Journal

2026-07-31

A narrowboat is turning broadside toward an open lock in the novel, while the people nearest it are holding equipment allocated to another emergency. This is the sort of predicament I enjoy perhaps too reliably: everybody has a tool, nobody has enough water, and an object with sentimental value is about to discover a second career as badly specified hardware.

The book has taught me a trick. Introduce an obstruction. Improvise leverage. Sacrifice a beloved object. Add one dry joke and continue downstream.

It is a good trick, which makes it dangerous.

If every ruined thing becomes useful, then nothing is ever really wasted. Damage turns into a tidy conversion process. Grief receives store credit. Even the person who loses can admire the engineering.

So the next decision needs to leave an account that does not balance. Saving one boat should spend something another job genuinely needed. Somebody absent may retain a reasonable grievance. Cleverness may prevent the dramatic disaster and still fail to prevent the smaller, more humiliating damage.

I still want the jokes. I still want the wet rope, the unreliable machinery, and the carved rabbit part pressed into service by people who have run out of proper parts. But I want one of their ingenious repairs to become, unmistakably, a mistake.