A quiet corner of England

I've never come across a river like this Thames. Moor up on every other one I've boated on and you can bet that within minutes some landowner will rush up either telling you to p**s off or demanding to have his palm crossed with notes for a night's stay.
Yes, here on the Upper Thames one can apparently nudge into the bank almost anywhere, bang in a couple of pins and break out the deck chairs and the beer. FoC. It's remarkable really and quite delightful. We're presently nestled into the edge of a cow meadow and here and there other boats are snuggled in for the night as well.
(It's certainly not like that on the Lower Thames where you get pounced on before you've even got your boat stopped in some spots.)
It's proving to be a delightful river and not just because it's so easy and cheap to moor (though cheap always appeals to us boaters). It winds and twists its way through almost empty countryside; here and there a house or a bankside chalet or an occasional bridge but that's about it.
You have to keep reminding yourself that this docile little country waterway is England's glorious royal river that sixty odd miles east will flow broad and fast through the centre of London, lending its notable presence to so many famous riverside landmarks - Traitor's Gate in the Tower of London, Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament and more and more.

Messing about on the river

Well we've finally left the Oxford Canal and turned onto the Upper Thames, exchanging the shallow, narrow canal for the wide, deep waters of the river.
We exited the canal via the delightfully named Sheepwash Channel, a sort of back alley exit that ducks under a couple of rail bridges before reaching the river.
At the last lock we met someone who had come nearly as far as us - but on foot. 73-year-old John Mason had walked 80 miles of towpath all the way from Coventry, the latest in his annual long distance fund raising walks in aid of the Alzheimers Society. Read more about him here.
 A few miles up-river we happened upon our Thames-loving narrowboating friends, Ian and Allison (or the Nobbies as we like to call them) nestling in a shaded mooring spot by Swinford Bridge.
They were headed down river and us upstream but we breasted up alongside and spent an enjoyable evening in the local pub, the Talbot.

This morning we woke at the startlingly early time of five a.m. (!) and watched in sleepy delight as the sun slowly came up and early morning mists swirled around the surface of the river, fish rose for flies and birds sang. Worth waking up early for.
Now we've breakfasted, waved the Nobbies off and written this blog and it's still only eight a.m.

Another world

We've been visiting another planet today. The planet Oxford. It's a world whose population seems to be largely divided into two only marginally similar species. The first are teenagers, dressed in a variety of brightly coloured tee shirts and baggy jeans (boys) or sawn off shorts (girls). These can be found wandering zombie-like in the morning; their living-dead faces gazing bankly ahead. Later, as the sun warms them, they begin to shriek and chatter in a babel of tongues, still seemingly oblivious to the world each other and their various smart phones.
The second species is the affluent academic, either bumbling along translating Aramaic texts to themselves or riding upright bicycles - the elderly ladies among these looking for all the world like latter-day Miss Marples in their flowing summer frocks and straw hats. And everyone talks proper – not just pleasantly but in the sort of modulated English you thought had died with The Home Service.
It's an absurdly wonderful planet, crazily full of tourists busily snapping each other or any piece of stonework that could be more than a few months old. In amongst the shopping streets are the glorious golden stonework buildings of academic Oxford, with its secret world of cloistered colleges protected by bowler hatted gatemen who politely allow we proletariat the merest glimpse inside before shoing us on our way.
Jericho is a satellite suburb of this planet, its main street alive with bars, bistros and even a cinema. It's a sort of Oxford Islington, with property prices to match: a back-street Victorian two bedroomed mid-terrace will set you back over £400,000.
The towpath is full of joggers and walkers and the occasional angler. We passed a father and son - the son fishing, the father reading a book on thinking.
As I said, it's another planet!

Hello from Jericho

Moored in the jungle of the Cherwell Valley

We've been in the land of internot rather than internet these past few days as we headed south from Banbury towards Oxford. Now the virtual world has caught up with the real one I can report - well, not a lot really except heat and more heat.

We've been dawdling, aiming to meet a few old mates along the way, and I'm glad we've not had to rush either. Instead we've sought out the shade and laid up for the afternoon before heading on a bit further in the cooler evenings.
Shade was actually pretty hard to find: the Oxford is a truly rural canal but runs through an open landscape of low hedges and few trees – which get 'bagged' by the first boat to spot them.

The curiously shaped Cherwell Weir locks

Last night, though, we finally found trees, and lots of them, as the canal wove its way into the Cherwell valley along a thickly tree lines route in a waterway edged with reeds and towering grasses like something out of The African Queen. Then, as the pink sun set behind us, hundreds of rooks flew noisily across the sky to roost in the trees around.

More weaving through the woods this morning, and even a section on the River Cherwell itself before we finally closed with Oxford. By now the shallowness of the canal - occassionally a problem all the way - was becoming a serious issue. At the popular Thrupp moorings we couldn't get closer than three feet from the side then as we neared Kidlington we were grinding and bumping along the bottom in mid channel at tickover.

Welcome to Oxford: the Agenda 21 moorings begin

Like many canals, this one enters the city through its back yard, skirted by a railway line on one side, a medley of back gardens on the other and in many parts is lined by 'Agenda 21 residential mooring' boats. These are there by some complicated witches brew of planning issues, past BW inaction and boater eco-agitation. Supposedly the moorings are to encourage a 'low impact alternative lifestyle' though some of the rotting hulks and that rubbish covered plastic boat with five cats sunning themselves on it seem poor adverts for any sort of enjoyable alternative lifestyle.
It wouldn't be so bad but the occasional 48 hour visitor moorings elsewhere on the canal were inevitably far too shallow to use. After grounding out at several I was resigned to a night in mid-stream until we finally happened on an empty stretch of mooring rings on the edge of Jericho at 9p.m. tonight.

Where would you rather be?

Down here or up there? South of Banbury we meandered under the M40 at a steady 3mph -- which was rather faster than the stationary Friday afternoon traffic up there.
M40 traffic noise blights a long corridor of Oxfordshire - we went for a walk in the evening and you can hear it echoing for miles.
The noise is almost entirely road noise rather than vehicle exhaust noise. If someone could only invent a quieter road surface this part of the world would be a much more peaceful place.

Banbury makes me cross

After the rural charms and delightful honey coloured stone cottages and barns of Oxfordshire's peaceful countryside, Banbury arrives like an unpleasant rash of modernity.
To be fair it's no worse than many towns, probably better than some, but that's not saying much these days. And I expected more from a town in the middle of such traditionally English charm.
But no, most of the centre has been blitzed by developers and replaced with the modern concrete charms of a huge shopping mall, sports centre and busy ring road. As usual, you only need to walk a few streets away from the same-as-ever brands of shopping gloss to find squalor and mess.
After a few sunny days in the quiet countryside my feeling of inner calm and relaxation was soon jolted by the sights of noisy drinkers, smokers hanging around outside every cheap cafe and the grotesques on their fat carts motoring towards the nearest Greggs. A typical English town enjoying a summer's day in a haze of smoke, beer, noise and grease.
Banbury, of course, has a unique place in canal history as the place where Tom Rolt had Cressy prepared for canal live at Tooleys Yard. The yard and adjacent wharf were an important centre for working boats on the canal for many years but all of that vanished with the developers' bulldozers in the '90s.
The yard that survives is rather like a non-alcoholic beer. It may be called 'beer' but has nothing of the taste or spark. It's a sorry little place with a ramshackle collection of memorabilia of no particular relevance to the site and a little brick blacksmith's forge all overwhelmed by the surrounding shopping centre. Tom Rolt would have been saddened and so were we.

Busy, busy, busy

Just three locks and four miles took us from Cropredy to Banbury where we are moored tonight - but they also took us about three hours to negotiate. Boy, were things busy.
To begin with we were third in a queue going down, with no-one coming up - which means that every lock has to be filled again after the previous boat has emptied it before the next boat can go down.
We passed one or two boats after that but never crossed in a lock but somehow by the third lock there were four of us waiting to go down and no less than six boats waiting to come up.
We stooged into Banbury past a long line of filled-up 48 hour moorings and were on the point of giving up when we spotted the last empty spot almost outside Tooley's Yard where Harry was built.
The Yard still exists - just - but virtually all the Harry era buildings have been long since submerged beneath a massive shopping mall. And sadly the bloke who built Harry wasn't around either. In fact, without knowing it, we'd passed him at a lock earlier in the day heading north. A shame neither of us realised.