 |
| Atlantic grey seal in Deptford Creek - Oct 2014 |
23 November 2014
It
is over a year now I’ve been living on the boat, and since the beginning of
this month, I’ve been living on it more; I've been able to quit my job. For the last 13 years the Department for Work and Pensions have been paying me to turn up and work for them; now they have paid me to leave. I now have money in the bank
after having lived hand to mouth for the last ten years since losing my home when my relationship with my daughter's mother broke down.
Anyway,
since moving to the boat a year ago things things had already started to improve for me, financially. Leaving my job, I now have what is equivalent in money terms to a quite healthy
advance to concentrate of music and writing projects. At some point next year,
if or when I see the money draining away too alarmingly, I can always look
around for temporary work to keep me going, but right now, I can use my time
creatively.
I
have been, in any case, more than usually productive on the songwriting front
over this last year. Without doubt, living on the creek has helped to inspire
this. In the last couple of weeks I have been busy demoing and rehearsing new
songs written over the past year for the next Rockingbirds album; and it is proving
to be a very promising harvest of songs and lyrics. It will be a few months yet
before we can get everyone together to record, so in the meantime I intend to
press on with writing what I can. There is also my “Alan Tyler Show” project –
me, Patrick Ralla and Fiddling Jim Morrison, an economy size gigging unit which
we are recording an acoustic album for (work in progress) and hope to get
working next year. Closer to my chest, I recently finished writing tunes for
William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, which I plan to record and put on youtube. I
now call this Project “Oh Dear”, after the two word response I received from
Andy Hackett when I mentioned what I was up to.
Leaving
your job, “retiring”, being in your fifties – it focuses the mind marvellously;
you know you can’t rest on your laurels – the opportunities that now present
themselves will not forever be there – they have to be seized without
unnecessary delay. Of course, some of my contemporaries have already achieved
much of what they want to do, and have been suitably rewarded; houses bought,
families growing up, etc, and can perhaps take their foot off the gas; this is
certainly not how it is for me. Purely in money terms, my “advance” won’t last
forever; I need to make a viable living out of music and writing if I can.
It’s
been a bleak, wet week on the creek. As I write this Sunday morning, the patter
of rain on the roof of the boat is unrelenting and cheerless. The weather
forecast offers no prospect of it stopping until the evening*. At least the
tide appears to be coming in; to have the boat lifted afloat from the mud will,bouy
my spirits as well as body, just a little. Or perhaps the tide isn’t coming in
yet – in rainy weather the river swells and can mislead. No – it’s definitely
coming in, I can hear the clicking and clunking from the hull and see the back
of the boat begin to bob a little next to the big barge next door.
When
the tide comes in there is generally less wildlife to look at, because then the
shoreline disappears under water. So the herons, and moorhen, and the grey
wagtails (to give three for instances), who make a living scouring the the mud
and shallow water, take their leave. But with the tide in you might see grebe and cormorants ducking and diving on the water.
More spectacularly, last month, our neighbour spotted an atlantic grey seal
catching flounder a little further out on the creek, and posted photographs of
it on the @Creekside_Trust twitterfeed.
So for those who know how to
catch them when the tide is in, there are flounder to be had in the creek. There
are eel too. I spent an amusing ten minutes a while back, watching a seagull
grapple with a dead eel on the shore. The tide was coming in. The gull wanted
to hang on to its prize, but unable or unwilling to eat any of it there and
then, it kept picking it up and putting it down just on the edge of the
advancing tide-line. It seemed to lack the wit or ability to pick the whole
thing up and remove it entirely from the encroaching water.
I think I have mentioned in
an earlier post that my friend on the next boat, an experienced fisherman, had
expressed scepticisim at the viability of fishing the creek. Obviously at low
tide there can only be tiddlers. At high tide, the water can often come in so
mucky and murky that successful fishing looks dubious. Nevertheless, I did
discover a very large dead bream down alongside my boat in the late summer. Too
big I think to have come downriver along the shallow Ravensbourne, I theorised
that it had swum in off the Thames at high tide, and then perhaps not found
things to its liking, and gave up the ghost.
*It
turned out that later in the day Loambit Vale in Lewisham, less than a mile
away, was flooded as the River Ravensbourne burst its banks.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-30171327
