Tales of the riverbank...

This is the county marker, that sits in the middle of the bridge, that crosses the river, that runs through the town, in the land where I was born.

The River Thame is, at this point, the boundary marker between Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Thame is the town where I was born and grew up in. It’s one of the few Oxfordshire towns allowed to use Oxon in its address rather than Oxfordshire because… well I used to know why but I seem to have forgotten.

There was a saying when I was growing up, more ironic statement really, and I still use it today - I use it to show my incredulation over something, to flag that I’m not stupid, and sometimes for no good reason at all – and that statement is: ‘Be I Bucks? Be I buggery’.

Back then this was the standard reply in answer to the question ‘are you from Buckinghamshire or Oxfordshire’ because it was hard to tell from your accent. Both Bucks and Oxon had the same bovine bumpkin drawl and both counties were populated by village idiots with varying degrees of idiocy from ‘full cretin’ to ‘ just a bit dim’.

I erred on the ‘just a bit dim’ side, spending years calling girls - guruls, milk - mawlk, and shillings – shallins, as in; ‘Is thart mawlk a shallin a point yang gurul?’

I was without doubt a fully fledged country oaf, and it wasn’t until my education at Lord Williams School that I lost the accent and became the same as everybody else. It was the scholars who beat it out of me, providing this service to all townies and teaching us how to speak without our retard accents whilst moulding us into acceptable copies of their flawed normality.

Before this, when I was still a real townie boy, I used to go down to the river almost every week. Back then there wasn’t a sign warning you off, nor did your parents worry about you going there and drowning - in fact mine actively encouraged me to get some fresh air by the river - in retrospect I wonder if that was reasonable parental behaviour, but I enjoyed myself anyway and only came close to drowning once.

One Sunday afternoon my Uncle Bob took me fishing on the river. Uncle Bob had been in the army and had made his fishing rod out of a telescopic tank aerial. He let me borrow it and showed me how to cast into the purple shadow under the weeping willows where, he said, the pike were. I was so excited – I was going to catch a pike. Six hours and not a bite later I decided that fishing wasn’t for me and I’ve never been river fishing since.

It was my uncle Bob who caught the Pike and gave it to my Mum to cook for dinner. I have never tasted anything so revolting in my life. It was slippery and slimy and tasted of the smelly mud that you get at the bottom of ditches - it put me off fish for years afterwards. Boiled Pike? Not even if Marco Pierre White cooked it.

I would often take my girlfriend down to the river. We used to wander down the bridge steps into the field below, taking care not to touch the trees – there were cows in the field and they rubbed against the trees, and touching where they’d been rubbing might give you ringworm (or so my auntie Muriel said). We’d hide away under the single landlocked arch of the bridge and kiss and whisper and dream and eat chips from Kimberley’s fish and chip shop at 6d a bag.

Sometimes I’d swim in the river during those long, hot, boyhood summers - me, the Brahams, the Bowler boys and girl. We used to swing out over the river on a rope and then drop into the deep, green, coolness of the water. You had to watch out for the whirlpool under the bridge - the whirlpool would drag you down if you got too close to it. I didn’t believe in the power of the whirlpool, which was only ring of gently swirling water - until the day I watched a spinning sheep dragged, screaming not bleating, under the water never to be seen again.

That’s me in the water in the bottom right of the picture. I can see the bridge from where I’m standing it’s to my right and the whirlpool is just behind me. On top of the bridge, exactly in its middle, is the county marker. I’m standing in the water in Oxon and across on the other bank it’s Bucks and listen, I’m shouting…

‘Be I Bucks? Be I buggery!’