enfield

2/06/26

‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’ is the newsletter of signed artist and traveller Catrin Vincent, formerly the front-woman of the band Another Sky. Subscribe for news about my first solo record, touring dates and reflections on life in a van and a boat.

This part of town gets its own title. Enfield, perhaps my favourite place so far, besides Hackney Marshes. Meridian Water had a place in my heart too, but a ‘The Last of Us’ kind of place - long dystopian walks across motorways with dust billowing in my face, carrying heavy tesco bags across the North Circular, the most heartbroken I’ve ever been.

Gunpowder country park. Horse riding, fencing, a creature screeching in the distance. Osier Marsh - grass snakes, and ‘teal’, Britain’s smallest ducks. Silver birch and willow trees everywhere. And Enfield lock looks like something out of tomb raider. It’s waiting for me.

A dead willow tree lies fallen on its side, gnarly roots like fingers reaching with their last breath. A cuckoo sounds for hours in the distance - hours. I want to follow it, but it starts raining.

When I was eighteen, I don’t think I saw this for myself, at all. Didn’t feel capable. But here I am, a studio in a crypt, living on a narrowboat on the outskirts of London. I have done eighteen miles in the past eight months. Lived everywhere, or nowhere, rather. ‘No fixed address’.

At eighteen years old, I probably thought I’d be married and have kids by now. No, I think I didn’t see myself getting this far.

At the Crypt, I open up the song I wrote when Covid hit and I recorded everyone banging pots outside of their window ‘for the NHS’. I can hear so much pain in that song. And I feel so much gratitude that I could leave that pain behind me, in that song.

On the wall behind the speakers, there’s a book of James Taylor songs. A memorial photo of an uncle. Laura Cannell’s pendants, the monkey-toy from the kebab shop we used to lovingly called ‘Dad’s’…the ever-shifting ‘we’, the amalgamations of musicians and bands that grace the Crypt with group-think and music that could only be made with connection. And there is always more.

And there’s the Chinese charm Lilly brought back once, blessing the studio. A true-tone harmonica. I can’t remember whose. A costume plague-mask hanging next to the big yellow fisherman’s coat that looks like it belongs on the movie set of It.

Everyone has left parts of themselves here. The Crypt has become a living museum, it’s true. But life has grown around it.

I listen to a playlist, ‘Brave Catrin’, and remember when I wrote the lyrics to Brave Face, not living by my own words at all back then. I think I was trying to write myself into it. It took seven years to truly live by them, but I finally did.

I think about the word ‘traveller’, and think about how humans evolved to travel long stretches on foot. I think about how this way of living is in my blood, probably in everyone’s. And I think about the music I’m making now, and every time I thought it would be best to stop making it, which has been most of the time.

And I think about what it took to shut that voice up. Years of therapy, probably. Or I’ll always be fighting it. Everything is both infinite and complex, either and or.

In the past eight months, I think about every time I had to move the boat in the pouring rain and try and steer it against the wind, all by myself. I think about all the tricky locks I could probably map out for someone else’s benefit, now. I think about London Bridge, and train stations. I think about Storytime, and the train sounds above Enid Street Tavern.

And I think about standing on nature reserves in the midlands in the pouring rain, too, my little gazebo with David Attenborough’s face on. I think about how I had to take a leap of faith to leave that, and how it paid off. I could have let my world get so much smaller. Instead, I stepped into another.

And I think of Maya Angelou’s words -

‘have enough courage to trust love one more time and always one more time.'

Blue Bucket Finds:

This Substack is named after Sufjan Steven’s ‘Blue Bucket Of Gold’, a song about the Blue Bucket myth. Kids wandered off from a mining camp in Oregon and came back with their blue bucket filled with gold, but nobody could figure out where they had found the gold, or find it again. So let me indulge you in some things from my blue bucket.

Reading

Still ‘Love Is A Mixtape’.

Listening to