November Fireside Nights

JOURNAL ENTRY

 1^st November, Wednesday.

“November is born brave
This morning.

The dark water is alive
With movement
And a scatter
Of light.

The walk from the boat
To car
Is under starfield and
A bold moon.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The moon hangs low in the east, whispering in the ears of Gemini the twins. But now the rain is beginning to sweep in from the south.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into a wet November night to you wherever you are.

Thank you so much for coming on such a filthy night as this. Come inside, and get dry by the fire. The kettle had boiled and there is a hot drink waiting for you. Let's slide close the hatches and lock the weather outside. I am so glad you could make it. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

Today big banks of clouds have piled up, dark and growling from the south. The sun flitting between them – warming and welcome. Even though the teasel heads have been stripped bare, the goldfinches continue to dazzle the trees and hedgerows in rumbustious pantomimes of chirping movement.

We've had another storm this week. The barometer fell to an almost all-time low. I read that at one point the barometric pressure was around 955 to the west of Cornwall, which is really low. However, we got off fairly lightly here, with a bit of blustery wind and some rain, but nothing like the conditions further south. 

The water level in the canal is almost back to normal despite having more rain. The water remains soupy and almost bluish-green from churned up sediment and run-off. In places, the surface has the appearance of solidity forming a carpet mosaic of fallen leaves; green, brown and yellows. It looks too thick to move and yet it takes just one small moorhen to strike out across the canal for it to be transformed into shimmering water once more.

The fields remain saturated and in places waterlogged. Dips and hollows filled with leaden troughs of quicksilver. Maggie picks her way with care – keeping to the grass ridges.  

The fiery colours of autumn spread down the towpath, although often somewhat muted by mist or veils of rain. The deep crimsons and vermilions of hip and haw still richly blaze. Haw berries, are particularly in great profusion.   

The ducks remain highly active. A lot of them are pairing off, but they are still remaining in large groups. From time to time, they will all take to the air, wheeling around almost as soon as they are airborne (probably around 20 to 30 feet above the ground). Splitting and rejoining, they circle, before again peeling away (often in pairs or threes) and setting off in different directions. There is something very deliberate about the way ducks fly.

The other evening the cows had come down to the canal side, near the fallen hawthorn. Most were grazing but one, chin over the fence was statue still, watching a small group of ducks splash and bathe. She stood for may be four minutes, even when the rest of the herd were beginning to move away. What was she seeing in this little cameo of duck-life? What was she thinking? How did she make sense of this movement – the pearls of water splash, the companiable chuck and quack vocalisations. It was clearly them that she was watching. How did she experience it? Were there too the hints of joy and sense of commonality that I too felt?

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

NOVEMBER FIRESIDE NIGHTS

 [READING]

It is with this extract from Rupert Brooke’s poem The Chilterns that Tom Rolt begins his classic canal book, The Narrow Boat. And as the year’s turn rolls into deep autumn, I cannot think of a better way to start a book that is essentially about his experience of living in a boat on the canals.

Of all the seasons, there is something about autumn that this kind of life welcomes and embraces. Don’t misunderstand me. Spring, summer, and winter too, all have their charms, their attractions. The special characteristics that form each season and to which life afloat provides a platform or a window from which to enjoy them – and challenges too! With each season, you come alive to a different aspect of living. Becoming aware of different rhythms, different sound-worlds, different skyscapes, the slow revolution of the kaleidoscope, producing shifts in light and tones, different colours. Even the landscape changes its shape. The soft flowering curves of summer hedgerow and tree, shrink with the passing year, become more angular, following more closely to the geological contours of field and skyline. If you took a time-lapse film over many years of the hedge-line just above us – still rich red with haw berries and autumn. It would look as if the land was breathing – the rise and fall of foliage growth.

But, for me, there is something about autumn, and particularly the onset of autumn, that I find suits all the very best aspects of boat-life most perfectly. Living on a boat seems to be made for the autumn. As lovely as the long days of the warm summer months are, they are suited for being outdoors. The focus of everything is outside. Perhaps that is why, those days in which that is not possible can feel frustrating and plain wrong. However, with the onset of autumn with its fading light and chill, the accent is placed on life indoors. It’s when the boat as home – rather than as boat – really comes into its own. For me there is nothing to compare with that feeling of walking along the towpath as dusk deepens into night. The scent of mushroom and wet soil and the hint of wood smoke in the air that is sharp with the bite of coming winter. The rasp of night-breezes among the reeds. A buttery-moon playing among racing clouds. And, if you are carrying a torch – and because of the large puddles at the moment you’d be wise to – the silver dart and shimmer of light the flicks and skips across the canal’s surface like a stone being skipped across a pond. The air and the night wraps around you like blanket and your breath rises in white clouds in front of you. You turn the corner under the large oak. An owl hoot and there’s a rustle among the rushes along the opposite bank. Moon shadows crisscross the muddy path as you splash through a waterlogged section. In front of you, tucked into the bank behind a stand of reeds lies a boat. Lights spill out into the darkness and a wreath of blue-grey smoke lazily curls upwards into the night. There can be few sights more welcoming, or, after shaking off your coat and boots, that enveloping feel of warmth as you climb the hatch steps down into the cabin and take your seat in the glow of firelight.        

It’s that nesting instinct. The drawing in, the sense you get when you feel encircled, protected, safe.

Of course, not every night is like this – and it is good that it is not. But there is a sense of being so close in proximity to the elements and part of the world just outside the cabin walls, and yet apart from it too. Autumn – and some winter days – you get that feeling most of all.

With it comes that desire to slow down, step back. A time for reflection – to let thoughts flicker across the ceiling of your mind in the way that the fire light from the stove does. I think I have always felt that way, but somehow, being on a boat, allows me the space to do that more freely and easily.

Some nights there is nothing better than to curl up beside the stove with a hot drink and a good book. It seems to be exactly what autumn evenings are for.          

In fact, I’ve decided, that is exactly what we’ll do tonight. Taking our cue from Rupert Brooke and Tom Rolt, we’ll spend this autumnal night with some poets who capture the season perfectly, in the ruby and port glow of firelight.

I have here a little book that I found last year in a second-hand bookstore. It’s called Forest and Vale and High Blue Hill: Poems of Gloucestershire, the Cotswolds and Beyond. At the moment, we are moored on the very northwestern edge of the Cotswolds and so it is a fairly apt choice for tonight. It’s just a little larger than my handspan, quite slim, but the pages are thick and creamy. It is accompanied by some black and white wood engravings by Ray Hedger and comprises a collection of poems selected by folk musician Johnny Coppin, who, apparently, has set some of the selected poems to music. It is published by a small Gloucestershire press; The Windrush Press. The Windrush is one of the rivers that lazily coils and loops its way through the Cotswolds. On the first page there is an inscription in thick black ink: “A Christmas present from Alison. 1991.” I think it would have made a very good Christmas present. I would have loved it, anyway.

I began with Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Chilterns’, a landscape I know well and love, but let’s move a little northwest, to be a little closer to home here. This is David Ashbee’s ‘Cotswolds’

[READING p38]

One of the aspects of the Cotswolds that I love are the lanes – although increased traffic mean that they are often not so much fun to either drive, cycle, or walk down now as they once were. Nevertheless, there is something peculiarly English about the way they twist and turn in an almost riverine flow, between small fields and then vaulting high onto the broad swells and skies of the wolds. All the time, passing through small, villages built into the landscape (almost organically) of honey-coloured Cotswold stone.

Eva Dobell captures their feeling nicely in her poem ‘Cotswold Roads’.

[READING]

John Masefield, probably better known for his sea poems and particularly for his Sea Fever - I must go down to the sea again...

Is also drawn to the highways and byways of the Cotswolds in his ‘Tewkesbury Road’

[READING]

This theme is continued again in the next poem, although from a slightly different angle. The comparison between the little roads (the country lanes winding along valleys and combes with the high roads - the main routes often clinging and contouring along the high ground - the old drovers’ roads and packhorse routes. The ridgeways now 'municipalised' into highways. 

It also captures the romance of names of unknown or little-known places in the way it lists villages and hamlets. Slaughter mentioned refers to the valley in which Upper and Lower Slaughter are located.

‘The High Road’ by John Haines

[READING]  

Although it is not particularly, autumnal. The character of the Cotswolds is rendered in the next poem – or extract from a poem – so beautifully. The wolds are the high ground. The valleys that cut through it, are riverine. The Windrush is one. Another is the Evenlode. Possibly my favourite of all names for a river – almost Tolkienesque!

This is Hillaire Belloc and it is an extract from his ‘Dedicatory Ode’.

[READING]

One of the characteristic features, particularly of the high ground – the wolds – is their walls. As with further north, fields in this area are demarcated by dry stone walls, that cling precipitously to the skyline. Forming long – straggling lines across the smooth belly and folds of this land. Decorated by the emeralds of moss and golds of lichen, they stand testimony to passing time and have about them an air of antiquity. All though of human construction, like many of the canals, long ago they have joined and become one with the land and the elements.

I love this poem by Brian Waters, ‘This Ancient Wall’.   

[READING]

 In landscapes such as this, it is hard not to become sensitive to cycles of time beyond our own. To be aware of other lives, past lives, whose influence can still be felt. Time slows its pace – and even becomes transparent. It’s a landscape inhabited by ghosts – though not necessarily in the scary sense. This next poem reflects this theme. Autumn’s Halloween, but also the custom of sharing ghost stories around the fire makes this a particularly appropriate poem for tonight.

John Drinkwater’s The Cotswold Farmers.

[READING] 

I would like to finish tonight in the way I began, by reading from Tom Rolt’s book Narrow Boat. I said when I began that, for me, the autumn brings together everything that I love about life afloat in a narrowboat. I think Tom Rolt would agree. As beautiful as his descriptions of his journeying throughout the year is, his writing certainly moves up a gear when he comes to describing autumn.

I will leave you with this extract which relates his time on the Shropshire canal…

[READING]     

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG