There’s a proper order to things, especially on boats.

I have been getting ready for a couple of American friends coming to England for the first time. Since I thought I had better offer them an adventure, we’ll be heading down the Thames for London.

But even if I weren’t off for a trip, I would need diesel and water.  Dusty, the fuel boat that cruises up and down the South Oxford, was due any day, and I hadn’t filled up with water since Easter Sunday when I bribed kids and friends with roast lamb afloat in return for helping me cruise a quarter mile up the canal, tap into a nearby hydrant (shhhhh – that’s why we do it evenings and Sundays), and reverse back to my mooring. 

I love living on my boat, but I admit that moving it makes me so anxious that I barely sleep for days before and after the shortest journey.  Steering 62 foot long, 6.5 feet wide Pangolin is a bit like how I imagine driving a tank would feel – except tanks are a lot shorter, and I’m guessing they have brakes. 

Well, anyway, the rule is, water before diesel.  If you do it the other way, the weight of the water (in front) could make the diesel (in back) spill into the canal.

In the meantime, I also ordered half a tonne of ballast (steel bricks), on account of the promised Thames adventure.  Even good drivers have trouble working my boat and anyone who has attempted reverse gear has been muttering about ballast for years.

I negotiated (with promise of the Queen’s head) for my ballast to be delivered to the car park, right by the (dodgy) water point.  My cunning plan was to drive up for water one evening, pick up the ballast next day, and reverse back just in time for Dusty:  water, ballast, diesel, in that order, with a little coal thrown in, because it has been a long winter, and a cold spring. 

But the timing needed luck: hanging out by the water point more than just overnight, waiting for deliveries, is Not Done.  Water, ballast, diesel, was what I wanted.

Alas, Dusty beat the ballast man by two days, so by the time the bricks arrived I was watered and fuelled and back on my mooring.  I had a half a metric tonne of steel bricks to load onto my boat, and the bricks were a quarter of a mile away.  The choice was, move the boat to the bricks, or move the bricks to the boat. 

I decided that I could carry 500kg of bricks by wheelbarrow, if I didn’t care how many times I went up and down the path, and so I went on until I had about a third of the bricks piled on the grass by my boat’s stern.

By early evening the Grumpy Mechanic, watching me trudge up and down with the wheelbarrow, had had quite enough.

Sod that! he shouted, and then excused himself, because he never uses bad language in front of a woman without apologising. 

He drove his boat up to the water point and ordered me to hand him the bricks, two by two.  Piling them onto the bow deck, he reversed his boat back to mine (it’s all right for him – his boat is fitted with a bow thruster).  Together, in the late evening sunshine we tossed the bricks onto the towpath.

The next day, with my boat now full of water and fuel, I carefully placed the brick ballast in the stern of the boat.  British summer had finally arrived and the temperature was in the high 80s as I leapt on and off the boat holding 10kg with each load.

When I had finished loading the bricks I changed clothes and went to a party, a three mile walk there, and another three back.  I hadn’t had anything to drink stronger than water for a week or so, but as I felt the weight of the bottle of wine in my knapsack on the way to the party, I comforted myself that I wouldn’t be lugging it home.

In the morning I noticed, but ignored, a pain in my left calf.  The pain got worse over the next few days until I could barely walk.  My elder daughter became more and more anxious and urged me to go to the hospital.  It isn’t like you to be hobbling about, Mum!  she said.

I googled unexplained calf pain – unexplained because I really couldn’t think of anything I might have done to hurt myself – and read Deep Vein Thrombosis.  I broke my six year no doctor stint.

I don’t have DVT.  I do have water, diesel, ballast, and several empty wine bottles.  Also a badly sprained calf muscle, unexplained. 

The doctor says that something as simple as standing up too quickly can do it, at my age.

Well, it is all very exciting, but frankly a bit of a disaster.

After our usual, orderly elections, the new PM (or the re-blessed old one) cheerfully swings round Buck House in a posh chauffeur driven car, kisses hands with the Queen and Bob’s your uncle. Meanwhile the old PM calls in the movers and slinks out the back door of No. 10 Downing Street.

By lunch time it’s all over. It is a pretty brutal business – one lot moves out and the other lot moves in before anybody has even gone to bed. None of this genteel US elect a President in November and install him in late January stuff. The Brits can be hard nosed and brisk when they want to be. Maybe it’s a legacy of all those upper class nannies: Spit spot, chop chop, and no dawdling!

The process of replacing one Prime Minister with another, or renewing the old one, is called Kissing of Hands and really does require contact with the Royal digits. That’s exactly what we expect along with our boiled eggs and marmite soldiers the morning after election day.

Instead, this morning, Her Majesty, having read the exit polls announced that she would see no one (and therefore not accept any kisses) at least until lunch time. Given Gordon Brown’s unfortunate election encounter with another British grandmother, the PM wasn’t in a position to complain. HM was likely to be a grandmother too far.

In the event, Her Majesty saw no one, and her hands have remained officially untouched. For the first time since 1974 we have an inconclusive election result. The stock market and sterling are falling fast (good time to book that visit to the UK, as long as you are willing to dodge the twin perils of airline strikes and volcanic ash).

Neither of the two main parties got enough seats to form a government, so the folks famous for coming last, wearing socks with their sandals, and growing beards get to decide which of the two front runners they’ll prop up. I expect it almost looks like power to someone who has lived on warm beer for four or five decades.

While the sock guys are making up their minds whom to back, political junkies (like me) are walking around like zombies, sleepless after a night of election results and a day of political horse trading, drunk on the heady mixture of caffeine and political spin. Who needs booze? The lucky ones (mostly Conservatives) have mixed champagne with their spin, but everyone is exhausted – and this could go on for days.

Thank you to all who asked if I had managed to sort out my voting problems, now that I am of no fixed address. I learned that you don’t have to live somewhere to vote, you just have to prove that you have a connection to a place.

If all else fails you can declare yourself homeless and still register.  That casual and humane flexibility is also very British. 

So, although I was deleted when my house was rented, I re-registered at my old home. 

The village was looking its best, as it always does in spring, with each walled garden draped in aubrieta, and blue bells, grape hyacinths, cherry trees and magnolias just at their peak. I talked to a few of my old neighbours and drove past my house. The pub has changed hands, and finally (after about 25 years) also changed a few items on the menu. It is still overpriced, and still felt just like home.

I voted for the socks and sandal guys. I’m daft that way.

Ho hum. Interesting times.

A friend asked if I missed gardening since moving onto the boat. I did miss it at first, when I didn’t have a proper mooring – harder to come by than hen’s teeth in Oxfordshire – because without one you are meant to be “continuously cruising”, that is moving the boat at least once a fortnight and “engaged in a genuine, progressive journey around the network”.

In other words, continuous cruisers are not meant to have time to make gardens. In practice, people sit on illegal moorings for years, but if they grow flowers, that’s taking the Mick, and they risk bringing down the wrath of British Waterways.

But now I am more or less legitimate (the mooring isn’t mine, but I have official permission to sit on it), I can till the soil to my heart’s content. The rightful moorer probably won’t complain – if she ever comes back. In June last year Purple-haired Emma gathered up her cats and headed north on her boat, leaving the mooring to me.

I didn’t think of taking a “before” picture until after I had already done some clearing up and moved in my chiminea, but here are a couple of almost before pictures from late August last year when I finally let out my house and moved onboard. I wanted to throw away the bicycle bits and other detritus, but in the end I just piled it all together at the one end of the mooring space.

August 2009

August 2009

Here is the garden today, very much a work in progress, but coming along nicely. I brought some plants from Hedges, and some were here already, though badly overgrown with weeds. There isn’t much colour yet because our spring is very late after the coldest winter in 30 years. I’ll post more pictures as I go along.

early May 2010

early May 2010

early May 2010

The birds are at the feeders all day long and the ducks come and clean up the seeds the small birds scatter. 

Ducks clear the birdseed

Meanwhile, I bought myself one of these.

Duchess powered

It is Duchess powered. The Grumpy Mechanic asked me where I got that antique, but Ratty asked if I would come and cut his grass, which I did.

Ratty

Ratty paid me in towpath currency – a drink down the pub.

My favourite chore – just as well, because it’s at least a daily one eight months of the year – is the fire.

From the time I got back to England in early January, until just a few days ago, the stove has been going almost continuously. Once a fortnight, or so, Dusty rings his bell, ties his boat up to mine and tosses 25 kg bags of coal onto my roof, before filling my tank with diesel and, if I need it, replacing my propane. If I am not home he slips a bill through my stern doors before he moves on to the next boat.

In between his visits I drag the coal bags one by one from the roof and onto my covered front deck, and twice a day I fill my coal scuttle using a small black shovel. I’m a little bit glad when the bag is empty enough that instead of shovelling I can lift it and pour the last nuggets, but then I’m a little bit sad too, because I know in just one more scuttlefull I’ll have to heave another 25 kg bag from the roof.

On a really bad day I realise at about 9 o’clock at night that the scuttle needs refilling and the bag is empty. I don’t like doing the roof manoeuvre ever, but especially not in the cold and dark. So then I suffer from duelling aphorisms: never put off until tomorrow what you can do today, competing with: sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.

At bedtime I bank up the coal and close down the dampers, and with luck, in the morning I only need to open all the draughts and the fire will wake up with me. There’s a “Mr Tippy” steel box by the stove for emptying hot ashes and I proudly keep count – nine days, ten days, a fortnight and the fire has never gone out. Coal is heavy and dirty, but it burns for a long time and a fire set just right can be left alone for many hours.

But the wind conspires with the stove to make my fire temperamental and capricious. On still nights if I turn the draught too low the fire will die, and when it is windy, if I give the stove too much air, the coal will be burnt to ashes before dawn.

On those mornings I kneel cold and tea-less in front of the stove, trying to coax it into life: fire first, kettle next.

But all is changed, now that spring has finally arrived: the trees are in blossom, the hedge has leaves and the flowers in the towpath gardens no longer look windswept and tentative. Yesterday the temperature reached the heady heights 21 C (that’s around 70 in “old money” – the Brit expression for all measurements imperial).

Dusty was the only unhappy boater on the canal as the days began to warm. He grumbled that he hoped it would be a short summer. I still had 3 bags on the roof and didn’t order more, though his text message announcing his visit read: “You think spring has sprung, but I had ice on my boat yesterday. Plant your coal bulbs now!”

Dusty is right, of course. We still need our fires, and I still light mine most evenings; as soon as the sun goes down, it’s cold. But I don’t need to keep the fire going through the night, and if I throw in a shovelful of coal in the morning I am sitting in a tee shirt with the doors open by 10 am.

These days, wood, and not coal, is my friend. Small logs burn fast, and can be scrounged here and there. I’ve watched my neighbours drag fallen branches from along the river below the lock and cut them up on makeshift sawhorses. Until September we just need a quick, fire fix. Poor Dusty.

I heard on the news the other day that ferrets are the latest chic pets in the UK, for some reason favoured by flight attendants (who have a lot of time on their hands just now).

Trend setter that I am, I had pet ferrets more than a dozen years ago.

My children began agitating for a ferret or two after they saw pictures in an educational book helpfully provided by their American grandmother.  The begging campaign went on for months.

In a moment of insanity, I called the local wildlife park and negotiated two young males.  The gamekeeper enthusiastically agreed that ferrets were just what my family needed.

We named our new pets Bangers and Mash, one streaked steel gray and the other a pale ermine. The gamekeeper advised handling both as much as possible in order to tame them.  As I stroked and cuddled Mash, he nestled into my shoulder, turned his head and sank his teeth into my neck.  Every time anyone held him he bit suddenly and he bit hard.

I found Mash a new home fast (as did his next family), but, as far as I was concerned, Bangers settled in much better.  The kitchen became his domain, and he had free rein whenever the doors were shut. 

Bangers spent his evenings like any model pet, curled up on my lap, letting himself be stroked.  He similarly favoured my younger son. 

No one else was safe.  Bangers terrorised the two sheep dogs, and the cats hissed and bolted whenever they met him. 

The kitchen became a no-go area unless I went in first and captured him.  Otherwise there was usually blood: Bangers was no amateur ferret.  

Bangers doesn’t like strangers, I would explain apologetically to friends, relatives and visitors, scooping him up in my arms.  He’ll be all right when you get to know him. 

My husband absolutely declined to get to know him, and the children began to suspect that there was a good reason most people just had dogs or cats.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of any windows or doors left carelessly open, Bangers became a regular escapee, though he always came home.  He knew when he was on to a good thing: squeaky toys, raw hamburger for tea, and an evening in a comfortable lap.

One day, during my mother’s annual visit from the US, she and I went out, leaving my stepfather alone in the house.

In the middle of the afternoon the shopkeeper’s husband banged on the window.  Hugh opened it, just a crack.

Your ferret is in my wife’s shop! the man shouted.  You had better come and get him!

It isn’t my ferret, returned Hugh, a lawyer by trade.

A lengthy negotiation ensued.  It was finally agreed that, without prejudice, Hugh would open the kitchen window, and the shopkeeper’s husband could, if he so chose, and entirely at his own risk, pass the animal through that opening.  Once the animal was inside, Hugh would close the window.

The next day the ferret’s visit to the shop was the talk of the village.

I thought he would go up Mrs P’s trousers! said the Principal Soprano in the church choir.

Yes, replied the Shopkeeper, adding darkly, And we all know Mrs P doesn’t wear knickers.

After that, and what with the children complaining they couldn’t get breakfast because Bangers would attack them, I bought a rabbit hutch and moved our pet outdoors.

For a while that seemed a good solution, but rabbit hutches are designed for much stupider animals, and Bangers soon worked out how to open the cage’s sliding door. 

He often escaped, but as he was always back, happily curled up in his bed by tea time, I convinced myself that this arrangement was working.  Bangers obviously liked his home, or he wouldn’t return, and no harm seemed to come of his outings.  In the evenings, I still brought him in the house to sleep on my lap.

This was the uneasy status quo for another few months.  My neighbours reported sightings of Bangers all around the village (they hadn’t forgotten poor knickerless Mrs P’s happy escape), but by the time they phoned, Bangers was invariably back home, and peacefully asleep. 

It couldn’t have been my ferret, I would say.  I’ve just checked, and my ferret is locked in the rabbit hutch.  Maybe you saw a weasel.

One early summer day the old lady two doors down knocked on my door in obvious distress.  Your… creature! she gasped, Is…in…my…house!  A bloody handkerchief was wrapped around her hand.

She breathlessly explained that she had fought to rescue her ducks from his jaws, and after biting her he had run from the garden through her open door and up her staircase. 

I knew Bangers too well to think he would still be there, but to reassure her I wandered through every room of her house calling him and squeaking his favourite toy.   Bangers come! I shouted. Bangers come!  (Squeak, squeak.) 

Meanwhile my elderly neighbour had phoned the vet.  He arrived while I was still reassuring her that my ferret could not possibly be in her house. 

I don’t charge for treating ducks, the vet said, glaring at me. 

Sometime that evening, as usual, Bangers came home.  Since he hadn’t managed to dine on duck he happily accepted his usual minced beef.

In the morning the District Nurse was on my doorstep.  My neighbour had a severe attack of angina in the night (brought on by worrying about her ducks, said the nurse).  An ambulance was called, and she had spent the night in hospital.  If I didn’t find another home for my ferret, the District Nurse would inform the Environmental Health Officer that I was harbouring a Dangerous Animal.

A friend of a friend knew a ferret fancier in the nearby village of Ducklington.  He had already taken in the incorrigible Mash, and Bangers joined his former litter mate that afternoon. 

For several years afterwards, on the way home from swimming lessons we used to pass the roundabout leading to Ducklington.  Sometimes I would remind the kids as we drove by that Bangers and Mash were there.

My children always declared themselves glad that Bangers and Mash were having a jolly Ducklington life, but my littlest one invariably shook her head solemnly and spoke for the others:

Ferrets do not make good pets.

As all the world knows, a general election has been called in the United Kingdom.  The exact date is always within the gift of the Prime Minister, the only rule being that every constituency must choose its Member of Parliament at least once every five years. 

Gordon Brown was dead out of time when he finally confirmed he would go to the country on 6 May 2010; the last Parliament was elected on 5 May 2005. 

Once an election is called, Parliament has only a few days to deal with any pending legislation.  First there is prorogation, and then there is dissolution.  In between, there is the wash-up.

During the wash-up the government quietly drops anything especially controversial, and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition agrees not to grumble; there isn’t time for the usual debate as bills progress through the House of Commons to the Lords and back again. 

Instead the Clerk of the Parliament reads out each remaining bill, and then, as if the very language brings special magic, the Clerk begins speaking Norman French: never mind our usual democratic processes, the Queen wills it. 

Royal assent comes in a form Chaucer would have found familiar in the Customs House of 14th century England.  Hundreds of years later, willy nilly, law is still made.

Quietly lost in last week’s wash-up was a bill that would have added 10 pence to the price of (alcoholic) cider. 

Saved was the Digital Economy Bill, which Her Majesty vicariously willed into law in Parliament’s last minutes.  I am told that, among other things, this bill means households caught pirating software, music, movies or television could have their internet access cut off.  I guess that pretty much includes any UK household with teenage children. 

Never mind, though internet lights may be going out all over Britain, parents can still drown their sorrows in cheap cider.

La reine le veult.

After months of nursing the worst kept secret in Europe, Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown finally revealed the next general election date.

First he had to visit the Queen to get her permission to dissolve Parliament.  Since “dissolve” sounds a bit drastic (and possibly painful) the press usually turns that verb into a noun, and instead explains that the PM asks HM for a “dissolution”. 

Never mind.  It amounts to the same thing: the Prime Minister takes a flash car to Buckingham Palace, bows to Her Majesty (who, like everyone else, has known for months what’s coming) and before you can say Peter Mandelson, everyone is melting.

And now I’ve got to work out how to get a vote, non-person that I have become, ever since I moved onto my boat.  My tenants will be registered at my address and they will have removed my name, assuming I would re-register elsewhere. 

The problem is, my boat has no address…  And, though I get parcels and deliveries at the pub, I don’t think I can claim to be resident there.  Once upon a time only landowners could vote in this country.  It still seems to be true that only people with addresses can.

Meanwhile my Baby will be a first time voter this election, and she is very keen.  She has signed up to volunteer for the Liberal Democrats.  Her father says she can put up posters in the windows of his house in north Oxford.  He is wondering if that will cost him business as an economist-for-hire, but he’s willing to take the risk.  His beloved grandmother was an early 20th century member of the Liberal party, and nostalgia beats billable hours.

As for me, though I voted in the European elections last year, this will also be my first general election.  I became a British citizen a few weeks too late to vote last time. So I asked my Baby to find out from her Lib Dem organiser friends how her homeless mother could be franchised.

She declined.  She thoroughly disapproves of the way I live, and when I ask why, she gives me a long list, beginning: 1. You shouldn’t risk drowning when you cross the threshold in the morning.

Right.  I’ve got until 6 May to work out how, and for whom, to cast my vote. 

When it is all done, dissolving will make way for kissing of hands.  There’s nothing in the world like British politics.  What larks!

While Americans are parsing their historic legislation on health care, I’ve been thinking, I really ought to see a doctor.

In May it will be six years since I last consulted a physician. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I can see my GP any time I want and it won’t cost me a penny.  No insurance forms to fill out, no co-pay, nothing.   But the sign in the waiting room that says an appointment lasts for 10 minutes, and is for one complaint, is putting me off.  If I have more than one complaint I am advised to inform the receptionist. 

It doesn’t tell me what to do if I don’t have any complaints at all. 

I know I should be glad, but instead I think, I’m 56 years old.  I should see a doctor!  I could be dying!  How would I know?

I am the worried well.

And maybe I should be worried: I have never had my cholesterol checked.  My blood pressure hasn’t been taken for years.  Colonoscopy?  You must be kidding.  (Apparently I should be grateful that you are kidding, because I hear they aren’t very pleasant.)

Government policy means women over 50 get a mammogram every three years, so I have not been entirely without medical attention.  I have had two of these examinations, carried out by specialist technicians in a trailer that visits my GP’s car park.  A card is sent through the post summoning me, and on the day and time prescribed I climb into the trailer and am immediately directed to undress to the waist behind a curtain.  The technician manipulates the steel plates, pushes buttons, retreats behind a screen, and we are done.  She hands me a pamphlet explaining that I will get a letter within a fortnight with results. The next woman is already waiting as I descend the trailer’s steps.  I look at my watch: five minutes max.  Not that I needed more – it was a model of efficiency.

Nevertheless, I have been thinking that six years is a long time at my age to be doctor-less.  It’s possible that my GP thinks I have already died, and I begin to consider what problem I might bring before her (one at a time, of course) so she knows I haven’t (but might!). 

The list of possibilities isn’t promising:  My right foot has itched for most of those six years, but I never thought it was worth bothering her about that.  My right ear itches too, but I already tried that one on her, without affect, 10 or 15 years ago.  I can’t turn my head far enough to ride my bike safely, but a mirror on the helmet gave me a non pharmaceutical solution to what I guess is degenerative arthritis.  I’ve got through menapause.  Everything else I can think of that’s wrong with me I know damn well would be a lot better if I drank less, slept more and weren’t a bloody hermit.

But yesterday the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Alistair Darling, since you ask) stood up in Parliament to deliver the annual Budget speech and solved my dilemma. 

The Budget is when the Chancellor declares his master plan for the economy.  How much the government will take in, how much it will spend, how it will spend it. 

In the Budget speech the Chancellor reveals the income tax we are going to be paying next year (a lot), but that’s only the start.  He gets to decide what’s spent on filling potholes in the road.  How many university places for 18 year olds will be on offer.   How fast the government will pay its bills.  How much more petrol, wine, beer and fags (or anything he likes) will cost from the moment he sits down (or any moment he chooses). I will never forget the year the then Chancellor decreed that from midnight Value Added Tax would be levied on all takeaway food heated above the ambient air temperature, as long as it was ordinarily expected that the food would be consumed before it cooled. At the stroke of twelve the price of fish and chips went up by 17.5%, but not bread from a bakery (because, though some like it hot, it only got that way en passant – if you see what the Chancellor meant).  

That’s how much power our Alistair has.

So yesterday, while I was listening to him wittering on about how he was going to fund apprenticeships to solve the problem of young persons not in education, employment or training (in the UK Neets are the new Yuppies), and how he was going to save money by making 15,000 civil servants move out of London to, say, Luton, my ears suddenly pricked up when I heard the Chancellor say that he intended to allocate sufficient funds so that everyone over 40 could have a health check every five years.

A check up for the middle-aged every five years!  That makes me one year overdue. 

It’s just what the doctor ordered.

My friend the Electrical Engineer from MIT dropped in recently, in between meetings in London and Paris, and as usual I put him to work.  His big job for the visit was installing my new batteries.  I felt just a little bit bad about making him do this – he’s in his mid sixties and had to lie on his side in the engine room to disconnect the old batteries before lifting them almost over his head and out of the boat.  Then he had to do that all over again to get the new ones in.  There are five batteries running the lights, fridge and sockets, and each one weighs more than 60 lbs. 

But I didn’t feel all that bad, because, frankly, I hold him partly responsible for the whole kit and kaboodle.   When you have a crazy idea most people just tell you you’re daft.  David says, Let me think about that…

I’ve known David since I was 15 and he was 25, a young MIT post doc.  The improbable beginning to this almost life-long friendship was that his wife was my high school Latin teacher.

Later, when I was in college a few subway stops away from MIT, we met for lunch occasionally.  In my senior year I fretted about producing my thesis.  I always composed at the typewriter, and then edited by hand.  I mentioned my obsessive need to retype a whole page whenever I wanted to change a single word.  Then, as soon as I saw the next clean version, another word would demand to be changed and I would have to type the page all over again.

Why hadn’t someone invented a machine that would retype the page for me so I could always edit from a perfectly clean copy?

It was 1978 and we were in a coffee shop in Harvard Square.  David said, Let me think about that…

What I needed, he explained, was access to a computer. 

On a computer you could write something, and then, if you knew the commands, you could change a single word and it would save that change and it would retype your page.   It was called a “text editor” (word processing was an idea yet to come).  The text editor interpreted your instructions line by line, and each time you pressed the carriage return (enter) your page would be retyped.

In the 70s computers took up whole rooms, and most people never got near one.  At MIT, students, faculty and staff logged into the computer using terminals. Recently, David said, people were beginning to scorn ordinary, paper loaded, computer terminals.  Instead everyone wanted the latest thing, called a VDU (visual display unit).  It looked just like a television and everything you wrote was on the screen instead of on paper.

David said he could sneak out a terminal for me if I were willing to have the old-fashioned paper version. 

I said I was very fond of paper and didn’t know anything about computers.

David was sure I would work it out.  It was quite a cool idea.

Of course, my terminal needed a way to communicate with the MIT mainframe, so David also smuggled out a modem, a device with two rubber rings, designed for the receiver of an ordinary telephone, one rubber ring for the earpiece and one for the mouthpiece.   There’s a picture on a Columbia University website, improbably dedicated to the history of acoustic couplers, that looks at little like what David delivered to my Cambridge appartment.

With the circular dial on the phone, first I telephoned MIT, and then I dialled David’s password (which was, of course, very wrong of both of us).  When the computer began to emit a series of whines, squeaks and whistles, I shoved the receiver into the rubber holes on the modem, and then I was connected to an MIT mainframe, one of the most powerful computers in the world.

I dialled and shoved and typed furiously all evening, every evening for months.  My flatmate was very understanding.  She was (is) a poet and part of the house agreement was that if either of us were writing the phone was off the hook anyway.

I was startled every time I hit the return button and the terminal typed out revised lines of text, and I slept uneasily as long as the thing was in my bedroom. 

Nevertheless, I tweaked my paragraphs word by word, and my masterpiece was stored on the remote computer, which eventually produced a series of little holes in a long string of tickertape.  The night before my thesis was due David and I fed the tickertape into a printer.  The thesis was about 100 pages long and it took almost all night to print it out.

I am pretty sure I was the first undergraduate at Harvard to submit a thesis entirely produced by computer.   The authorities were completely confused when I explained that I couldn’t submit an original and three copies, because my “original” was just a bunch of holes.

A quarter of a century later I picked David up at Heathrow.  He’d moved on from stealing terminals for undergraduates to being part of the team that invented the internet, and later, when everyone wanted to join in, helping to design international protocols for the guts that run it, like IP addresses.  He travels all over the world being important, but when he is in the UK I always have some homely project for him.  Electrical engineers make useful friends. 

As I pulled out of the car park and headed for the motorway back to my little Oxfordshire village I told David that the plan for the weekend was to go look at boats for sale.

Three months earlier I had put my home of 25 years on the market.

I have decided, I declared, that the only possible consolation would be to buy a narrowboat and live on it.

I admitted that I knew nothing about boats.

Let me think about that… said David.   And then, after awhile, he added that he was sure I would work it out. In fact, it was quite a cool idea.

My daughter’s partner works with a non profit organisation that helps asylum seekers. Recently they were forwarded a copy of a letter in which a claim was denied by the UK Border Agency.

I am assured that this is a real extract from the letter sent to a Côte d’Ivoire asylum seeker when his application was turned down.

You claim that you could not relocate to the area where your parents are living as you fear attacks from guerrillas. However, information from the World Wide Fund for Nature confirms that guerrillas are not native to that part of the country and in any event there are few recorded incidents of primates attacking humans unless their natural habitat is disturbed or their young threatened.

The UK Border Agency is staffed by college graduates (many from the most elite universities in this country) who take a competitive exam for entrance into the Civil Service. They are highly paid, starting at salaries not far off the most I have ever earned.

These young people are making decisions that might mean life or death for the people who come before them. They have absolute authority, tempered only by the efforts of organisations like the one my daughter’s partner works for.

Otherwise, I would have found the above quite funny, especially as I have, for 30 years, lived among arrogant idiots who think it is clever to remark, But you Americans barely speak English!

Meanwhile, I am puzzling over the obvious question, since I know the author of this letter must have been Highly Educated, what exactly we are teaching our children.

Nevertheless, as there are still a few people in this country who do speak English, I expect the claimant in this case will do well on appeal.