Sara Alexi's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-piano-raft"

On Thursday 26th January 2017 my latest book The Piano Raft with be officially released.

I was rather excited to see pre-sales of this book took it straight to No1 on Amazon UK!

The Piano Raft brings me back to the UK and the story sets sail (excuse the pun) in a town called Greater Lotherton in Yorkshire.

To set the scene, here is the synopsis:

The Piano Raft is an unforgettable, heart-warming story about love, a piano and a hand-built raft that will have you enthralled, laughing and sitting on the edge of your seat as you sail (precariously) upon the rivers and canals from Yorkshire to London.

Neil, a disillusioned art student, wakes to find himself drifting down a canal on a raft, accompanied by a small fluffy dog, to the sound of his girlfriend's piano being played by a stranger.

Through the fog of his hangover, he tries to piece together the events of the night before which brought him to this curious and unexpected situation, and to work out what on earth to do next.

The current is carrying him swiftly on towards the capital, where Kim, the piano's owner, has recently started a new life.

As Neil’s journey continues, and whilst trying to conjure the courage to win Kim back, his story captures the hearts and imaginations of the country as locals in the towns he passes and national media alike follow this unlikely hero on his equally unlikely adventure.

How will these extraordinary circumstances challenge and change a man whose life has been stuck in first gear, and who now needs to decide how far he will go for the woman he loves?

The current is swift, and there's no turning back...

I wanted to share with you an excerpt from the story, an encounter Neil has with a homeless man.

‘You all right, laddie?’ croaks a voice, quite near to him, which sounds like it might not be all right itself, it’s so phlegmy and guttural. The voice coughs, a great hacking noise that scares the birds from the hedges on the edge of the towpath.

Neil straightens up, still out of breath, to meet this new stranger, and immediately any concerns for his own wheezing chest are gone. The man before him has grey hair sticking up at all angles, long in some places, short in others. He is not tall but he is very bulky, and he is enveloped in a herringbone tweed overcoat that drops to his ankles. The coat is shiny at the collar and sleeves and blackened around the knees and hips. A few turns of rough string serve as a belt around the waist, finished with a knot. Protruding below the edge of the coat are what look like rubber boots cut to slip over a pair of brogues with no shine left to them at all.

Neil looks back to the man’s face. He has not had a shave recently and his skin is a dirty brown, making it seem tough like leather, the creases permanent. But his eyes are a light blue, and they dance as he looks at Neil and his mouth twitches ready to smile.

‘I thought you were going to keel over then.’ His grating voice is again at odds with the bird calls in the hedge behind him.

‘No, thanks, I’m fine.’ Neil looks down the path and takes a few more deep breaths. He needs to keep moving, to catch up.

‘You lost something?’ The man takes his hands out of his pockets, revealing fraying fingerless mittens. He holds up a cigarette end. ‘Got a light?’

‘I don’t smoke.’

‘Ah, wise, very wise. Nine days out of ten, neither do I. But then a nice dog end presents itself, and I say to myself, why not!’

‘Sorry, but I have to go.’

‘What’s your rush?’

‘My raft.’

‘Raft?’

‘Yes, my Pianoraft.’

‘Oh! You mean that thing with the drawers and the piano on it that all those people were pulling?’

‘Yes, that’s it. Look, I’m sorry but I really have to go … Bye.’

‘Well, bye if you want, but if you’re looking to catch it up you have all the time in the word. Do you have a light?’

‘You already asked that. Why do I have all the time in the world?’

‘Sixteen Locks. Down that way, five miles. It’ll take them a good long time to get through, and that’s if nothing is halfway up, coming the other way. I’ve seen people stuck there up to a day.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. No light, eh?’

‘No, no light.’

The tramp looks longingly at his half cigarette and then returns it and his hands to his pockets and starts to walk the way Neil will be going.

‘A whole day, you reckon?’

‘Have you been through a lock with your raft?’

‘Yes.’

‘Remember how long it took?’

‘Yes.’

‘Times it by sixteen.’

Neil feels all the tension in his shoulders drop and his tight thigh muscles relax. But there is still Fuzzy-Pants.

‘And even walking slowly you’ll be there in two or three hours, no worries.’

She’ll manage – she’ll sleep, most likely.

‘So why are you floating a piano down the canal? You a musician?’

‘Trying to make amends to my girlfriend, Kim. She wanted to move to London, and I wasn’t so sure. This is meant to be a big romantic gesture to say sorry and show how important she is to me.’

‘Don’t blame you, though.’

‘I’m Neil, by the way.’

‘Honoured to meet you, sir. My name’s Quentin.’ With the phlegm cleared from his throat, his voice is distinctive, educated.

‘Don’t blame me for what?’

‘Not much relishing the thought of London.’ He stops to look around; the hills roll away from them on all sides, dotted with trees, fields lined with hedges, cows lying down, chewing their cud.

‘It’s the lack of trees and nature and so on, but it’s also the fear of being sucked in.’

‘Sucked in?’ Quentin takes his hands out of his pockets and looks at his cigarette end. ‘No light, you said?’

Neil ignores the question this time. The cigarette is returned to the folds of the oversized coat.

‘The whole rat race thing, getting up crazy early to run all day and going home late just to afford a house you never spend any time living in.’

‘Ah yes,’ Quentin says, sounding like a wise old sage. ‘The rat race.’

‘You must know what I mean? After all, you’ve opted out of all that?’

‘Opted out – I like that. Yes, I suppose I’ve opted out. So are you saying you want to opt out?’

‘Well, no, not like …’ He is about to say ‘not like you’ but realises that this could sound rude, so he finishes with ‘… not completely.’

‘Well, it has to be complete, else you are still in it,’ Quentin offers, which makes Neil smile.

‘You have a point.’

‘So, you think if you went to London you would get a great job and an expensive house and then run in circles to keep your expensive house. You, the man who is floating to London on a pile of sticks with a piano on top?’

Neil cannot help chuckling; the man is funny. ‘Not immediately, obviously.’

‘So when would you get all that, then?’

‘Well, it sneaks up on you, doesn’t it?’

‘You know what your life is? Your life is merely a combination of the things you are prepared to put up with.’

Neil smiles. It sounds like a joke, but then he runs over the words again.

‘You think?’

‘I know. When the “worst” I would put up with was a detached house, two kids and a wife, that’s what I had. I didn’t want more so I didn’t work to get more, because I was prepared to put up with what I had. I would have taken more if it had been offered for free, but if it required my work then I didn’t want it. The house and family was the “worst” I would put up with. If as a family, for some reason, we ended up in a tiny caravan, I would not have put up with that, so I would have worked to get out, do you see? Our lives are a combination of the worst things we will put up with.’

Now Quentin chuckles as if it is a joke, but Neil is serious.

‘I’ve never thought of it like that.’

‘But Kim wants it.’

‘Then which will you put up with? No London and no Kim? Or London and Kim? Besides, it’s all in your head anyway.’

‘What’s all in my head?’ As Neil walks, he looks at Quentin’s face, at his dancing blue eyes. He exudes charm.

‘The universe is in your head,’ Quentin says.

Well, it’s either charm or insanity.

‘Then I must have a big head,’ Neil jokes and takes his cowboy hat off, and then his jumper to sling it around his hips. The sun is heating up the day. He looks at his companion’s thick tweed coat. ‘Aren’t you hot in that coat?’

‘Hot, cold, all in your head.’

Neil does not answer. He looks ahead, hoping to see signs of Sixteen Locks and his raft, but the canal stretches into the distance, where it lazily wends left and disappears. They continue to walk in silence. Neil listens to the birds in the hedgerows, and he spots a fox slinking along the perimeter of a field with rabbits dotted here and there that nibble the bright green grass. He can see the openings to their burrows, too, all over the field. The fox doesn’t have a chance: the rabbits will be too quick, and they are too close to home.

‘You can be free in a jail cell and lonely in a crowd,’ Quentin growls. He could be a radio newsreader with that voice. ‘Because the universe is in your head.’

‘Hm.’ Neil is still watching the fox, which is sneaking closer to the rabbits. A rabbit freezes: it looks like it will run, but then it carries on eating. ‘You mean you need to look inwardly and get all spiritual?’ Another has its head up now, alert.

‘No!’ Quentin barks loudly and stops walking.
Concerned, Neil turns to face him. Has he offended the old man?

‘You look outward. Outward! If you look inward all you see is yourself! I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.’ He starts to walk again.

The fox makes its move and the rabbits run. The fox runs low and hard but the white tails disappear into the holes one by one, plop plop, plop, leaving the cunning one exposed on the hillside. The predator looks uncertain now and slinks between gorse and rocks back to the shelter of the hedges.

‘How long have you been on the road?’ Neil asks.

‘No idea,’ Quentin grunts.

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I admire people who can write, drawing on the workings of their mind, as I cannot. I have to see and feel and smell the things I describe, and I’ll often research situations, locations and characters.



One such piece of research found me dressed as a Goth, in a feather-trimmed purple dress and a black wig in a small village in Yorkshire. I had an idea for a character, and I wanted to see how people reacted, to better understand the mind-set of my character. As it has turned out I was side tracked and this character’s story is yet to be written.

For no particular reason I found myself heading down to the canal, where I came across a rather odd raft. This misshapen floating pile of sticks had such an impact on me that I had to investigate. The man on board told me he was delivering a piano down to London, on the raft, but he seemed to have no real plan or reason for doing what he was doing - he just seemed to have this vague idea of floating down to London to deliver the remains of a pretty waterlogged and disintegrating piano. I asked who he was delivering the instrument to, thinking that by the time he got to the capital city there was very little chance that whoever the person was would still want it. But it seemed that he had no real recipient for the unplayable instrument. His story was jumbled, but I slowly gathered that he was a performance artist and that he planned to create a puppet theatre on the raft, among other things. I left him to his world but the story of the piano raft had already formed almost in its entirety in my head before I got back to my car, where I pulled off my black wig and wiped away the last traces of my deep purple lipstick. The Goth research would have to wait for another time - I was all fired up with this new story.

Back in my jeans and T shirt I spent the rest of the day walking along the tow path, and later I followed the path further afield on Google maps (Oh bless Google maps!). But what I really needed to know was, what is it like to float for days, live at the pace that the canal flows? How does that affect you?

It is often the way when I have ideas like this, that fate seems to co-ordinate to al-low them to happen. In this case a person I had only recently become friends with happened to mention that she needed to go and visit her mother for a few days, and did I want to stay on her canal boat in central London whilst she was away? I think she was a bit taken aback at the eagerness of my response.

Her vessel was short in length but wider in beam than the standard narrow-boats, and I was thrilled when she handed me the keys and I waved her off as she strode away to catch her train ‘home’.

Initially I was so excited I could hardly stay still inside the craft so I used my energy outside, exploring a wood right there on the other side of the tow path, right in the centre of London! Here I found a pile of fallen branches. Nipping back to the boat I found a saw and I hewed the branches on the spot and carried the logs back to the boat. Most of the houses I have lived in in the past have had real fires and so it was with ease that I stoked the wood burner until it blazed. What I was not used to was the small space on the boat and within half an hour I had all the doors and windows open - it was so hot!

As I got used to living on board I felt myself slow down and I spent a lot of time just watching the way the weather affected the surface of the water, the breeze, the sun, the rain, all stirring the surface in a different way. With no internet and no TV I was in bed at sunset and up again at dawn. Tucked up in my bed I would pull the blinds back just enough so I could watch, unseen, the early morning commuters, legs pumping on bikes, arms swinging as they ran, the early birds keen to get to work, fired up by the pace of London. As the morning passed the attitude changed until, by around ten o’clock all haste had gone and no one was in a hurry. They now walked with a lazy air, looking around them, breathing in the day. As for me there was no need to jump out of bed, because this lifestyle on the boat had no speed to it. When I did gather myself together to go for water, for example, it was a gentle chug along the waterway to the tap at the nearest lock.

As for making any progress in any direction I found that canal boats have a top speed of around 3mph, which is about the same as a leisurely walk. I also found that after putting the engine into neutral on one such trip it took quite a while to slow down if I did not use reverse gear. The weight of the thing kept the momentum going for some considerable time. There was no option but to slow down and go with the flow. I also loved that I could not have many possessions with me - there was room enough for essentials and that was it. Life seems so much simpler without a lot of stuff around you, and there was little, if anything, that I missed.

I was concerned at first about managing the locks, but I needn’t have worried. Everything is easy when you know how, and the canal boaters are a friendly and helpful bunch who are always ready with a wave or an offer of help. People use the canal for a variety of reasons, but with a commonality that draws them together. I became very familiar with the birds in the local area, as well as some of our shyer land mammals. It amazed me how the boat was absorbed into the landscape after mooring in some lonely section for the night, and if I awoke gently and peeped through windows I was rewarded by sights of inquisitive animals and equally unafraid birds.

It was not a shock to learn that there is no speeding life up on a canal boat. There are no short cuts to anything and whether you want to or not the way of life requires you to be in the present moment. I found the slowing down process very seductive, I found the immediacy of nature very alluring. If I was cold then sawing the logs got me warm even before I burnt them. I no longer put on makeup; I borrowed a massive misshapen jumper from my absent host’s wardrobe and in all I was very, very happy.

My stay on board lasted longer than I originally planned, and when the day came to leave I found I just wasn’t ready. I stayed another day and then another. In fact I stayed on a few days after my new friend returned. She announced that she was going to move on with her life and sell the boat, and naturally I was interested and even checked my bank account. But it seems that all things do not conspire to help me all the time. Could she possibly wait until the spring, so I could save up, get a loan, sell my right arm? It was only a few weeks later that she sold my beloved little boat to another seeker of the slow way of life who, unlike me, had done their running into work early every morning for enough days to have a stack of cold hard cash.

My time on board made writing The Piano Raft such a joy! I felt I was reliving my time on the water and meeting some of the lovely people I met all over again.

I feel sure I’ll spend time on the canals in the future, and it’s an experience I would recommend to anyone!

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