Sometimes I picture myself in certain coastal situations: I’m on a bike (even though I can’t ride a bike) riding along a clifftop path in a breeze with my scarf trailing behind me like steam from a train. I’m on a beach eating a sandwich and my mam and dad, long gone for many years, slip up quietly behind me. They are still young and full of the joys of life and love and we sit together eating and chatting. I am on a rowing boat on a still calm lake just by the sea; my wife and family are with me and we are laughing and somehow, in indefinable ways, I am The Best Dad Ever.
Well, the first two haven’t happened and probably never will, although I live in hope, but the third one has. Mind you, the fact that in these domestic parts we refer to it as The Rowing Boat Incident might give you a hint that I wasn’t in receipt of a Best Dad Ever badge that day. It was, as I recall, a cool day. Rain was forecast but not until later.
We’d been on the sands and we’d had an ice cream and now we decided that it would be good to go for a row around the boating lake. There was no breeze and there seemed to be no other hazards as far as we could see. I may have made an error there because in one sense, perhaps the most important sense, I was the hazard.
We got in the boat and it shifted alarmingly like a bouncy castle at a stag do. We all sat down and the ticket man handed me the oars. They were huge and weighty and it took me ages to get them into the rowlocks, a word I always enjoyed saying, mainly because I didn’t have to use them practically. Now, I wasn’t so sure. My smile was painted on and the paint began to dry.
Once my wife and kids had got settled and the boat had stopped dancing, the man pushed us away from the edge and we were afloat on the mirror-like water. I began to row and my shoulders pressed a button marked ACHE.
One of the kids shifted a little and the boat seemed to Titanic about a bit and I said in a ‘soppy-stern’ voice (to quote Philip Larkin) ‘Please stop doing that. Please stop doing that now.’ The kids and my wife sat like books on a shelf as we went further out towards the lake’s centre. It was really shallow and you could see the bottom but I still began to feel a trickle of sweat down my back when my eldest daughter began to trail her hand through the water. I did my best to hide my anxiety from my family and, somehow, from the boat itself. It didn’t work.
Another family approached in a different boat, laughing like an audience at the recording of a successful sitcom. I felt a sharp scratch of jealousy; their lives seemed uncomplicated and confident. They glided through the water like a merfamily. I redoubled my rowing efforts and my shoulders ached even more. Somehow, despite my efforts, we were drifting towards the edge of the lake as though we were the last drop of soup and the lake was a plate. My wife pointed out (unnecessarily in my view) that the edge was approaching. We bumped into it. The kids laughed and my pride took a tumble.
I pushed us away from the edge with the oar and we drifted into the lake again. I quite liked the drifting; it felt meditative and zen. It was as though I was floating above the floating. I could have been a character in a folk tale or a parable: The Man Who Floated Nowhere.
The kids were getting restive. My wife looked at her watch as a coded message to me to do something. I was secretly hoping that time was almost up and we would be called back imminently but that wasn’t the case.
I took up my oars and began to row. Ah, maybe my hands had grown sweaty during the becalmed interregnum; perhaps I had unthinkingly dabbled the handle in the water and they had become slippery; perhaps fate and gravity were up for a laugh. Anyway, I dropped one of the oars and it floated away, half submerged, crocodile-style. My passengers (this is how I thought of them, as though I was the captain) looked on in horror with silent Munch Scream faces as the boat began to spin. It was only a saucer-deep lake in North-East Lincolnshire but it felt suddenly unpredictable. The oar continued to float away tauntingly. I tried to row towards it but seasoned canoeists will tell you that’s a difficult operation with only one oar. We began to spin like a slowing globe on a bedroom windowsill. I rowed with one hand and one oar.
The family from before passed, still laughing, still packed with a kind of uncomplicated glee. I shouted ‘Excuse me, could you just pass me my oar?’. They carried on laughing and rowed by, the dad’s muscles gleaming, the mother looking at him adoringly, the kids stage-school burnished. The oar made its stately way towards the edge, the edge that I’d bumped into before.
Ah, ‘before’; that time when everything was all right and I had two oars and a sense of purpose. Now I had one oar and a sense of futility.
Maybe I’m still there. Perhaps I never got off the lake. Maybe some kind souls in sou’westers rescued the family and they left me there for punishment. Been there for decades; become a tourist attraction like an exhibit in a freak show. Send sandwiches please, and a copy of Moby-Dick or Mutiny on the Bounty.