My dad lives on a boat. Despite the earrings, tattoos, missing teeth and bare feet, he is not a pirate – just a man with an expensive divorce and a public sector job, living in one of the most unaffordable cities in the UK.
This month, his mooring in Oxford was hit by the kind of flood described as “once in 100 years”. Except the same thing happened 10 years ago. And three years before that. All along the same stretch of water.
One morning, before he was lent some waders, the river was so high that he had to leap from his boat, wearing nothing but a pair of jelly shoes and his pants, and push his bike through the flood water to higher ground. There, thankfully, he could get dressed for work in the clothes he had stuffed into his rucksack. The next day, he was completely flooded in, with a ukulele, three potatoes and some old chair legs to burn if things got really desperate.
It is unsettling to have that silty brown tideline creep up the skirts of your city. To walk down streets that have turned suddenly into rivers. To watch the water line slide unstoppably over benches and garden walls and floorboards.
While swathes of Oxford were under water, I went out with a researcher, Jamie Clarke, and interviewed people living in the houses over the river from my father’s boat, including a 91-year-old woman called Betty and our MP, Anneliese Dodds. Betty was in the same house she had been in 10 years ago, when Jamie had first interviewed her. Did she, I wonder, think the flooding had anything to do with the climate crisis? Of course she did.
It was sobering to hear the way people living inside bricks and mortar were preparing for this sort of weather to happen more often and more violently. Perhaps, after all, it is better to lose your house and end up living on a boat, like my father, than to have your concrete foundations sunk into the middle of a floodplain. Unless we all want to start heading off to work in our jelly shoes and pants.
• Nell Frizzell is the author of Holding the Baby: Milk, Sweat and Tears from the Frontline of Motherhood
