with the Cherwell sluggish and muddy only a few hundred yards from my front door. The Thames curves just a mile to the west, almost wide enough to swallow a thrown stone there but narrowing as it approaches the sandstone walls of the centre. And cut between the rivers is the canal, straight and willow-shaded by Jericho to where it meets the Thames at Sheepwash Channel. Old hands save journey time by learning the bike trails along the canal and the waterpaths, or take to kayaks and coracles and go bobbing along the flood. Older hands still have tales of ice blocks and tumbling in on five-pint night rides, racers snagged on rudders, boats ablaze, killer swans, red-eyed derelicts with spiderweb face tattoos and festival folk wandering in from Aristotle Rec or the Meadow approaches. There’s a single gondola moored at Folly Bridge, it would be something to see it nosing out of the reeds and mist on my own lonely river stretch.
