Mark Knofler is the single handed sailor. He can't sleep and is wandering Greenwich at 2 am and the scene unfolds. The mother is pushing a baby carriage for some unkown reason on one side, the "College of War" is on the other and between them are the sad sights of two great ships held down in chains.
The line "What do you call this thing" is indeed spoken by a man sliding by on a barge, not by the man on the river bank in Greenwich. The river is rolling away in the night (the Thames is tidal at this point) so the barge is slipping away downriver. A boat going downriver shows its starboard side to Greenwich, so from Greenwich you would see a green light on the boat.
Perhaps Mark Knofler is thinking of going it alone rather than staying with the band at this point, perhaps he's conttemplating the fact that great success can end in concrete graves or, worse empty tourist-trail popularity.
In any case he is the single handed sailor in dry-dock land who could say that these boats are the pride of london but he just wanders off away from the scene in the dark without resolving anything.
Mark Knofler is the single handed sailor. He can't sleep and is wandering Greenwich at 2 am and the scene unfolds. The mother is pushing a baby carriage for some unkown reason on one side, the "College of War" is on the other and between them are the sad sights of two great ships held down in chains.
The line "What do you call this thing" is indeed spoken by a man sliding by on a barge, not by the man on the river bank in Greenwich. The river is rolling away in the night (the Thames is tidal at this point) so the barge is slipping away downriver. A boat going downriver shows its starboard side to Greenwich, so from Greenwich you would see a green light on the boat.
Perhaps Mark Knofler is thinking of going it alone rather than staying with the band at this point, perhaps he's conttemplating the fact that great success can end in concrete graves or, worse empty tourist-trail popularity.
In any case he is the single handed sailor in dry-dock land who could say that these boats are the pride of london but he just wanders off away from the scene in the dark without resolving anything.