Today we set off down the Thames. There is no river that has done more for British culture, from the Magna Carta to Pink Floyd. It’s quite a change from the canal system. First of all we have to pay a separate license fee – fifty quid for a week for a boat of Pegotty’s size. The river itself is much wider and deeper than the canals, which means we can go faster. The speed limit is a breathtaking five miles an hour, which makes me want to get out the water skis.

Actually, I have been going slower that that to enjoy the view and save on diesel. On the canal, a lot of your engine’s effort goes into pushing the water around the boat. Imagine pushing a ball down a narrow tube full of water. The water has to squeeze around the ball, and it takes more work to move it. It’s like that with a boat going down a narrow canal. Not so on a big wide river, so I can still be at one third throttle or less and be going faster than I would at half throttle on the canal.

The locks are much bigger, with room for several boats in them, and they have full time lock keepers to operate them for us. All we have to do is hang on to the bow and stern lines to make sure that we don’t crush any of the plastic boats. (For narrowboaters, anything that does not have a steel hull is a “plastic” boat.) The lock keepers are friendly and helpful, and make no assumptions about the knowledge or abilities of their clients.

One of the first things we went past were the Oxford college boathouses, where the various rowing clubs keep their racing boats.

The Thames is wide enough for one coxed eight to overtake another, but in Cambridge, where the river is narrow, the boats all start spread out in a line, and you have to try to bump the boat in front. Then the next day you start ahead of that boat in the line. One time long ago, my college, St John’s, bumped the boat in front so enthusiastically that they killed the cox. As a result, St John’s Boat Club was banned from the river for ever. Undaunted, the rowers in the college founded the Lady Margaret Boat Club, and the official club attire was a blood red jacket in memory of the slaughtered cox. That, believe it or not, is the origin of the term “blazer”.

Here’s another nice boathouse.

I think that one belongs to Nuneham house, where Victoria and Albert had their honeymoon, and Lewis Carroll used to row Alice Liddell. Yeah, the Thames, history everywhere you look.

This boat has a sign that says, “Four Pillars Hotel”.

I suspect is just advertising a hotel and not actually the hotel itself.

Finding a mooring on the river can be tricky. On the canal you can moor where you like on the towpath, so long as it is not to overgrown and there are no signs saying otherwise, but the land adjoining the Thames is mostly private property. We stopped tonight in the municipal moorings in Abingdon, which were mostly full by two thirty, but we managed to find one.

We did a supermarket run to Waitrose, and then explored the town, which is quite pretty.

It’s a bit of a step up to the bank, but we’re flexible, or we will be by the time we finish this trip.

The name Abingdon comes from an abbey that the town seems inordinately proud of, in spite of the fact that it was torn down by Henry VIII in the 16th Century. They do have some scenic abbey remains.

My guess is that they were put up by the Victorians to boost the tourist trade.

The county hall is on legs.

You see that in some English town, I suspect it was so that markets could continue on rainy days. The logical extension of this was to put a roof over the whole street, which led to the glorious Victorian iron and glass shopping arcades and the hideous modern brick and concrete shopping malls.

We passed a pub on the way back to the boat that has those big outdoor propane heaters running. You only use to see those in the States, and I thought that only the Americans would try to heat the out-of-doors. I was wrong. Not only do the English do it now, they have to do it in August.