Noel’s flood is a joke by Geoffrey Chaucer in his Miller’s Tale – part of the Canterbury set. It’s invented by the young wife of an older carpenter, and her would-be lodger lover to persuade him to set up barrels hanging from his roof rafters into which they should climb at night, to be sure of staying afloat as and when the waters rose. Needless to say it all goes wrong and one of the oldest stories in the language ends in ribald hilarity –1380s style.
I don’t remember not having a sense of humour as a kid but I distinctly recall a sense of scepticism when I first read the story as a teenager. “Barrels, in the roof, to navigate flood waters that might be 20ft deep? I don’t think so,” my young navigation-aware person inwardly scoffed (before I had got to the really good bits). And surely as a carpenter would he not know the basics of boat-building? Even if it was just a punt, square in section, made of deal planks it would be better than a stupid barrel. Whoever heard of a barrel as a boat?
Of course I was doing that aware-naive thing and not really getting the point of the story, but for some reason I used to think about a flooded world a lot in my pre-teens and I had already decided that whether it was of Noah-size or Noel-size the trick would definitely be to have a good boat.
So I spent hours working on scenarios, like how would you navigate in a world underwater? Somehow dimly I worked out that the contours of depth and height would remain the same, it would just be the sea level which changed. When I joined Sea Cadets I paid acute attention to stuff like using a lead and line and learned how to read charts as soon as I could. The lead and line though, the basic compass, positioning by seamarks, landmarks and the stars – all these seemed to me to be great skills to acquire especially if you find yourself in waters which have suddenly risen.
Of course I was actually just interested in basic seamanship of the kind that allowed any sailor with half an ounce of nous to get into a strange river system, predict tidal range and pick his way through the shoals using the most rudimentary of tools.
Since those early days of wanting to understand navigation I’ve been blessed with a life that includes some sailing and it’s a fun exercise to use a lead weight on the end of a boathook and pick your way up a strange river channel – sounding ahead and either side to see where the channel twists, and shelves.
But against that backdrop has been a life of global warming, ice melt, sea level rise and a more ominous threat of floods. Can’t stop it if it happens of course, can we? But the one thing I hope we won’t be doing is hanging barrels in the roof.

 

Getafix – hoped-for wizard of navigation… master of the position line and running fix

Image: And while we’re at it…

How many fans of the old Gaul Getafix – cartoon druid from the Asterix comic book series, totally failed to get the drugs pun in his name and instead hoped (like your editor when young) that he was some kind of wizard of navigation; master of the position line and running fix, who at any moment (this being the 1970s) was about to demonstrate this power in a maritime graphic novel of splendour, swapping golden sickle for golden sextant? Yet alas all he did was to keep on serving up his woodoo soup!