Up the Thames with a flat-coated retriever
In Memory of Millie, the Dog of the Title, who died in June 2016.
It had been the wettest April for a hundred years. We knew that, but we’d been planning this boat trip for months. We were going to take an open Canadian canoe, tents, cooking gear and a retriever called Millie upstream from Oxford to the source of the Thames. By mid-May the unseasonal rain had swollen the river as far up as the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. What should have been an easy glide on almost still waters had turned into some sort of triathlon event.
The Thames was not living up to its description of ‘a pond between locks’. When we set off, from Pinkhill Lock near Oxford, the sun had come out, but the ‘lay-bys’, landing stages where you step ashore to open the lock gates, were flooded. Waterlilies, normally sunning themselves on the banks, were drowning in the deep water. Further upstream, the Environment Agency had opened weir...