Last spring, aboard Caprice, a Le Boat cruiser, I slipped out from Penton Hook Marina, close to the adrenal loops of Thorpe Park, and found the Thames capable of slowing the pulse. This year, returning aboard Mystique from Le Boat’s Benson base, we made a wider loop: to Abingdon, Oxford, Goring, Reading and Henley, then on through Marlow to Cliveden, before eventually pointing back to Benson. It looked simple on paper, which is always the first error.
The river had other ideas. Cookham Lock failed, apparently because of something involving a ‘solenoid’ - a word which left the engineer’s mouth and, by the second hour, had turned half the waiting fleet into specialists. Beneath the trees, an elderly, bronzed, bearded man sat in a dinghy playing guitar while claiming the delay had made him late for a meeting with King Charles III. This may have been true. On the Thames, royal appointments and broken hydraulics occupy the same afternoon quite naturally. Meanwhile, two teenagers carried a kayak around the lock, asking me the time, explaining they had no phones on them. It was the most cheering technological development of the week. Nobody grew visibly furious. Thames people have a way of making delay look like recreation.
