I’d be early for my next appointment but I drove straight down there just the same. I quite often get called out to the Maida Vale area and sometimes to Little Venice, once even to Russia Road, but I’d never been back to Paddington Basin since I was chucked out of the Grand Union Polytechnic and their mixed course in Business Studies and Psychology. Even now I can’t think of that place, since renamed the University of Latimer, without shuddering and then laughing at my shudders. But then, the only way I could find of getting there without one way or another descending below ground level was to walk along the canal bank and thus pass under the Westway exit road but not underground.

You can’t drive to the Basin. You have to park your car as best you can (and pay a pound an hour) in Howley Place or Delamere Terrace and walk down through the little garden that overlooks the point at which the canal branches and the island where they say Browning used to sit and write his poetry. They’re big on Browning around there. There’s even a pub called the Robert Browning. Selina once had an apron with a picture of him and Elizabeth Barrett on it. A path that no one would suspect is there, still less that it leads anywhere of importance, runs down through a kind of shrubbery and brings you out onto the canal bank and the bridge. Above you is the Harrow Road and it’s quite a wide bridge but not dark enough under there or shut in enough to upset the claustrophobic. On the other side of the canal are all the houseboats, moored aft to bows, all with their names on their sides in painted wreaths of flowers, Susannah and Water Queen and Cicero and Garda, plants in pots on their roofs and plants on the canal bank in the gardens the boat people have made. At this time of the year those gardens are full of tulips and wallflowers in bloom. The boats are doomed, of course. Once building starts down here, and building is scheduled for the whole of the Basin, the boats will go and the gardens, the wild buddleias that push their purple spires out of every cranny, and the elder trees with their flat white platelets of bloom and the brambles and nettles and tall milk thistles—and the mess and awful slumminess too.