They took their sixteen year old son with them.
It has been the wettest June since records began.
I am a patient man in many ways but I would have been driven to a frenzy of boredom on a canal boat within, oh about three minutes. When I knew they had departed on their holiday with the rain so heavy I couldn't see the space on my drive where my company car used to be parked it seemed to me that, for once, my lot at home was better than someone else's in so many, many ways.
I tried to imagine their conversation on board. "Look a moorhen. Look another one. Look another one." Occasionally it might get really exciting and become "Look a duck. Look another one. Look another one."
Then, "Dad I've left my iPod at home."
"Well, walk back home and get it because we've only moved .3 metres in the last three hours at the maximum cruising speed of 0.1 kms per hour and even if it takes you five hours we will only have moved 0.5 metres and that water vole has just overtaken us".
Imagine the relentless chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug of the Perkins diesel engine like a fiendish form of Chinese water torture, the dripping of water from the decks and the moorhens making their awful moorhen racket. And then, because of the rain, the descent of mega-boredom. No sitting on the warm, sunny English canal banks with a pint of the landlord's foaming Best Badger's Piddle - no it's slightly warm tomatoes and butter that is not quite solid from the fridge that isn't quite cold enough with bread that might just have a touch of mildew whilst being cooped up in a floating pencil box. Then there would be the excursions in the relentless rain. "I'm just walking to the other end of the boat. I'm back". "I'll walk to the other end. Oh I'm back". The most excitement would come from the wash of big motor crusiers that snarl past with their 40000 hp engines bubbling away at minimum revs but managing to achieve 45 knots and a bow wave that looks like a particularly spectacular Severn Bore. And then the evenings, oh God the evenings. Fitful light from two 40W bulbs that glow intermittently with the pulse of the engine, card games with the sixteen year old who has just discovered that he can't recharge his iPod from the boat's electrical sockets and bedtime at 9pm because there is just nothing left to do. And still the bloody moorhens will not keep quiet. And there are still six more nights to go. And it won't stop raining.
Well unemployment is nothing like that except it is. I was never too hot on logic and syllogisms. Unemployment is about being patient, stoic and knowing that there are six more metaphorical nights to go in this floating shoe box in the rain and the maximum speed you are allowed is 0.1 job rejections per day. Still no moorhens so that's a good thing, a very good thing. I find it hard some days to find things to do because of the restrictions on money and travel but there are ways and means to keep going and keep interested without going to bed at 9pm. It could have been worse, they might have gone camping. Let me tell you about the time we went camping in the Dordogne, oh you have to go do you, so soon? I'll call you shall I?
No comments:
Post a Comment