Stepping from the jetty to the rowing boat I feel both shift. Unable to go back or go over I doth bestride the Thames like a Colossus. The river flows below my legs but time has stopped and I am caught on the prongs of a ‘situation’. 

A third party looking on - from a safe distance to avoid being involved - is pretending not to notice, is studying clouds in a cloudless sky; is trying to look like he’s solving complex equations behind his eyes, to look like he’s enjoying an inner world, a richer world far from the World of Events - but this third party is fooling no-one. HE IS HOOKED. 
“Any second now…” We both think, both thinking how odd it is to react to such things as if we were both not involved. Is it to better relish the schadenfreude of my own predicament? 
“You idiot.” - he / we / I think - “It’s like you have decided to try and balance on an icecube; In a Pimms; In Covent Garden in summer at Pimms ‘o’clock; And your mother's in town.” We are brutal to ourselves. 

We want to be able to say “aquaplane” but the boat “bobs” - “bobs!” “Bobs” further from the dock. We also cannot call these “tectonic shifts”; we cannot say Africa and Europe inch further apart, but the result is the same and the Colossus is deformed: be-lunge-ing the Thames. Rather than thrusting my arms out for balance, panache, to clutch at railings or a Samaritan to drag down with me, I go straight to my pockets. I try to throw both wallet and phone a pathetically short distance onto the pontoon - yes pontoon - but that word ‘pontoon’ does something and I pontoon the phone and wallet: they land glancingly on the pontoon, the phone edging over, its camera eyeing up the distance to the water like a suicide preparing. After a life of pockets and prodding who can blame it? 

A deck-full of gawpers on the Yarmouth Belle wave point laugh yell and gawp in passing. Their wake rocks the boat marginally closer and with grunting and pops the Colossus be-squats, knees squeaking in protest, never so misused as now - a proxy for a workbench clamp - and pulls the boat in a fraction more. But the bobbing boat and pontoon are no closer to a meaningful relationship; the wallet longing to insert cards seeks a gap in the pontoon; the phone longs to lose signal in the bed of the river’s soft sludge; the Colossus’s days are surely past whether it acknowledges it or not.  My reflection and I lock eyes between our shaking legs and realise we have sat in goose poo. 

The river flows on...