Thursday's Child while Promise had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on me ****

Today

But I have to work today. How rude.

I am waking up to the smell of coffee.

I am dreaming of fresh baguette and mummy’s fig jam.

Squeezed Spanish orange juice.

Enough time to eat it. 

Maybe take a shower. 

It’s not happening. I think it's Friday. 

I am in England and on the boat.

It is raining. 

I can hear the swans pecking the long hairy canal weed growing on the hull.

I know it is food for them. But it does not appeal to them that maybe they could find better?

The amount of take-away boxes and litter in the canal is very much part of the wild life.

They should find some left overs. But I guess they don't digest plastic. 

I wonder sometimes if these animals have taste though.

So elegant and yet so unrefined. 

Faithful but unpredictable. 

They have an impeccable composure above the water line and yet they have to paddle hard. 

Their life is a bit like having the arse stuck between two stools, stuck in a quandary on the horns of a dilemna. 

I don't want to be like them. 

So I feed them with some Kellog's Fruit & Fibre. They like it. Better than the canal weed. 
A guy told me off the other day for feeding them. He said they are wheat intolerant. 
Isn't it one of the oldest job in the universe? Feeding swans with dry bread? 
Even children do it. 
If children do it then that must be fine.
I wondered if that guy was real. 

One of them has a Tesco bag around his webbed foot. 

 I am not surprised.

Tesco bags are probably the most common aquatic flower in London. It is a perennial white and blue flower. 

It's got a Latin name. 
Tescolea Plastica. 

In other mooring places in London, it is possible to find the Sainsburo Aurentiaco, a vivid orange shade.

In posher places, Little Venice or Angel, admirers of the Marksum and Spenceralinis can be contented. 
A rich dark organic green colour. 

But these ones are the rarest. And the reason is because they are being consistently picked up. 

People picking up, usually on Saturday morning, the Marksum and Spenceralinis.

These people seem really on it. They never pick up any other plastic flowers... only that one. 

It looks as though they are taking them so that no one sees them around and only see Tescoleas and Sainsburos. 

Why?

...

No? Really...?

Even my cynicism does not allow me to think that. 

And it is time for breakfast.

Italian biscuits will do. As ever.  

They make me happy but sometimes I’d like to throw a party for my breakfast. People do that for their birthday, why can’t I do that for my breakfast?

I think about what it would be like to have lots of friends turning up for my breakfast. Bringing me things, like doritos and dips, listening to music rather than BBC4… not worrying about tomorrow, drinking coffee like it was a rhum and guava cocktail.

Meeting strangers.

When was the last time I met someone new at breakfast?

I am getting dressed. I put on a nice bespoke shirt that has been especially tailored but not for me and yet it fits me perfectly. My neighbour gave it to me *.

I still grimace when I get dressed but I start to believe that I do it more by automatism than by response to an acute pain.

It is patience that I am lacking now. I have used roughly two years’ worth of patience in the last four weeks.

I haven‘t got much left.

But I am getting better.  

So, what's next?

My ribs are reforming, that's a fact.

But will they be the way they used to be?

I have heard a few things about what happens after an accident. Sometimes things aren’t the same after, especially for bones.

The thing is I want my ribs back the way they used to be. Not stronger or weaker. Just the same. If not my rib cage would be like when a band gets together again after not having played for twenty years.

Usually they turn out to be the best tribute band of their own songs.

I have no sympathy for these devils.

And tribute bands always remind me of that Beatles tribute band I once saw in Dundee. And the Beatles remind of a friend of mine who has fucked up seriously with most of our friends.

And my friends remind me of home and home is here and home is there and I feel alienated. And being alienated is very much like living in London. This reminds me that England has never been on my list of places I would love to live in, but there I am. 

Here, some call me 'expatriated' because I am from Western Europe. I know that it is only a word.
'Expatriated' is a word that is used if someone is an immigrant coming originally from a country that is considered superior or on an equal footing with the country of adoption. 

In my case, what makes a difference is probably the use of the language. Had I not learnt English in the first place, I may not have stayed here for six years. The choice was mine to make. Only time got on the way.

Maybe the hint that got me to learn English in the first place is the music I never understood.

I always enjoyed the melody first. The words came last.
The less I heard the words, the better the harmony was. It was an advantage to be half a beginner, reading little English, speaking it even less and hardly understanding most parts of the songs.
Such was my pleasure as De Quincey would say.

There are songs I have been listening to, for twenty odd years, and only got to understand what they are saying a few months ago. 

Hum.

So I go back to think about the Beatles. And the Beatles remind me of that tribute band from Dundee. 
And Dundee, Scotland, reminds me of my first car, a red Peugeot 309 diesel. And this car, really… reminds me that I lived in it for a while. 

And that reminds me that it is probably when I learnt how to live on a boat.

 The Ho(me)ly Corridor

All boats are different. 

But the lowest common denominator is the confinement, impediment, thinness, in short the narrowness. 

It's like living in a corridor. 
I never thought I would do that. I never tried before to fit in a corridor with all mod-cons. 

But I have listened to The Jam in a corridor before so...

It all makes sense here. 

Before moving on Thursday's Child, I lived on a small boat called the Promise. She had what it needs to make life difficult. 

There was quite a significant gap between the frame and the door. If I had had an address, the postman would have slipped the letters through it thinking it was the mailbox. 

There was rust in the water tank. When the water was running low, I would know it after a shower. I was covered in orange rust which gave me a Southend look. OMG.

The stove could fit a log the size of a match. It was so cold in the morning I had to get dressed in the evening and jump under four blankets to sleep.
The top blanket would always freeze overnight. 

There was a fridge that did not work. I then realised she was the fridge. 

Once I broke down crossing Islington tunnel, right in the middle. 
It was a dark night, maybe in June.
Late.
Foggy.
The old diesel engine, a BMC 1.5 which used to power a black cab, had started to play on me a couple of weeks before.
I remembered calling my neighbour, told him I was about to cross the tunnel.
Told him that if I was not out within thirty minutes he should do something.
Like panicking or something like that.

I broke down.

Alone in the dark.

As a habit I don't panic in an emergency. I stay smart. Quiet.
I panic afterwards.
Afterward panic is a bit like having an argument with someone but thinking of the most vivacious and spiritual retort five minutes too late**.
It's galling.

It took me twenty-five minutes to get out, using a barge pole and the walls.
Back in the days that's the way they were doing it. They're cute ,aren't they?

It was so dark inside I could not even see my hands.
Then a bat decided to get tangled in my hair.
And I made it.
I finally got out.
And saw the neighbour with a cup of cider in his hand.

- What the...? Didn't I ask you to panic in case I don't come out?

- Yeah, but, you've only been twenty-five minutes...
   And you said thirty minutes before panic.

- ...

Authentic.


I heard The Promise is being considered for compression.
A woman, who lived on that boat last, found under the sink a mushroom the size of a pillow.
I heard people calling this boat the Broken Promise.
I almost celebrated a wedding on her, once.
She is a legendary boat.

Courtesy of D. Summers, Feb 1950

And then 

I guess I feel a bit out of breath today. A bit like a sentence without punctuation.
And not much can help me recompose myself. I still have to get to places and I will need my ribs fully back soon.

Being on a boat that is pretty much like a corridor, with cracked ribs, is a challenge.

But being on a promise with cracked ribs, boy, that'd be a whole different ball game.
Hum...

Luckily I am going through my invalidity experience on Thursday's Child, which, while I am here, has not been named after Bowie's song but after a nursery rhyme ***.

Being on a boat with, still, cracked ribs, I can spend my afternoon wondering how far I have to go. 

Beautiful Eartha Kitt.
I leave with this one


B.

* I said it before; my neighbour is a good man. And he likes featuring in the footnotes. 

** And that is called 'l'esprit d'escalier', French expression used in English, meaning something like the spirit of the staircase or staircase wit. 

*** Monday's child is fair of  face

Tuesday's child is full of grace

Wednesday's child is full of woe

Thursday's child has far to go

Friday's child is loving and giving

Saturday's child works hard for a living

But the child who is born on the Sabbath day

Is bonny and blithe and good and gay
(Traditional, 1838)

**** The Promise had a good effect on me although Thursday's Child had already had the charm I wanted.
It was a matter of time I found her.
Thursday's child, while Promise had had "had", had had "had had"; "had had" had had a better effect on me.