I am currently embarked on a  journey to Paris where I hope to work in the English language bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Although there are perfectly good flights that would get me there in no time at all, I have decided to travel through the UK visiting old friends who have since moved away. The following is an assortment of excerpts from my travel journal.

18th Oct 2012

Yesterday I successfully negotiated the London Underground from Euston to Kings Cross, although apparently these stations are a mere 500 meters apart…

…I breakfasted this morning on a bread roll and hard boiled egg laid by one of Hannah’s chickens. (The hard-boiled part was me, not the chicken.) We are in fact staying in a rather posh house that Hannah is sitting for some former neighbours of hers…

Saturday 20th Oct 2012

Thursday’s busking in Cambridge turned out to be over seven times as popular as Chester. It’s a beautiful and eerie little town… …wandering around I had to watch out for bicycles whipping round corners at high VELOcity. Cobbled twilit street, clickaclicka-SMASH.

I met up with Hannah outside Kings College Chapel and from there we repaired to the pub with a friend of hers from work, Korrina. The Eagle is considered one of the most “historical” pubs in Cambridge and it is something of a TARDIS on the inners… …one room appeared to contain the seventeenth century, the busking money bought a pub dinner.

Yesterday I tried my hand at hitch-hiking… …second lift was by a grey bearded  chap called Dave in an old Volvo. He told me he’d dug up a Roman pot which is now in the British Museum. You can tell its Dave’s because it has three penises flying around it.

Dave dropped me at a junction… …walking down the side of the dual carriageway .. …It was then that I had some extraordinary luck, because Professor Merrick of UCL had pulled over to take a call. On approaching him, though he was at first cagey, I secured a lift to a service station on the M25…

…at the service station I wrote a sign… …a taciturn soldier, Alex, offered me a lift as far as Reading services… …I won my final lift to Bath from Ben, a recently graduated mathematician just returned from three months in Tunisia. We had a fair few things in common, not least an interest in film photography…

Sun 21st 2012

…From Bath James drove us to Saltford where the boat is moored…

…The first rule of boating is NEVER GO TO THE TOILET. James has a “porta-potty” that he hasn’t emptied in “months”… …I’m glad to say I haven’t used it and followed James’ example by making use of supermarket/pub toilets instead…

…Yesterday we went shopping, filled up on gas and returned to the boat where we had an enormous fry-up and I introduced heathen Robinson to pease pudding…

…we went back to the boat where we ate a tonne of cheese and roast beef and mash and drank copious home-brew…

…This morning I used the shower on the boat – not something to be undertaken lightly, and I shaved with a cup of hot water in the reflection offered by one of James’ cooking pots.

Mon 22nd Oct 2012

Yesterday was somewhat outrageous  J&I took his little two man kayak up the river. We tried mooring at a sluice near the pub, but a grubby little jobsworth told us it was private property and we would have to take the kayak out at the lock opposite, walk around the weir and row across to moor at the pub itself.

As we sat in the sunshine outside the pub we saw a school of kayakees coming downstream. Some of them lifted their craft around the lock, but some of the more experienced paddlers shot down the side of the weir. James reckoned we could do it too. I pointed out the reasons why I disagreed; the fact that they all had nice new one man kayaks with splash-decks, where as James’ old tub was held together with fibreglass bandages; that they were trained kayakees and we were not; that they were wearing helmets and safety equipment that we didn’t have; and that because of the length of out kayak as opposed to theirs I was fairly convinced the front would go under as we came off the weir.

I said all of this, but by the time I’d finished my pint I was in the mood for a bit of danger, and so we said what the hell and went for it. I sat in the front with my paddle in, James in the back using his to steer. We really should have been the other way round for boyancy, but as it was James’ craft and his idea I conceded he should pilot the thing. We approached the weir tentatively,  suddenly were caught in the current and shot off the top of it. Just as I predicted the front went under and a wave of yellowish river water broke over the top of me.

We realised after a second or so that we hadn’t actually sunk – the canoe was half full of water and both our legs (and the others) and my front were distinctly sodden. We coaxed the boat over to the lock landing as quickly and as carefully as possible, and whilst I wrung out my clothes, James bailed the boat out with a cushion…

…That evening J&I had a BBQ and drank more plum wine. At one point I recall playing my guitar whilst dancing a jig on the boat’s roof….

…James was giving me a lift to a lay-by to hitch onto the M4 towards London. I broke the number one rule and had a number two in the porta-potty. Rotten up-drafts of faecal treacle, retching,  despair, and a sense of complete and utter degradation overwhelmed me. If any of you who read this ever go boating, NEVER GO TO THE TOILET.

More instalments at irregular intervals soon, later, or not at all.