Young and broke in the 1970s, I spent strenuous weekends with the volunteers of the Waterway Recovery Group, whose devotion restored stretches of canal ignored by haughty government - Stratford, Basingstoke, Peak Forest. We cleaned ooze and removed old bedsteads from locks, pointed brickwork, mixed concrete. The group’s devotion in that recessionary and heritage-blind decade can be measured by the fact that they bought their JCB digger with several million Green Shield Stamps from groceries.

Their passionate, beery enthusiasm was far from fashionable. Sunshine package holidays were newish, and crawling along a narrow ditch in iffy weather was understood as a pleasure by relatively few. But they were right, the canal anoraks, and now are vindicated. They helped to save, for an age of leisure seekers, the legacy of the 18th-century “navigators”, a rough, brawling, sweating horde whose shovels dug our matchless network of narrow canals for commerce, and whose laborious stamping-down of clay “puddle” keeps them watertight to this day (and satisfyingly frustrating to developers who try to fill them in).

We need them now. In an age of rush they force us below 5mph: in a world of plastic shopfronts they let us glide through the fascinating industrial backyards of dull towns, reflecting on change.

There is a soothing quality in their lovely brick arches and enduring iron bridges. Gliding through meadows far from roads or under them is the lovely antithesis of all things restless and modern.

Above all, after all the nannying and prohibition of modern life, you get to work real locks: wind the handle, shift hundreds of tonnes of water, open the balance-beam bridges. Canalling, slow and damp and beautiful and gently physical, is the cure for modern life. Good to know we’ve recognised it.

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