KEY POINTS:
Oh, there's nothing like messing around on the water. Forget ducks and lily pads and weeping willows and scenic English villages, though. Think blighted industrial landscapes, waste-processing plants, old nags grazing by the side of the canal and men with pit bulls loitering, suspiciously.
Just south of Enfield,
in a prettily painted narrowboat called Jessie, moving along at a stately 6km an hour, we glide gently into the kind of alien landscape that looks as if you might find Sigourney Weaver armed with a flame thrower: there are pylons on one side, the M25 orbital motorway just ahead, darkened underpasses providing the ideal cover in which to take crack cocaine, and beyond, delights still to come, Edmonton and Tottenham.
What could be more perfect? And who better to enjoy sharing a confined space with for four days, in a 55-foot vessel neither of us has a clue how to steer, than Pete, a feckless Australian.
He's my old friend, but I should also perhaps mention, given the holiday's potential for total disaster, loss of life, limbs etc, not to mention holed hulls, broken rudders and spectacularly poorly executed three-point turns, he also happens to be my ex-boyfriend. From a very long time ago, it's true, but when it comes to apportioning blame and calling each other rude names, it seems that, like riding a bicycle, you never quite lose the knack.
Peter, the owner of Lee Valley Boats, in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, had already spelled out the highlights of the trip: "There's nothing to see. It'll take you eight hours to get down to Limehouse Basin [on the Thames, in central London] and it's a complete dump once you're past Enfield. You haven't got enough time. And, it's like I always tell people, there's nothing more boring than boating."
"You're not really selling it, Peter," I say.
"If I were you I wouldn't go. You'll end up seeing Hackney and that's it. Ugh. Awful."
The idea of this trip is only a whim. But a whim with a surprising amount of momentum, since 12 hours after receiving this off-putting advice we're standing next to Angela, from Lee Valley Boats, listening as she says a lot of complicated things I'm not quite following.
"You've got to turn the greaser, half way round, in an anti-clockwise direction every morning, and clear the weedhatch, and if someone falls in the first thing you do is to put the engine in neutral, otherwise you can get dragged under the propeller, ooh, and that wouldn't be very nice, and give yourself at least 10 feet from the back of the lock otherwise you'll hit the sill and the rudder will fall off, and make sure you're not too close to the front of the lock, otherwise the nose of the boat might catch and then you'll be in real trouble and if you hit another boat, don't admit liability, now to turn around you steer into the bank, and then steer out and don't mind the rats, you're never more than six feet from a rat on the river. And whatever you do, don't moor in Tottenham."
"Did you catch any of that?" I ask Pete as we wave her off.
"Not a word!" he says, cheerfully, still waving. But still, it seems straightforward enough. True, we have not a clue how to work the locks, but they're beautiful pieces of Victorian engineering and we stand with our crankshafts and wait for some kindly sort to take pity on us.
Instead we get a couple, who for the rest of the trip, we refer to only as "Mr and Mrs Snotbag", a middle-aged couple who condescend long enough for me to winch up two ratchets and heft open two gates for them, only for Mrs Snotbag to leap back on her boat without saying thank you and cruise away muttering "renters" under her breath.
But there's solidarity among us renters, at least. A group of them, who contrive to look even less nautical than we do, sporting as they do nipple rings and tattoos, stop to help.
"What I can't believe," says one of them, "is that they actually let us out in these things."
It's a good point. Pete is worse than useless at manoeuvres. And when I have a go, I find that I am too. It's a winning combination which truly comes into its own as we motor into Tottenham in the gathering dusk.
"Wasn't it in Tottenham that a policeman was decapitated a few years back?" asks Pete.
Housing estates press in on either side. Plastic wrapped flowers of sudden tragic death are tied to a lamp-post. And, when we open the lock, a tsunami of crap - tyres, cartons, crisp packets, what might be uniformed body parts - gushes forth.
A group of boys fish on the towpath, although when I say boys, I mean what the police in their reports call "youths".
"You're going too effin' fast!" yells one. And he throws his maggot bait at us.
"They're getting on their bikes!" says Pete. "They're going to board us! Put your foot on it! Jesus! It's like being in the British equivalent of Deliverance."
We're aiming for Limehouse but the light's fading and Angela told us under no circumstances to continue in the dark. On the other hand we don't want to die from a blow to the head from a well-aimed maggot.
In the end, we moor in Clapton, a dodgy bit of Hackney even by Hackney's standards. It's a surprisingly scenic spot, though, between Springfield Park and Walthamstow Marshes on a half-mile stretch of houseboats.
"I've just seen a Jew in a bearskin hat, and a corner pub that doesn't technically have anything to be on the corner of," says Pete. It goes without saying that the pub without a corner, the Hope and Anchor, is the oddest pub in London, but then, as Pete points out, we seem to have embarked on a journey into oddness. Or possibly time.
It's a tiny, unreconstructed East End boozer, with Formica tables and ancient wallpaper and the one, obligatory, raving local.
But nevertheless, a pint or so later I realise I'm having a fine old time. From this angle Clapton looks enchanting. This is not a sentence I ever thought I'd write.
The next day it rains, and Pete and I hang around the cabin. It's neat and tidy and perfectly designed. We stare out of the portholes and watch the raindrops plink plink on to the river and I tell Pete about the Nigerian torsos that keep turning up in the Thames just as an enormous pink headless teddy bear floats past. It looks like it's been involved in a sacrificial ritual.
There's nothing to do but make cups of tea and eat cheese on toast and listen to the sound of rain hitting a steel roof. I'm starting to think it's the most relaxing holiday I've ever had. Maybe those watery metaphors aren't metaphors at all. I feel adrift, at sea, as if I've slipped away from my moorings, into an entirely different place that might not be London at all.
When the sun comes out and we get going, I half expect to see a barefoot urchin or a chimney sweep. We cruise through the forgotten byways of Hackney, past the decrepit, crumbling Matchbox toys factory and warehouses so dank they've been eschewed by even London's crazed property developers.
In the twilight we enter a spectral East End, a land of forgotten factories and gated executive developments. We turn down the Limehouse Cut where the bridges are illuminated with neon, and the light shines off the water like phosphorescence until we emerge in Limehouse Basin, the gateway to the Thames and, in its post-industrial, post-gentrification reincarnation, the place where investment bankers from Canary Wharf come to breed.
Still, it's a classy address for the night, and doesn't cost a penny. It's a bit disconcerting, though, the next morning when I emerge in my pyjamas and bird's nest hair to discover 1000 yuppies' eyes upon me.
What I forgot to mention to Pete is that there are three exits out of the Limehouse Basin. The one we came in on the Regent's Canal and the Thames.
We're supposed to be taking the Regent's Canal, only perhaps, now I think of it, I also forgot to mention this to Pete, necessitating our first three-point turn. What fun! It's like Five Go Smash Up a Barge. Pete manages it in 10 points, maybe 12, with a round of applause from the yuppies on their balconies.
Oh, they're always around, the yuppies, if you're getting into a scrape. As proven at our third lock of the morning, where there are throngs of Saturday morning strollers, and so it is that we get trapped inside the lock and can't move the gate.
Men lean out of their tower blocks to offer advice. A passing football team stop to give their opinion. Whole families sit down on the side of the canal and crack open their picnics. They all look vaguely disappointed when we finally figure it out.
It's in Islington, though, when the canal disappears into a narrow tunnel 880m long, that we truly surpass ourselves. Somebody shines a torch at the roof; its beam illuminates a sheen of cobwebs at least a foot thick.
And then Pete, for no discernible reason, steers the boat into the side. There's a huge, metallic clang, and then an eerie silence.
Above us are people shopping and eating. In our tunnel, there's only us, trapped, possibly with rats. It's the loneliest place in London.
And when we finally make it to the other end, it's like arriving in heaven, better known as Kings Cross.
If you want an insight into the crazy, fascinating, scruffy, loveable, scary, charming reality of Britain today, forget about castles and cathedrals: head for the London canals.
- OBSERVER
