In Morecambe Bay

Back after a couple of days frolics on the canal with Trina to a small pile of mail, including a Summons to the Magistrates Court for unpaid Council Tax. It will "be stopped if the amount shown [£542.47] together with the other sums claimed [£58.00] are paid [...] before the hearing date." It'll be OK. I'm a professional at one thing--living beyond my means.

To Trina's narrowboat on Sunday and the cosy, enveloping feeling as you bend and go sideways through the tiny French doors at the prow and down the two little stairs.

We were up early by our standards, since we were to strike across Morecambe Bay with the Queen's Guide To The Sands, Cedric Robinson, who is seventy-nine and has been leading people across the Bay for forty-nine years on a salary of fifteen [sic] pounds per annun. When he retires they are not making a new appointment, so a post dating from the sixteenth century will be lost, and it will be a brave person indeed who will set out alone, hoping to avoid joining the scores of human and equine corpses that lie below the sands. There is a young pretender who wants to do it commercially but he's had to be rescued twice by the coastguard and Cedric has a low opinion of his abilities.

The event was organised in association with Invisible Flock, a cheery young trio of artists, who provided headphones and an mp3 player for us to listen to a soundtrack. It was bits of interviews with Cedric, bird sounds, distorted bits of the Shipping Forecast--that sort of thing. After a while it became irritating, a muzak to nature's unmatchable music, so I turned it off.

Grey skies and a whipping wind; brief promises of sun were followed by flung rain. Most of us walked in bare feet, receiving a fine pedicure. Shortly before we came to the most treacherous part, crossing the River Kent, Cedric showed us a patch of quicksand, which wobbled malevolently underfoot like a huge jelly. Rolling up our trousers, we waded across the river. Someone gave a little scream as she trod on a fluke, a dab-like fish which lives just below the surface.

The last hour or so was across some stinking marshland, sheep dung and oily black mud everywhere; channels you had to jump across. "I'll be alright here," said Trina, and immediately slid down the bank and into the water. In another patch of squelching mud, her shoe was sucked off her foot. A careless comedy was taking over, as we gave up any pretence of protecting ourselves or our clothes.

Me bird: no post-production in the picture;
just taken at a particularly rainy moment

Trina and I were the last to straggle ashore at Kents Bank. After seven-and-a-half miles, filthy, wet, but exhilerated, we all stole gingerly into a cafe aimed at well-pressed car owners, where Invisible Flock bought us a cup of tea.

Back on the canal, changing out of our clothes turned into something far more enjoyable, making a virtue of the narrowness of a narrowboat. We improvised a studenty lentil stew, pouring off the mould that had formed on the top of the jar of olives, dispatching any harmful bacteria with one bottle of Chablis and another of Tempranillo.