i grew up as far from the sea as it’s possible to get on these british isles… give or take a mile or two.the largest expanses of flat water for quite some way were mill ponds and reservoirs.

however the canals, which had once pulsed so vitally through villages like mine during the nineteenth century, spreading the veins of industry out from mills and workhouses played watery host to my halcyon childhood summer holidays. their sleepy, brambled banks fat with rosehips and sweet nettles were perennial forts and dens for our stick wiedling batallions. a place where twilight sent us cycling home in weary, weaving convoys with scraped knees, the stucatto graze of briars across our shins and lips stained with blackberry juice.

since i’ve just moved closer to the water, to a charter’d street near where the charter’d Thames does flow, its made me think about how i find the nearness of water an eternally calming, contemplation inspiring notion. stories of sailors and pirates, whales and silkies, harbourmasters and fisherwives have always stung my imagination like briny flecks of seafoam and the slippery brush of rockpool seaweed.

songs about the water get their own playlist on my ipod.

the ebb and flow of arterial streams and waterways, the rain fall, the ice thaw, dried river beds, the floods and droughts, the eternal centrality of water to the human story, a force for geographic, social and personal change - something so vital and nourishing that its easy to forget quite how important it, at once is, and always has been. routes for communication and trade; the basis of settlements; a force for life and death, peril and cleansing, trial and inspiration all mute without water.

so i guess now’s a good time to remind you that 1.1 billion people in the world don’t have access to a clean, safe source of water, and to encourage you once more to take a few minutes out of your day to check out the amazing work that scott harrison and others are doing with charity: water.

trusting the flow of water to deliver is a tradition which is older than the hills carved by those self same insistant rivers. from hiding moses in the reed beds to a game of pooh sticks from a stone bridge; messages in bottles and the hopeful trickle of a spring. dana falconberry writes love notes on paper sailboats and sends them to a lost lover.

dana falconberry - paper sailboat