Delta Del Dept. - Flotation Is Groovy

Delta Del poses in front of home, yesterday

I think [muses Delta Del - Ed.] my interest in the floatin' life really began when I was a zygote [at left, yesterday - Ed].  I suppose there was the water chute ride that propelled my spermy self to it’s eggy destiny, but I can barely remember that.  It was certainly a thrill, but over all too soon.  As a zygote, the time for childish thrills was behind me, while ahead lay many a challenge.  But that’s a story for another day.  Suffice to say mama’s waters eventually broke, and I surfed that break all the way to the beach.

Fast-forward fifty years.  Springtime in Northamptonshire and at Braunston marina a re-formed zygote is shopping for boats.  I had decided that the floatin' life was the life for me.  I needed to get back to the river.  I’d been a teenage angler, a failed fisherman in fact, interested in rivers not fish.  It’s not that I don't like fish, in fact I think they’re super-cool.  I gave up fishing exactly because I like fish.

Back then I used to get up at 4 a.m. in June just so I could sit by a mirror-calm lake on a perfect English summer morning, a tranced-out trippy hour or five, rarely interrupted by any annoying fish-type action.  I also had a friend with a tidal mooring and a small sea-going boat down on the South coast.  The Solent at dawn on another of those mirror-calm summer mornings, an amazing place to be.  And in August 1970, against strict instructions from his mum, we took the boat through the mirror to the Isle of Wight.  But that’s a story for another day.  Suffice to say we didnt make it to the festival site because moon turn the tides and, anxious not to be late for our tea, we had to surf that break all the way back to the mainland beach.

Boats and water played an important part in my early years.  As a teenager I became obsessed with the philosopher-poet James Marshall.  His assertion that floatation is groovy sparked a lifetime of personal experiments, some involving boats.  I can confirm that floatation is indeed groovy, although working at low tide on Bournemouth beach, summer of ’72, I failed to find a single jellyfish prepared to back me up on this.  One did try to sting me with a story about their grandmother needing an operation, but I saw right through them.  And on the subject of tricky sea-creatures, low tide in Ocean Beach, San Diego, summer of ’97, I met a Californian mermaid.  Right this way, she smiled.  And lured me into El Niño’s salty embrace.  They said it’s impossible for a man to live and breathe underwater.  They were right.  I tried it once, briefly, it didn’t work out.  But that’s a story for another day.  Suffice to say a friendly incoming wave broke me free of Niño grasp and mermaid spell, and I surfed that break all the way to the beach.

Never did see that fishgirl again, though I went lookin for her almost every day that summer.  She’d be right at home here with me now in England, swimmin alongside my narrowboat throwing cute dolphin shapes and slappin that pretty little tail.  Actually quite a large tail, half of her body in fact.  But kinda cute and real trippy when the light hits the scales.  Me and that mermaid we’d cruise along fine at a dreamlike pace.  That’s narrowboat pace, like walking without moving your legs, or your fish half, an almost frictionless glide.  Time to space out and wonder at the mad proliferations of summer or the frosted perfections of a winter landscape.  A journey that by car would take a couple of hours, by boat might take a couple of weeks.  And what’s the hurry?  Narrowboats move at 18th century speeds, past 19th century industrial architecture, through 21st century cities and back out into a world of heron and pike.  In the clear waters of winter, when few boats move around to disturb the sediment, I see the pike waiting and watching among the reeds.  And as I float by, the pike stares back, with classic you-lookin-at-me? insolence.  I watch the heron’s throat bulge as a less formidable fish realises just how bad things have suddenly become.  I spot a grass snake swimming across the river, it’s head held above the water, it’s movements unchanged as it glides from the water up the bank and into the fields.  I see this stuff because I move at snail’s pace, and like a snail I take my shelter with me.  I don’t visit London, I live there for a week or three.  One day I walk from my home to a blues club in Soho, a week later I walk from that same home to a village shop in sleepy Oxfordshire.

In fact these days I have a mooring in rural Wiltshire and spend most of my time there, having spent the previous ten years constantly on the move.  And the water-gypsy lifestyle aint all dreamy perfection.  There’s work to be done, wrestling with manual swing-bridges and leaking locks, hauling on mooring ropes against wind and river currents, winter hands frozen rigid trying to remove discarded allsorts wrapped around the propellor, humping sacks of coal and cylinders of gas, emptying containers full of piss and shit, dealing with junkies hanging around city locks, dodging missiles aimed by bored youths.  But in the end, floatation really is groovy.  And so I took to the water like a duck, and like my father before me.  He was a wartime mariner, a mechanic on aircraft carriers.  There was an album of photos, taken by him on his journey home from the western Pacific at the war’s end.  I was fascinated by it.  A big, padded, important, grown-ups’ album, full of ships and boats and grinning sailors and foreign lands and seas.  And back home from the war, daddy had gotten lucky on dry land, found a job fixing sewing machines in a factory full of ladies working sewing machines.  Maybe a dozen male engineers and labourers, and fifty bored females with unreliable machines needing constant attention.  I stand before you today as proof that he surfed that break all the way to the beach.

[Floatation compilations to surface in comments section later - Ed.]