Today I was a nomad. I decided to try and walk off last night's excesses by seeing how long it would take to walk into the centre of London. Not the most direct route either, that would be easy. I wanted to follow the course of my favourite river in the world, the Thames. Which was lucky as it is the only river that goes there. If I had tried to get to central London by walking along the Amazon then I would have been in for a long and ultimately disappointing trek.
All in it took about three and a half hours of actual walking to get to Leicester Square and I passed through some of the most uninteresting parts of my town to get there. But there were a few highlights.
Early on, not too far from Hammersmith Bridge I saw a shape in the middle of the river that I thought I recognised. It would have been the kind of thing that had I been a drunken tramp, slugging from a bottle, would have made me do a double take, look at the bottle, then look at the shape and then look at the bottle and then throw the bottle away. It was a man on a bicycle, cycling in the middle of the river.
I didn't have a bottle and I wouldn't have thrown it away, because it was a sight I had seen before. Years ago when we used to record TMWRNJ at the Riverside studios, we would spend Sunday afternoons drinking vodka and Red Bull on the patio by the river and (presumably) the same man had cycled by one day. I think we might have called him across and talked to him. The bike, if you're wondering is fixed on to floats and presumably some kind of paddle underneath. It's a pretty remarkable and surreal thing to see and it was good to see this eccentric man again.
A group of kids sitting on the wall had spotted him too and started shouting across the river to him. He was right in the middle of the Thames and some way away, so they had to really yell.
"Come over here, mate!" they shouted.
"I can't," the river cyclist responded, "I am on my way to Oxford."
I couldn't work out if this was possible by river, but maybe he could get the bike off the floats and actually cycle on the roads if he needed to. Or maybe the rivers join up at some point. It would take him fucking ages at the pace he was going anyway. I think sensibly he was staying away from this slightly rowdy, though harmless gang of 11 year olds.
"What's that bike connected to?" yelled one of the boys.
"Do a wheelie!" one of the others added. No one really laughed, so he just waited a minute and shouted the same thing again.
The man, skirting the water like Christ on a bike, tried to yell stuff back, but was too far away to hear. He obviously enjoyed the attention and let's face it, if you're out cycling on a bike on the river, then you are probably doing it mainly for the attention, but he was not prepared to come and meet his public.
Another man came out on to the patio of his flat with a camera - "That's not something you see every day is it?" he commented. The cycling river man was bringing the public together, making strangers talk. I liked him. He is the kind of person that makes London great. I walked on into town, he cycled off in the other direction. I wonder if he's made it to Oxford yet.
