Staying afloat

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