First crossing

The last ferry leaves at ten to midnight and nobody on it has chosen to be there. I have worked its deck for thirty years and I can tell you who will be aboard before the ramp comes down: two nurses, a baker, a man with a bicycle and whoever missed the bridge.

The crossing takes nineteen minutes. That is long enough to drink a cup of tea and too short to fall asleep, which is the whole trouble with it.

Nineteen minutes is long enough for tea and too short for sleep, which is the whole trouble.

What the notebook was for

I began writing things down in 1986 because the mate asked me to keep count of the cars. The count is still at the front of every page, in the form cars / foot / cycles, and after it comes whatever else happened:

• the weather, in one word;
• who spoke, and to whom;
• anything left on board.

A note on the text

The nine crossings are printed as they were written. Only the names have been changed.