The story of how I found myself in a rowing boat, intensely following a piece of rubbish floating in the river Thames for 15 miles, is going to take some telling. It begins at the Museum of London where I worked as an advisor on a sound art installation, Linked, by the artist Graeme Miller.¹ This was a trail that ran alongside the M11 link road in Hackney, the site of the biggest anti-road protest Britain had ever seen. The trail was made up of oral testimony from people who had lost their homes in the process of the motorway construction, broadcast from lampposts in the streets alongside the new road. At certain points on the walk you listened to tracks at specific locations using audio equipment borrowed from local libraries, a little like the museum audio guides that most people are familiar with, but used in the outside landscape.