Nothing, but nothing, can beat the aroma of eggs and bacon cooking when you're out on the cut. You've been up since six, when the mist was rising from the still water of the canal and the day had yet to assert its authority. A quick check of your vital fluids (diesel, engine oil and water), a greasing of the stern tube and you'd cast off from the night's mooring under the spreading shelter of an ageing ash.
Putt-puttering scarcely above tick-over, the engine moved your 11 tons of steel, wood and soft furnishings that is the modern narrowboat with hardly a ripple of resistance, bar the bubbles of your prop wash. You shared the world only with a few Friesians taking a morning drink and some insanely incurious sheep. One hand was on the polished brass of your tiller, the other clasping a mug of tea to ward off the chilly tang of the moist morning air.
Four miles of unhurried cruising saw you standing on the tiny rear deck and surveying the bow across 45ft of roofline peppered with ventilation pots, more polished brass gleaming in the early sun that promises a glorious day. Such perfect peace was punctuated only by a rising flight of three locks when, with a burst of aerobic energy, you had opened and closed half-a-dozen heavy oaken gates and raised and lowered as many paddles, your windlass engaging rack and pinion to create the metallic song that is, along with the pip-peeping of the moorhen, the anthem of our inland waterways. Now you've found the ideal spot to tie up for breakfast and the bacon's sizzling on the stove in the galley, the eggs are popping and the coffee is saying 'Smell me'.
Over the years, times like these have sustained many an afternoon reverie, an antidote to when work is piling up and the pressure is on to find the key issues that will make waves on the coming Sunday.
It's nearly 30 years since I was first struck by canal fever during a weekend jaunt on the Staffordshire and Worcester Canal, built by the great James Brindley more than two centuries ago. Scores more trips followed, taken during every season of the year and on a variety of the canals and navigable rivers that make up the more than 2,000 miles of inland waterways in Britain.
But the problem was that each trip lasted a week or fortnight so just when I started to get used to the gentle walking-pace rhythm of the cut, it was time to get back to the blare and the blah of the city. What I dreamed of was a chance really to explore the backwaters that, in their day, were the highways of the Industrial Revolution. Then they carried coal, iron, salt, lime, agricultural produce and manufactured goods the length and breadth of the country. Today, with commercial carriers replaced by leisure boats, their cargo is pure pleasure as they wind around the contours of the land.
Now I have that chance. It all began a couple of years ago when two friends got married. They'd been living together on the good boat Stealaway when he popped the question. She said of course, as they were very much in love, but added they would have to live in a proper house. And so Stealaway, a singularly English craft with the beam of just 7ft to fit the restricted width of locks and bridge-mouths (designed so small to save money and water), came to be mine and together we are to embark on a 1,000-mile voyage around England; a jubilee journey around town and country, and the burgeoning bits that are neither, or maybe both.
Traversing nearly 700 locks in its rise and fall, and rise and fall again, and using rivers as well as canals, our journey will take three months. From London, we will move up the eastern core of England, past modern Milton Keynes and Northampton, past Leicester, Loughborough and Nottingham, to Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford. It will climb over the spine of the Pennines to Liverpool and Manchester before heading south through Stoke-on-Trent to Birmingham, which, loudly boasting more miles of canals than Venice, is the hub of the nation's network. Then, further south yet, to Worcester and Tewkesbury, east to Stratford-upon- Avon and Warwick before turning south again to Oxford and the 100-mile journey along the Thames back to London.
In the England of the twenty-first century, where no destination within its bounds need be much more than a day's travelling, this is a journey from a different perspective, the perspective of the eighteenth century, the last century in our history that travel and trade was conducted almost entirely at a walking pace, that of either man or beast. But the eighteenth century, in transport as in so many other areas, also saw the founding of our modern world.
Rivers have always been a source of wealth - food, power, transport. But for boatmen, under fire from fishermen and millers, and at the mercy of flood and foul weather, it was a haphazard existence. Not much changed until the eighteenth century. Then, with industrial producers demanding ways to transport the fruits of their labourers, artificial waterways were built, which, in their civil engineering and commercial operation, literally laid the groundwork for the rapid construction of railways in the nineteenth century and of motorways in the twentieth.
These canals are now a unique and inti mate resource; still publicly owned - British Waterways is the last vestige of the nationalisations of the 1947 Transport Act - they form the biggest reservoir in the country, able to move water in a similar fashion to the way the national grid moves electricity. They also, of course, move boats and today represent one of the major leisure industries.
It was not always like this. Until the 1960s, the country had turned its back on the canals, their commercial usefulness finally petering out with the advent of motorways. The writing had been on the wall since the arrival of the railways but many canal companies had soldiered on, delivering non-time-critical cargoes. After the Second World War, just as the waterways were nationalised, contracts fell away and canals were abandoned as fetid examples of our antiquated past. Most city dwellers became unaware of their existence as they languished behind high walls and buildings that turned their unsavoury backs to the water.
Today, all that has changed. After 50 years of seeing its role as managing decline, British Waterways is pumping massive investment into its canals and rivers. Earlier this month, it announced a £500 million programme of renovation and innovation, which last week included the reopening of the massive Anderton boatlift in Cheshire, one of my points of pilgrimage down the line. With canalside development in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, London and Manchester, to name only a few of the major ones, we have re-embraced the waterways, seeking their calm and tranquillity in the middle of the blather and dash of urban life.
Canals, then, are no longer just for boatmen and boatwomen. Anglers, walkers and cyclists now co-exist in relative harmony with boaters. But beyond their immediate use, they are starting to play an important part in how we organise our living spaces and how we relate to the past, moulding and shaping it to contemporary needs. Or at least that's my starting thesis, so let's test it to destruction if necessary.
For now though, I'm making the last few tweaks to Stealaway - with its 12ft by 7ft living-room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, it will be my home for the next three months. The engine - the heart of the living machine, not just moving me around but also providing hot water and electricity - has been serviced, the wood-burning stove freshly painted, and supplies stowed away. I'm as ready as I'll ever be for my peaceful voyage of discovery and can almost taste that first beguiling breakfast.
