Trespassing: an encounter.

There's nothing I dislike more than the pernickety. You know the type: they've little to disturb their small lives; their parents don't become frail, or dwindle but die, tidily, within three months of each other at 103, the first of a sudden heart attack, the second of a broken heart; these, their elderlies have bequeathed everything in advance, decluttered in the nick of time and arranged their own funerals saving all any bother; their young go, generation after generation, straight from a C of E Primary to Cambridge, never take drugs, take up with a tattooist or Taoist, or fall pregnant by mistake and so it is that all such types have left to do is marshal the general public.

They erect signs outside their homes, around which they have built sandstone walls leaving just enough space to allow the Volvo to go in and out and, since these mausoleums are, usually, along some idyllic county road travellers might enter in error, the signs erected read, 'no turning'. No turning, really? I kid you not. No rear ends allowed and just in case, there are also lines of hard edged stones left neatly along the grass verges left parallel and exterior to their castle walls there, so that any lone townie and driver of a mini might rip their tyres to buggery if ever forced to make way for an Urban Land-Rover or, god forbid, farm vehicle. Having secured their English homeys' castles and bored all their neighbours to death with stories of the difficulties faced by growers of dahlias, Compton-upon-Rising, the pernickety are forced to take up hobbies, exporting with these enthusiasms, the territorial instincts they have brought on at home.

Imagine if you can, a perfect late-life date, and in view of all the outrage just now around that ghastly book, 'The Salt Path' I urge all readers to note that although my stories often draw on forms of truth and truisms for their titillation, I make no claim and never can to being free to tell 'the' truth but here, I will admit to some confessional truth and state before the law, that I was treated to the best day our ever by an eligible suitor last Saturday, with not the merest hint of pernickety about the chap. This man has lived and survived to woo for England and his method of doing so (and eat your heart out Francis F) had engaged the wannabe lover in considerate, extensive, expensive and extremely well researched effort. First he purchased a Canadian Canoe (the academics here will be aware of Julia Kristeva's work on intertextuality but who needs an academic in the building now we have Substack - for the uninitiated, I refer you here to my slowly unfolding novel, 'Rivering' RIVERING the fifteenth episode of which should appear close by on Friday.) Next, he sent me a photograph of the grand vessel, bought a rather fine fridge for his van which he charged with good food and champers and thirdly, set a date on which we might go rivering, up the Thames from Streatley (the place of all nascent adventures on my part) close by the Swan Hotel with all that fine linen and hot water. Further he had ascertained precisely how and from where we might launch his new object of seduction and drift together aimlessly along and up and round the lily beds.

If I were pernickety I might describe the complexities involved, include a map and worrying concerns about the means engaged by both of us to arrive on the riverbank where we found a sign reading, clearly and in red: FOR THE USE OF PBS ONLY. KEEP OUT and being from the kind of family, and those who know me know, trained to trespass, I said to my hot date, 'PBS can do one,' and luckily he agreed. We were ready. Oared up. Steady. The canoe pivoting on the riverbank when suddenly, as if called by some internalised 'prefect monitor' three paddle boarders were upon us, the one in the hat saying, 'Can't you read?' which riled me. 'Of course,' I said. 'I went to the C of E Primary up the road. I've been jumping off this riverbank for 68 years' you twat. I didn't say, 'you twat' but the twat in the hat knew what I meant.

'We're paddle boarders' he said, landing his own and two friends' paddleboards.

'I'd never've guessed' I acquiesced, my hot date having retreated to his van, a faint shower coming on, once he had inverted the canoe, to wait.

'I think you'll find you can't launch from here,' said the twat, as I too demurred away to drink Champagne in the van, till finally the shower blew away and my wannabe and I returned to launch our boat and float quite steadily upstream.

'Job's worth' I said.

'Ever the diplomat, you' said my baby blue as I assured Monsieur Pernickety that the last thing I'd ever do is cause any harm to the riverbank and especially not there, could he see, that fabulous Willow, there, 'do you see?' I'd taunted Sir Pernickety, my parents ashes were each, with decades in-between, 'scattered there beneath your 'keep out' sign. Do you see?'

The man who runs the paddleboard club had nothing to say to me, except, 'you can do what you like when I'm not here' and while you are, Mr Twee

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