One cruise and I’ve fallen for canal life — but there’s a high price to pay

Although I spent nearly two decades living and/or working in London it was only this year that I finally saw Little Venice from the water. Stupid really, but that’s city living: you get spoilt blind. Anyway, on one of the first truly hot days of this year we wandered down to Paddington Basin, hired a couple of little Scandinavian motorboats fitted with silent electric motors and set off around the waterways.

Little Venice marks the confluence of the Regent’s and Grand Union Canals . East London in one direction, Birmingham in the other. Bars and smart houses line the banks. We cruised up and down feeling like kings and I fell a bit in love with the water.

The place is packed with Londoners, some of whom have fallen so in love with the water that they live on it full-time, in narrowboats of varying degrees of smartness. You can see them moored up on canals and the Thames from Richmond and Imperial Wharf in the west to Poplar and the Lee Valley in the east. It is — notionally at least — a cheaper and more cheerful form of living than remaining landlubber.

Or is it? For months now there has been a steady putt-putt-putt of bad- news stories suggesting London’s water-dwellers are suffering their own version of the housing crisis. Traffic is massively up but there is a shortage of moorings. Fees for mooring are being jacked up in some places by nearly 90 per cent. Some complain that moorings are being taken over by wealthy waterway dilettantes who take a boat as a pied-a-terre or leisure home rather than a full-time home.

In other words, things are as tight on the water as they are on land. It’s too expensive, there’s not enough space, absentee living is a blight and even if you do find somewhere half-decent to live, the chances are that one authority or another will stiff you for more money than you can believe possible.

With this in mind, I have abandoned any dreams I might briefly have entertained of selling all my stuff and moving the whole family into 42sq m of floating floor-space on the Regent’s canal . And that, perhaps, is just as well. On the one occasion that I mentioned the possibility to my wife she turned on me full-beam with divorce eyes. Now there’s something I definitely can’t afford.

Now for the mature path to cycle heaven

To Halfords to buy a clothing item that I assumed I would never own: a pair of cycling shorts with a padded gusset. After 20 years out of the saddle I am once again a cyclist, and now each day I go wobbling around the lanes, cussing out van drivers and swearing about the potholes.

I appear to have lost my teenage ability to pop wheelies and ride no-handed, and I suspect that I resemble Jonah Hill at the start of 22 Jump Street. No matter. In my mind I’m Easy Rider.

Axl and co are still diamond geysers

This weekend we are off to Iceland to see Guns N’ Roses playing the biggest concert in the island’s history. The band have been on tour for the past two years — it feels as though this could be one of the last chances to see them before the last strands of their hair fall out and they are wheeled out on stage with oxygen canisters beside them.

Obviously it would have been cooler to have seen Axl and co in the Nineties at the height of their debauchery. But at that time my mum argued that a) I was 11 and b) it would distract from my homework. Anyway, here we are 25 years on making up for lost time.

And also: Iceland! The opportunity to combine rock nostalgia with hot springs and midnight sun seemed too good to pass up. It’s going to be 11 degrees and pissing it down in Reykjavik, by the way.

I’d love to have seen Cromwell do Brexit

I’m reading Diarmaid MacCullough’s forthcoming biography of Henry VIII’s hatchet man, Thomas Cromwell. It comes endorsed by Hilary Mantel, whose Wolf Hall Cromwell outranks the real one in the popular imagination. I wonder what Cromwell would have made of Brexit, and our desire to allow popular referenda (rather than overbearing kings) to dictate institutional overhaul. Perhaps the caprice of a king was like the caprice of the electorate. The hard part is never the deciding: it’s the doing.