In order to prove this they had to ask me some important security questions to establish my identity. Unfortunately I hadn’t the slightest notion of the answer to any of the questions. Although I am me, I promise.

Meanwhile, the police arrived to deal with the man whose phone didn’t work and though I was worried they might possibly arrest me as well for theft of my own identity, in the end neither of us was arrested. He eventually walked out with a new handset (= telephone) and I with a dongle (= expensive thing I stick into my computer that supposedly makes the internet work on my boat).

On the boat it didn’t work. Not at all. Not even a tiny bit. So I trundled up the tow path with my laptop and my brand new dongle and my mobile (=cell) phone to see if it worked at the pub.  Nothing at all.

The whole pub took an interest while I telephoned for help and was connected to India and I argued with several helpdesk employees about whether or not a dongle could have a phone number. I maintained it could not. If it had a phone number, I could telephone it. What would that mean? Would it answer? How could it answer? What is the sound of one hand clapping?

They won. A very polite person simply asserted that a dongle must have a phone number and she would go ask her supervisor what mine was. When she came back she suggested I might like to make a note of the dongle’s number.  And then, though I did make a note of it, I never made any use of that phone number or entered it anywhere in the computer.  Nevertheless, once my dongle was allocated a phone number, it seemed it was happy and fulfilled, and I got connected, first at the pub, to everyone’s entertainment, and then on the boat too. 

In the early 90s, when the internet was pretty new, I first managed to get a computer online in the company I ran with my husband (I was always the geek in the family). Those days were before google and even before Internet Explorer. The brand new browser we used was called Mosaic. I don’t even know how we did it, but somehow we, in Oxford England, got connected to an archaeological museum in the University of California. There weren’t any pictures – God knows I didn’t expect any – just a list of what was in their collections.

It was one of the moments when I remember all the details – the time of day, the room, who was there. It seemed so extraordinary to me that I could be connected to a computer 8000 miles away.

These days I  am grumpy if I cannot buy a small toy on a Sunday afternoon without the intervention of Her Majesty’s constabulary, or the Indian sub continent, that will allow me to see, hear, and read information, or just chat, all over the world, while I float on the south Oxfordshire Canal, monument to nineteenth century engineering.

When did I become an unreasonable person?

My usual boaty visitors, begging bread out the window, do not worry, as I do, that January is the month my boat license comes due.  Because the four yearly Boat Safety Certificate was also up for renewal this year (and I could not license my boat without it) I have been scrambling about making sure I have met all the new health and safety regs (like batteries must be strapped in — on a boat whose maximum speed is 4 miles per hour.  That’s a fast walking speed for anyone who is paying attention.)

As soon as I was at least hopeful it would pass I booked the pony tailed, earring studded engineer to carry out the formal inspection. In my British way I delivered tea and an obsequious, shrugging incompetence (that I hoped was charming) whenever he asked for further information.

Lately the boat has been nothing but bother, and my engineer friend Pat has hauled the (unstrapped) batteries in and out of the boat trying to work out why I barely have power.

Sunday morning Pat came round with his volt meters and amp meters and other boat fixing paraphenalia in a bucket. I’m not being funny, he said, But I won’t leave my tools on your boat. Security no good. Kettle on?

Then he sat on my engine, and I delivered tea at regular intervals while the wind blew and clouds gathered and we both remarked on just how cold it was, except that he said his bum was nice and warm from the residual heat coming off my engine.

Several nice cups of tea later the engine had cooled down, the fault was found (though not cured), and I was out of milk. If anyone had called on me for lemon and sugar I could have gone on for days. But this is England, and a cup of tea requires a generous splash of milk.

A blizzard was forecast all over the UK, and I was hoping to be snowed in, but not without milk for my own tea, let alone for anyone requiring gentle bribery. Besides, I was bored. The wind was out of Siberia and it was so bitterly cold I didn’t want to take the walk I had planned, and I had few resources to fall back on while I was without power.

I have to admit that on the boat I miss my home electronics. I can sometimes pick up email, but never (so far) internet, and because of an odd ailment (and a long story) my tele will only receive the sports news channel. Luckily I am radio addict — an old technology, well suited to a rural towpath, and only requiring batteries. I didn’t have newspapers, but the radio assured me snow would be general all over England, though it did not yet fall on every dark plain.

I stoked the fire with coal and turned the air vents down so my stove would be safe while I was out, bundled up, made my way up the tow path to my car, and drove the five miles or so to the grocery store. Sunday is early closing and I needed to be checked out by four.

When I had bought my milk, and some Scotch with which to begin more serious bribery campaign (and charm offensive) on the local British Waterways Warden (another story) and more bourbon to smooth Pat’s way, I thought I would take a quick drive into my old neighbourhood in Oxford.

Several bloggers have noted a recent NY Times Europe article about British place names.

And I couldn’t help remembering that I used to live right around the corner from one of their landmarks.  Now that I am a blogger, I reckoned I had a Duty to the Internet to confirm the Truth of the NYT’s recent post. So here’s my Sunday afternoon photo:

Having satisfied myself that not much had changed since I wheeled my first born to the local shops (except never on a Sunday in those days — or Thursday afternoons, because that was early closing — and the milk was in pint glass bottles not litre plastic tubs) I drove back to the boat and waited for the big storm.

In the morning, though the radio was full of travel chaos in London, fifty miles away in Oxfordshire there was hardly more than a dusting.  It was cold, though, and it took a while for me to stick my head out of the covers.  When I finally did, I snapped the view behind my boat:

Looking towards the lock

And across the fields

I went to work and found the students, ever willing to make the most of whatever they have, at least when it comes to snow, had built a snowman. That’s an undergraduate cap and gown he is wearing.

Meanwhile, my boat passed. I’m certifiably safe until 2013, officially licensed until 2010, and legally moored for just two more months. Then I become a safe, licensed, squatter.

When I was on my boat last week I found that Jamie was tied up on my mooring pin.  That meant his boat was so close to mine it actually overlapped and it didn’t do a lot for the view out my window either.

Jamie is not my favourite local boater, mainly because we compete for the best squatting site, which used to be right behind Purple Haired Emma.  (Purple Haired Emma could be called any number of other things, because she’s got a purple boat and multiple body piercings, including one through the lip, and she has a really tiny cat who goes in and out of a flap on her boat, and a dog-for-the-disabled puppy she’s breaking in before his formal training starts, but the purple hair is her most striking feature.  It’s heavy and straight and falls to her hips. Besides, the rule on this blog is one epithet per person, and Purple Haired is hers.)

While I was in the US I lent the boat to One R Piere and he drove it about as requested (because I’m not a squatter as long as my boat keeps moving) and when One R Piere brought it back, Jamie was in my usual illegal space. So Pangolin (that’s my 62 feet long, 6.5 feet wide midlife crisis) had to moor further back, closer to the lock, and where the bank is crumbling. I was thinking, as soon as Jamie moves, and he’s bound to sometime, because we all need water, I’ll slip into my old spot and hunker down for the winter.

Because of the arcane rules of British Waterways, and because I pay £700, I am not a squatter in the winter months, though the fee gives me nothing more than a higher claim to the best squatting spot. Jamie is a squatter year round (except since he doesn’t even license his boat it officially doesn’t exist, so technically it takes up no space at all).  

Last week Jamie had moved, giving me my chance, but now he was moored up on my pin which I would need to pull up if I slipped back in behind Purple Haired.  I couldn’t move my boat without setting his adrift.  I couldn’t leave his boat secure without leaving my pin behind, and without a spare pin, I couldn’t secure mine.  I was stuck.

At the Rock of Gibraltar pub, a quarter mile muddy tramp up the tow path and over the bridge, I was trying to find out why this had happened.  I said, There’s a guy — Jamie — moored up on my pin and I can’t move.  

A stranger at the bar, drinking two pints of beer at the same time (which you have to admit is impressive) objected to my grumbling, said no one would moor on anyone else’s pin unless he were in trouble and he — the stranger — wasn’t staying to listen to my slagging off a boater in trouble. Then he grabbed both pints and the fag he’d just rolled (it’s all roll your own in the boaty world) and stormed off.  I think he probably just wanted a smoke anyway — since July 07 it has been illegal in the UK to smoke in a public place — but it was rather a dramatic exit.

Pat, who’s an engineer I’ve hired a couple of times to do work on my boat (and who always wants to be paid in cigarettes and bourbon) took great exception to the way the stranger spoke to me and was all in favour of getting Tad the Warden to move him on, except Pat said he knew Tad wouldn’t move him on because Tad never moved anyone on.  I pointed out that as I was a squatter myself more than half the year it was in my interest that Tad never moved anyone on.  Pat was having nothing of it.  He said the stranger was out of order and for all he knew Jamie was probably trying to steal my mooring pin.

During the week I had a text message from Purple Haired to say that she had heard I had complained about Jamie’s boat being on my pin.  My heart sank.  I had made a mistake by grumbling in the pub.  Everyone knew.  Purple Haired wanted to say she had tied Jamie’s boat to my pin because Jamie had gone off to run a pub on the Thames and was living in the pub with all his Jack Russels and his boat had come adrift.  

This Saturday the plot thickened while I stewed a half shoulder of lamb on the fire and baked little potatoes wrapped in foil. 

There was a rap on the window and I invited Ratty in. He said people were talking about me in the pub and he came by to see what was what. 

I fed him lamb, although he had already eaten.  The fact is,  I only bought that lamb hoping to lure someone in.  I miss cooking for people.  Ratty couldn’t resist because it smelled so good.  He’d had to wait three hours for a sandwich in the pub.  They close the kitchen at 3 and he got there a few minutes past.  I’ve been on the wrong side of kitchen closing too.

Ratty told me a couple of guys in the pub were saying they thought they had offended me.  I knew who one of them was (Kev) but didn’t have a clue who Brian was.

After we had eaten the lamb and polished off a bottle of wine Ratty and I thought we’d head to the pub, but it turned out Stematos, the landlord, had shut up about 9 pm, in a fit of pique, on a Saturday night.  We don’t know why he shut the pub. Pat and Ratty say, It is because he is a foreigner, no offence meant. 

I say, No offence taken. I am a Brit.  

Instead of going to the pub, Ratty and I crashed Pat’s boat and drank Jack Daniels where it emerged that Brian was the guy who got a bit abusive to me over Jamie being on my pin.  It turns out Brian is a mate of Kev who is illegally subletting Pete’s mooring. 

Kev met Tad the warden this summer on the Thames where Kev was a lock keeper. According to Kev, Tad said, Come up and we’ll see you right.

According to Pat that illegal mooring, somewhat less illegal than mine should have been offered to me.

Besides, Pat told Ratty that he doesn’t care what.  You don’t f and blind in front of a woman.

The next day I charged my batteries (no metaphor implied) and cooked risotto on the wood stove with leftover lamb.  I gave it to my son when I took him for a driving lesson.  He told me, again, to go to the doctor, because I’ve had a really bad cold and a horrible hacking cough and I know I sound terrible.  My son said he was a great believer in letting the body heal on its own.  He reminded me of when he had a chest infection when he was 18 years old and playing Lear.  He needed antibiotics then. Sometimes the body needs help, he said.

Then he parked his little red VW and prompted me to lock my door, and I said good bye and, as usual, loved him beyond anything in the world.

In case you have never been inside a British narrowboat, here’s mine, looking very cosy.  More pics to follow.

The Rock of Gibraltar pub is a quarter of a mile lurch up the tow path from my boat and then just over the canal bridge. When I come in, the landlord, Stematos, Greek with a heavy accent, greets me extravagantly and almost gets my name right. He’s the optimist in the family. His wife, British and apple checked, has taken my measure more carefully and knows my custom isn’t worth bothering about. If I arrive for a late lunch and ask tentatively if they are still serving the wife will throw her hands on her hips and say, Well I won’t do baguettes at this time of day!

Which is code for saying that at 3 o’clock she will not do new fangled foreign yuppie sandwiches. She will only do the kind of good honest British sandwiches she’s used to from the days when a ham sandwich was a ham sandwich — meaning two slices of nice British squashy supermarket bread, buttered, with a single, thin slice of ham in the middle and if you look kind of hopeful and ask in a quizzical way mustard? tomato? lettuce? mayonnaise? she might be tempted to report you to MI6 or at least Customs and Excise for subversive tendencies.

The food at the Rock is usually not bad, though, and on Greek Nights it is positively good. There have been cold Saturday evenings when I have wandered in late and been hit at the door with rich smells of roasting meat and cumin and garlic and I don’t know what and found Stematos and Apple-cheeked, not behind the bar, but at a small table in a dark corner, making eyes at each other while they sucked the left over lamb bones from some eastern stew.

I’m not sure where the diners for Greek Night usually come from or how close to the edge of profit or ruin this pub hangs. The boaty people generally lurk at the bar grumbling because Stematos won’t let them order a side of chips without a main course. They tell me it is because he is Greek and doesn’t understand British ways.

Last night I had a very different sort of dinner. I am back, temporarily at least, working for one of the Colleges in the University of Oxford. Like all the undergraduate Colleges we have a High Table reserved for members of the Senior Common Room and their guests. The food eaten at High Table is not very different from that eaten below on formal evenings (though far from the every day cafeteria flow). On High Table there is sometimes an extra course. And there is wine.

In case you are wondering, High Table really is elevated a step higher than the rest of the hall. The students, graduate and undergraduate, book in advance and queue up outside the hall clutching their bottles of wine. The door they enter by is next to the door we enter by, but a step below.  A team of staff members checks them in, urges them to fill up one table at a time, and opens their bottles.

Meanwhile the grownups gather in the Senior Common Room and drink, beginning as they mean to go on. When all the students are settled and the chef is ready, an announcement is made in the SCR: Ladies and Gentlemen, dinner is served. Unless there are Peers of the Realm present, in which case it is, of course, My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, dinner is served.

In the College where I now work the Principal sits at the centre, like Jesus at the Last Supper. All the students stand as she enters and all continue to stand as she bangs her gavel and pronounces grace: two Latin words (the seating layout and grace traditions vary from College to College).

There is a good deal of bustle as everyone is served. You can talk to whom you like for the first two courses, but it is very bad manners not to turn at the pudding course (not to be confused with dessert which is another matter, and room, altogether and only takes place on alternate evenings) to talk to the person on your other side. You must at all times hold both fork and knife in your hand during the main courses, and your fork and spoon during pudding. It is wise to keep an eye on the Principal during the final course, because when she has decided that you have had plenty of time to finish, whether or not you have, she will bang her gavel, everyone will stand, she will pronounce two more Latin words (the closing grace) and every one, ready or not, will file out.

But what I want to tell you is the really big difference between this whole carry on (to use a British term) and any dinner down the pub is not really the food.  Almost all the food I was served yesterday could have turned up in any institution in the country, including Her Majesty’s Prisons (okay, the first course was special, but the rest was basically sliced chicken, soggy stuffing, soggy potatoes, overcooked peas and worse).

But the words! The menu! Now that had class.  That was really, really grand. So I give you last night’s dinner. I nicked the menu to copy, just for you. Not chips down the pub but:

Parma Ham, Ricotta Cheese and Asparagus Rosettes with a Light Watercress Dressing. Served with Montana Marlborough 2006.

Apple and Chervil Sorbet

Ballotine of Poussin with an Artichoke, Borad Bean and Cumin Farcie, Fondant Potatoes, Corgettes, and Fresh Peas in Chervil Butter served with Cornas Noel Verset 1990.

Mixed Berries set in a Sauterne Jelly

Petits fours

You could just eat those words, couldn’t you?

I haven’t quite come clean about my life in Oxford and have felt strangely reticent in writing about it.

I am, as I have passed myself off, a middle aged expatriot mostly living in England, but also a sometime escapee to a small island in west coast America where there are more Democrats and hippies than you can shake a stick at.

The thing I haven’t confessed to is that in the UK I partly live on a narrowboat, and, in so far as there’s a plan, that’s the plan. When I told my children I intended to sell up and buy a house boat my grown up, moved away son only laughed. My younger, off at college son replied (quite sensibly), But you don’t know anything about boats. My just finished college daughter said, That’s cool, can I have it when you die? And my fourteen year old asked, using the most censoriously clipped vowels her sweet, broad mouth could manage, Exactly how long do you intend to be homeless, Mother?

After that she, and perhaps her siblings too, wrote me off as an unreasonable parent. And why not write me off? Unlike any of the other mothers they know I have sat drinking cheap wine under a bridge and have kept warm by a fire of burning picnic tables.

I have also checked my make up in Her Majesty’s ladies room, because on two separate occasions the Master of the Household has received Her Majesty’s command to invite me to Buckingham Palace. — which means I have got on some ambassador’s list, and long may it be so.

A couple of days after shivering under the bridge while picnic tables burned I fastened a medal to the ample bosum of the representative of Court of St James’s branch of the DAR. Would you be eligible to join? she asked, haughtily and unwisely, breathing deeply as the pin hovered. I didn’t stab and I didn’t join.

My midlife crisis is called Pangolin. She’s 62 feet long, 6.5 feet wide, and illegally moored on the Oxford Canal. I’d be on her full time, except I can’t sell my house and am endlessly here dealing with the upkeep on a part 18th century mess (unless, as I have said before, you are buying, in which case Hedges is an unspoiled village period property with many charming, original features).

On the canal I have peace, though I have no electricity except what I generate with my diesel engine and I think hard about every amp I use. There is no water except what comes from a supply a day’s journey away. My neighbours have names like Ferret and Ratty, keep scary dogs and roll their own cigarettes. We meet in the nearby pub, enforce uneasy peace amongst our pets, get drunk, trade stories. In one way or another we are semi detached from ordinary British society. We are variously lame, divorced, sport shoulder to wrist tattoos, write books or play the violin. We live alone and don’t pay our TV license fee. For once I fit right in.