Low life | 30 July 2011

‘If you want to get off and walk or run along the towpath, we’ll meet you at the fourth lock,’ the skipper had told us after breakfast.

Breakfast was a croissant and two cups of tachycardia-inducing coffee. The towpath was a six-foot-wide strip of smooth asphalt between two grass verges. It was drizzling. The coffee buzz, the level smoothness of the towpath and the overcast sky were ideal conditions for running a mile or two. I stepped off the gangplank and hit the towpath running.

The scenery was French. Burgundian. Sleek and contented Charolais cattle were up to their knees in pasture in every other field. A buzzard circled the vines on the hillside. Six magpies were pecking in a field of long stubble. Even the barbed wire seemed somehow more stylish than ours.

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One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy. What did five and six mean? I couldn’t remember. Now there were brown slugs crossing the path, hundreds of them, all at full stretch, horns out, going hell for leather. Anxious about standing out against the asphalt and being picked off by birds, I supposed. I hopscotched over and around them. Nature seems more abundant over here. On this stretch of the canal the only thing not in abundance was people.

I passed an empty lock and lock-keeper’s cottage. Was this the first lock or the second? Had the skipper included the one at the start in his calculation? Who cares? I was full of running, that was the main thing. And I was remembering, too, to keep the stride short and fast and avoid that old-school, labour-intensive heel-to-toe type running that makes my knees ache.

Another lock.