“I don’t like geese.” A pause. “I’m a vegetarian.” A further moment was allowed to pass while he waited for a reaction. We laughed, out of politeness rather than amusement because we’d both heard better ones than this, but now the man sitting on the bench decided he had our attention. Beside him sat a lady, also aged about sixty who we assumed was his wife. She was silent and expressionless. In between us were the pair of wandering Canada Geese that I’d made the mistake of commenting on. “My wife’s a vegetarian.” Another pause. “in between meals,” he continued. And then, “do you believe in the afterlife?” At this Ali and I looked at each other nervously – we didn’t want to get into a debate on theology and I hadn’t recently considered my views on the subject. But before we could respond, “I don’t. Which is strange because I did in my previous life.” We breathed again. At least we weren’t being invited to discuss philosophy. I’m not sure where he’d bought his Christmas crackers the previous December, but hoped he’d increase the budget next time so that he could invest in some with better jokes inside them.
We were in a narrowboat; all sixty-seven feet of it floating at the bottom of a slowly filling lock on the southern outskirts of Oxford. And there’s a thing about locks. People like to sit beside them and watch the boating community going about their leisure. They even have a name – gongoozlers. I’ve no idea who came up with that term, but I kind of like it because it sounds as eccentric as some of the people it describes. In many uncomfortable situations you can smile gently and keep walking. But when you’re temporarily moored in these middle worlds between different levels of the river, then for ten minutes or so you’re at the mercy of would be comics and other all sorts of other interesting oddballs. A few years earlier at Marlow an American lady who was sitting on a bench high above us appeared to have taken quite a shine to me as in our hired Victorian camping skiff we rode the incoming white water for which the lock has a certain notoriety. I’m not sure exactly what she was trying to say, but as she fixed me in her sights it involved a lot of frantic arm movement and a degree of excited placing both her hands on top of the sun hat she was wearing. Maybe she was communicating with semaphore signals and assumed that as hardened seadogs we'd understand. I knew the Morse code for SOS, but that was about it. In fact I was beginning to think I might need it. She said she loved old boats. At least I think that’s what she said. It was all rather charming, if more than a little odd, and certainly one of the more unusual exchanges I’d had that week. Both of my children, with whom I was rowing on that first Thames trip in 2011 felt that she was hoping for a dinner invitation aboard our vessel at the very least. She’d have probably changed her mind if she’d got close enough to discover what a middle aged man smells like after three hard days of rowing.
Back at the edge of Oxford, Ali and I were on the foredeck, me holding a line to keep the bow steady in the rising water. At the stern my brother Dave, his son Sam and my son Tom handled the business end of our home for the week. I was quite content not to get involved in the steering, besides which my brother, who despite being nearly fifty was still a couple of years away from finally taking his driving test was proving to be an admirable captain on the water. I was coming towards the end of one of the most difficult periods of my life, during which the sudden and awful loss of a close colleague at work saw me involuntarily elevated into the boardroom for a year. Me! I wasn’t remotely interested in what went on behind the door where the power lay. Suddenly I was embroiled in the politics of Further Education, working even more all consuming hours than before, while all I really wanted to do was gaze out of the window and daydream. I’m good at daydreaming. But a finance specialist was needed at the top table, and they either brought in a consultant, who’d spend his or her entire time asking me everything and getting paid half as much again as I was, or I did the job myself. Maybe I’d emerge stronger and more rounded at the end of it. We’re shaped by our experiences after all. I’d always wondered how the high flyers ever found any time for real life, and now I was learning that they didn’t. That year, work stole almost every waking hour of my existence. If I wasn’t working, I was thinking about it, or more often fretting about it. The only escape was taking photos, and the opportunities for that were limited. By the end of the spring term, I was running on fumes, and sitting on the foredeck of a narrowboat surrounded by nature for a week was the perfect respite before the final three months of intensity would try to finish me off completely. And now we were in a lock, being addressed by somebody who apparently regarded himself as a stand up comedian. With geese as props.
“I don’t like geese. I’m a vegetarian.” Hadn’t we already heard this one? And then, “My wife’s a vegetarian.” We knew what was coming next. This time he waited for a response to the afterlife question, but the punchline remained the same. The lock was almost full, both of us willing the final few hundred gallons of water through the sluices to bring us level with the river on the upstream side. In a few moments we’d be released, but he’d already started on his routine for the third time. All the while, the lady beside him sat unmoving, totally impassive as if in some form of stasis. “Do you believe in the afterlife?” we heard as finally the lock gates opened and we began to move forward. The man stood up, and for an alarming moment I thought he was going to chase us along the bank in the world’s slowest race, repeating his three jokes as if they were some form of mantra. But fortunately, our blistering pace of two and a half miles per hour was a little too much for him. We looked back as a wave of relief spread over us, only to see he was now level with the rear cabin and our captain; a new audience. “Do you believe in the afterlife?” The words crept away behind us on the receding air. He’d begun to vary the order of his routine. Still, his companion never uttered a word. She’d obviously heard it all before, probably several times already that afternoon in fact.
Gradually we made our escape towards Oxford, passing through the next lock without being heralded by any further wannabe Butlin’s redcoats. There’s an excellent artisan food market in a square nearby if you moor up below Osney Bridge. I can’t remember where exactly, somewhere close to a pub amusingly named the Four Candles; but you could sample all the flavours of the world at the overwhelming multitude of brightly coloured stalls there, given a couple of weeks of happy gluttony. I think I might have gone with the Korean katsu chicken, but then again it could have been the Sri Lankans that won me over. When we returned to the boat, a pair of anglers had been fishing old slime covered bicycles out of the Thames. They asked if they were ours. Strange things happen in cities. A couple of hours later and we were chugging out to the north of Oxford, past Port Meadow, across which you can see those famous dreaming spires in the distance.
Of course, we discussed him at the time. It had been a bizarre exchange. Quite hilarious in retrospect now that we’d got over the discomfort of being anchored to the spot in the face of a rotating sequence of terrible gags. Why on earth did he keep telling the same three jokes? He must drive her mad, mustn’t he? How does she put up with it? But it was only much later that the episode came back to me and I wondered whether we’d overlooked something terribly sad. To our inexpert eyes, there was no trace of anything to cause alarm, but maybe he had dementia? Maybe he was unwell in some other way. Maybe we’d leapt to conclusions as we were stationed in that lock. Perhaps the lady was his carer as well as his wife. We’ll never know. First impressions are so powerful at times and it’s easy to ignore the possibilities. And actually, I thought the afterlife joke was quite funny. Not so amusing that it needed to be repeated three more times though.
But if you ever want to escape; to truly escape from life for a while, and despite the appearance of the occasional person of interest at your bow, you can do a lot worse than take to the river. The world is a more peaceful place when seen at two and a half miles per hour. We’ve met people who live full time on their boats, and I’ve seldom seen such happy souls elsewhere. With kingfishers, herons and even geese all around to make your world a voyage of discovery, there’s not much more you could ever really want is there?
