Bronte

The very same man and boat!! He travels widely (the Thames at Sonning is 70-odd miles from Oxford) but glad that, ten years later, he's still in business.

Might be the same cap too.

I take that back, good subject that Bronte makes. Here he is again, on the Grand Union near Braunston in 2020: He and I nearly came to blows then after he accused me of trying to take pictures through people's (houseboat) windows, and told me to get the [censored] out of there. Not a nice man. Perhaps he's married to the mad woman of Binfield Heath.

Oh dear, you do seem to have a habit of upsetting the locals. I hope you can swim.

I've noticed that you seem to spend an inordinately long time composing your photos, sometimes crouching down or hovering around to try better angles, which could cause the occupant to become suspicious of your motives. In shots with people around, I find it best to take a quick snap and move on.

This one, for instance, is not very good, because the man's face is in shadow.
But at least I achieved it without anyone being too bothered about it.

Not exactly. With 61 years of practice I intuitively know from where to take a picture, and it takes me little time to get there. As well, because on group walks or when a boat, figure or bird is momentarily in the right place there's no time to hover round.

When I was abused by that dear man, my camera had momentarily been pointing at a boat window, but when I explained to him that I was not taking a picture, merely viewing a picture on its screen, he would have none of it. Threatening behaviour is illegal, and he was lucky not to find himself in court.

And for the record, it is perfectly legal to photograph a person, house or anything else in a public place, and this does not require anyone's permission. If this bothers anyone, that's his or her problem.

To have any chance of succeeding in court, you would have needed to switch to video to record his rant. But you're right in saying that it's not illegal to photograph a person in a public place, unless it could be shown that you were harassing him in some way or prying in his window, which I'm sure was not the case in your case.

That is one reason why I wouldn't like to live on a narrowboat, because one has a continuous stream of legs walking past the window, and it must be rather disconcerting when the legs stop and linger and one isn't sure what the owner of the legs is up to.

Anyone living on an upper floor of the building in the background could have seen this from his or her balcony.

No problem with this. I was referring to someone standing directly outside the window of a moored boat. Your actions might be totally innocent (and legal), but could be disconcerting for the person inside. However, he should have accepted your explanation wihout being abusive.

Houseboat dwellers, like some landowners, can easily be as territorial as rabbits.

And rightly so. It's their home.

But not the canal towpath by their boats, nor the public footpaths crossing their land, which others are entitled to use without hindrance, interference or abuse. Any canal boat dweller or landowner unwilling to accept this should make his home elsewhere.