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Monday 1 December 2008

Downstream

Thinking like a river

P.J. Kavanagh on Tom Fort's account of punting down the River Trent

the lake is healthy enough to sustain large carp, and pike and tench. And the Trent itself runs clean, a little river again instead of an open sewer, which may be some consolation for the loss of the great house, and the chimneys and kilns of the Five Towns.

Like a river left to itself, his mind takes its own course. There is another element also, the physical nature of his journey. He has a punt, but he decides against punting. His punting instructor, using a pole to demonstrate a 180 degree turn, is catapulted from the punt onto a concrete jetty; our prudent author decides to use a paddle. Now, afloat at last, his wife and father-in-law waving from the bank, after two strokes of the paddle he has run aground. He sorts that out and waves back. That night, on the river-bank, it takes him an hour and a half to put up his little tent.

Further on the journey he lies inside that tent and listens to it being beaten by torrential rain. This leads him to ponder on the nature of rain, of clouds, of storms and floods, and of all the theories there have been about these since antiquity. He seems to have read everything and distils it into clarity. Within a few days it takes him only 20 minutes to put up his tent. He appears to subsist on Spam and a fruit cake made for him by his wife, and on beer, in quantities. When the beer is good, he celebrates; when it is bad he says so. Passing through Burton he, naturally, gives us a history of Burton’s India Pale Ale. He is dispirited by ugliness, by the 1950s power stations, half-destroyed and left to rot, such brutality disrespectful to the river. It is for the river he complains, not for himself. When he passes Rugeley he of course cannot resist giving us an account of Palmer, the Victorian doctor-poisoner.

There will be those who grow impatient with his Maeander-like digressions, but for the river-lover, who likes to pause and look over bridges to see what is going on beneath (and alongside), and who likes to think of the past and the present continually flowing into the future, this book will be a delight.

Like a river, Tom Fort changes course when he is forced to: the river becomes full of industrial traffic: dredgers, barges and the like, and he discovers he will need navigation lights, and permits, and heaven knows what else, so he takes reluctantly to a bicycle. Which, confronted by an obstacle, and to stretch a simile, is the sort of thing a river would do.

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