A London Wave on the Regent’s Canal
William Blake might have written of Paddington:
“They groan’d aloud on London Stone
They groan’d aloud on Tyburn’s Brook’,
But this was in the days of the journey from Newgate:
‘Welcome to the Hanging Match next Collar Day … the Paddington Fair…
Watch them Dance the Paddington Frisk when our friends shall Go West…’
In short, these are Hogarthian streets, rather than a Regent’s Canal.
And this was in the days before the railways:
My Paddington train was delayed,
So I passed the time, walking past the old branch line bay,
To the platform end,
To listen to a blackbird
Herald the winter morn,
And watch the mists
Folding the hills around Stroud –
Fog hanging in the valley –
The patient passengers huddled on the platform,
Lamp-lit like a sketch from Boz
Or like a poem from Thomas Hardy.
Fog shrouded the canals, turnpikes and rivers of southern England,
As we made our Brunel way through
Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Berkshire and Middlesex
(The Thames lost to sight and mists),
And so to William Cobbett’s Great Wen,
And Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Xanadu,
Moored at Paddington Basin,
For scrambled eggs,
And a visitor from Bengal rather than one from Porlock.
We chugged through Dickensian Bleak House fog,
Past barges, selling coal and kindling and books,
Through Little Venice, via the Grand Union,
Then along the Regent’s Canal,
Through tunnels and locks, under bridges,
Past gas holders, railway stations, warehouses,
Churches and festive barges and the homeless,
Sleeping rough in tents on a cold, damp canal bank,
Past Regent’s Park and Camden and King’s Cross,
With the companionship of the crew of the Bengal Tiger:
Comradeship and collectivism through the locks,
Sharing the windlass, the ropes and the gates,
Waiting our turns outside Islington Tunnel,
Until we passed through its arched London brick
And under London’s dripping waters,
The half circle of London light
Bringing a new mooring,
And a farewell from us all,
Josh and Alice and me on Xanadu,
To the passing Bengal Tiger,
A London wave,
On the Regent’s Canal,
In a right regular London particular.
Addendum:
There was one more unexpected lock to navigate – ‘The Lost Lock’. Josh dropped Alice’s bike lock into the canal, but needless to say, he has attached a powerful magnet to the end of a pole, to cope with such eventualities; and so the lock was retrieved.
