Borrowed Time

The river seems different when everyone else is working. One spring lunchtime my wife and I found ourselves looking for something to do – our original plan had been cancelled at the last minute. Rain was still falling but had thinned to the faintest murmuration on our skins. When we reached the Thames about a kilometre south of central Oxford, its surface was almost untouched by the weather, although the colours of trees and boats tinted the shapes of the waves.

We had decided to walk home via the towpath. It is often crowded during the warmer months, with people heading in or out of the city, and rowing coaches cycling alongside their sweaty crews (and not looking where they’re going). But this was out of university term, and on a weekday at a time far from either of the rush hours. We had this stretch almost to ourselves.

On our right, horses grazed a flood meadow where ridge-and-furrow marks ran below the stands of nettles. In between the bristling stems a group of geese pecked and strolled. The trees running the long sides of this rectangle were freshly in leaf, still with that intense shade I associate with Dylan Thomas’ “green fuse”. On the far bank, willows coppiced many years ago, and now wearing coronas of thin branches, had reached the moment of flush – when the leaves break out from their sheathing buds.

After rain, the oxygen in the air is ionised which gives it that fresh smell impossible to describe, except that to me it has the same whiff of promise as the smell of a new book. This was the air into which birds were singing.

The morning had been filled with a rainstorm in which most songbirds had taken shelter. Now, as we made our way past the boathouses, blackbirds and robins were making doubly sure of their territories. Small dark shapes arced from branches above us, then shot directly into invisibility among the trees on the far side. It felt as though this unpeopled time was one in which another system dominated – birds’ rules.

On the river two swans approached. This was not an enactment of Spenser’s “Prothalamion” in the Faerie Queene. The first, slimmer than the other, paddled at a brisk pace, while the other broke into the first one’s wake with powerful surges upstream. Presumably a male, the second bird’s wings stood proud of its back, and its neck formed a hook from which a grim head protruded at water level. Beak and eyes were focused on the retreating female. The male’s surges of acceleration came from two-footed thrusts deep under water. The wake of these drives spread quickly and clattered the grass along the banks.

Finally the female swan resorted to the air, getting aloft with difficulty and flying less than a metre from the water surface. Her wingtips cut tiny dips in the river, and spray leaped out from where she touched. The male pursued her, swimming, until she rounded a bend that took her up towards central Oxford. Then he settled in the water and turned back towards us. Perhaps he had a nest down where the river passed a peninsula ringed with willows, and was keen to drive off interlopers.

This was not something we’d seen in years of walking down the Thames, and we put it down to the strange effect of being here in “forbidden time” – that lived just outside a working day. It’s a strange feature of moments of non-work during the week that in them I see much more than I normally would.

Once, I took a Monday off, but as on the day of our river walk the planned event was cancelled. I walked from our house up to Boar’s Hill, through Cumnor and along the river, round Wytham Woods and down Port Meadow back into Oxford. That day I brought be my best-ever tally of bird species spotted on a single walk, at 33. I might persuade myself that “borrowed time” is worth much more than the usual sort.

After the swans had gone, we stood by the river’s edge for a few minutes, listening to the water, to the birds, to the ring road’s current. That, far off, was where the world was.

All a pause, of course. I had to get back to work, and our daughter had to come home from school. The rainwater on the A34 would be driven off by the friction of rush-hour tyres, and from 4pm the towpath would be crammed with cyclists heading home. We could leave no footprints in the towpath’s metalled surface. But the pursuit of a magpie by a sparrowhawk all through the trees down to the road filled us again with the excitement of our hour’s liberation.