Traditional sailing ship with anchor and flowers

The rigging's finished at last, all forty-one threads of it, pulled tight with the tweezers you left on my bench the week you went north. The hull is pine from the Margate ferry's broken stern, sanded until it went the colour of weak tea. I've set her on a bed of Medway sand in the green bottle from the Rose and Crown, and tonight I'll pour the wax, because Harker wants his barge loaded by six and the tide won't wait for my hands to stop shaking.

You'll say a ship in a bottle is what men make when they've no sea to go to. Perhaps. But I walked down past the lock at Strood on Sunday and watched the bargemen lean on their poles with the sails furled and the red cloth pulled over the cargo, and I thought, there, that's a ship that doesn't need the open ocean. It only needs to get where it's going, slow and steady, with the water doing the work.

I've folded a note small enough to slide under the mainmast before I seal her. It says what I couldn't say on the platform, with the guard blowing his whistle and you pretending you weren't crying. Don't read it on the tow path. Wait until the river opens wide past Gravesend, then break the neck on the bow and let the water take her, the way it took everything else I ever loved.

Yours, as ever, Tom