Home life
River-boat ride
Alice Thomas Ellis
The summer party season is at its height and I'm wondering how many peo- ple have OD'd on white wine. I have. I never want to see another spoonful of fermented grape juice, especially now that we're told it's full of anti-freeze. Apparent- ly they add it to wine to sweeten it, which seems most peculiar. It would not occur to one, after all, to put it in one's tea in lieu of the lump of sugar or the saccharine tablet. My stomach is now behaving like an animal which has been ill-treated by its owner, and refuses to trust anything I offer it. It will grudgingly accept the occasional Marie biscuit but nothing more. I felt quite ill the other day, so I lay on my back and Cadders lay on my stomach (cats are preferable to hot water bottles in that their covers do not slip off and they don't go cold) and I vowed not to go to any more parties ever. Then my oldest chum, Z6lide, came along with an invitation to the barge race, which was quite irresistible. We boarded the vessel Naticia at Greenwich Pier and joined a group of lightermen and their families and sailed up and down the Thames watching young men rowing these colossal barges. I had my money on a large one covered with coloured hearts, but it kept getting athwart the tide and the Virgin Atlantic barge won. I had been told by two friends that the best thing to placate an indignant stomach is port-and-brandy, so I drank a few of those and had a very enjoyable time. Wide is extremely knowledgeable about matters nautical and the most observant person I have ever met, so I learned a lot about the river — most of it disheartening. Where there were warehouses there are now luxury homes and leisure complexes and all the rivermen are close to despair. The barge race is intended partly to publicise the possibilities of river transport, but our host told us glum tales of warehousing ventures which were rendered redundant before completion because of ever newer containering techniques. The egregious EEC, it seems, is in part responsible for this decline. Between the Americans and the Europeans the people are beginning to feel they cannot call their soul their own.
Our companions were very kind to us. They introduced us to everyone meticu- lously and were careful of our comfort, explaining the more esoteric points of barge-racing and buying us drinks. Quite unlike, said &fide repressively, the people at the last party she was at where everyone talked over her head about Biffy and Squiffy and if you hadn't just come gallop- ing in from the Quorn you were beneath notice. At one point she got so fed up she thumped her tiny fist on the table and announced to the guests flanking her on right and left that they had spent the entire meal talking across her about people she had never met and she was bored. Some- what taken aback they asked if she had ever known the Dunn Witterings in Singa- pore and when she said she hadn't they resumed their dialogue. I put it all down to in-breeding.
Passing Rotherhithe we observed a wide open space permitting a breathtaking view of some high-rise dwellings and remem- bered when that space had been occupied by a row of 17th-century sea-captains' houses. Most of them were owned and lived in by people who were prepared to cast themselves into penury in order to maintain and care for them, but the powers that be for some arcane reason of their own had decided that they must be razed to the ground. Letters to the Times, questions in the House, impassioned pleadings were all to no avail. Those tall, lovely houses with their panelling evocative of ships' cabins, and their little crows-nest balconies over- looking the river were all utterly de- molished and squashed. Don't worry, said the fiend in authority who held the ulti- mate responsibility for the act — they were going to put up concrete bollards all along the denuded waterfront to preserve the nautical quality of the area. Oh good, so that's all right then. I had to have quite a few more port-and-brandies before I re- gained my composure. Still, apart from these chilling reminders of the English- man's iniquity to his heritage, we had a heavenly time. Wide made me look at the sky because from the river you can see all of it, and she made me look at the water because no two waves are ever quite the same and the surface of the river is not monotonous but infinitely variable. I be- lieve I should be content to ford the Styx with Wide because while I was cowering in the gunwales sucking my thumb she would notice something interesting about the traditional weave of Charon's jersey and his individual method of poling his boat.
Previous page
