BY OXFORD CANAL

It’s an Oxford Day today, so I braved the cold train, and the even colder walk from the station, and I walked up the always pretty Oxford Canal.

I like a canal. A canal shows you the backs of things - like a messy garden: all washing lines and the tops of trampolines, or the windows of fancy red-brick apartments that were once bulked along a busy wharf. I like the boats too, and the twisting path that turns under Victorian bridges.

Anyway. This morning the water was frozen. A man nodded at me as he climbed out of his narrowboat, a cloud of white breath gathering around him. He looked cold. His boat looked cold, trapped as it was, in the green ice.

I wondered what story in your life leads you to live on a house boat. A romantic idyll perhaps? A mid-life crisis, or perhaps a noble stand for economical living. It’s certainly slower - and I imagine, more peaceful. About 45% of me would love it. The rest knows what I’m like in the winter.

I thrust my hands deeper into my coat pockets. I walk from the station through Jericho, all the way up to Aristotle Bridge. There was nobody else about. No traffic puffing exhaust fumes, no honking of horns or bursting of radio, just my feet crunching over the towpath, imagining what it was like to lead a horse, pulling a barge along this very waterway.

After Aristotle Bridge, I take a couple of turns through the streets until I find myself on the main road North. That’s always busy; a leaf-lined thoroughfare of constant traffic pulsing past the houses of lecturers and dons and college professors from an episode of Morse. I sometimes think I’d have liked Oxford as a university town. I know really, that I ended up exactly where I needed to be, all those years ago. What, I wondered, would I tell my seventeen-year-old self, disappointed at a polite rejection from Keble College? What, I wondered, would future me tell me about my disappointments now?

I’m thankful I don’t have to do this walk every day; the early start would be too exhausting to bear, but every now and then, I think it’ll be great. I can’t wait to see how spring falls dappled on that towpath, how the water sparkles in morning sun, or even how the pink summer sky hangs above the silhouetted buildings.

There’s so much ahead to be thankful for.