So what do you do when you get divorced and sell the family home? You can either be a limp-wristed, pussy-whipped ladyboy (if its possible to upset more people with so few words, let me know how) and get a nice little pied-a-terre in Tooting with your share of the sale (cos in and around Lundun, ya ain’t gonna get much more), ORRRRR… you can man-up, get in touch with naycha and live… on a BOAT!!! Yup, a boat. Wot floats. Hopefully. Because although you get a meagre bricks’n’mortar property for a shit-load of money, you can, quite literally, buy the best fucking boat you ever did saw, for about 25% of that money. Mooring is cheap, costs very low and you can either stay put in one place f’rever, or you can move around. Within limits.

And we worked out some of those limits on Thursday. Quite a few, in fact.

Because we went ‘up north’ to pay the Boatman a visit.

He’d picked up the boat in the Midlands, cos that’s where they made it, and it was in a marina on the canal system. The Grand Union system which comes all the way to London enabling you to have a Hammersmith/Kingston/Putney address for bargain money. And in the intervening 4 weeks he’d got as far south as… The Midlands. But a different part. More southerly. Ish. In fact he was in Milton Keynes. So up we went.

The first thing you notice is a distinct lack of concrete. They’ve completely ruined the area around the canal by making it all green and grassy and tree-lined and, what some would call ‘beautiful’ even though there’s not a multi-storey car park for miles.

And the boat. Wow. It is magnificent and inside is simply wonderful with bedrooms and bathrooms and showers and a fitted kitchen and a barge pole (see above) and absolutely everything you need, but probably nicer. And its spacious.

The downside of which is that all that ‘space’, when translated to the outside, makes it twice as wide as every other boat on the canal. And at 22 metres long, let’s just say that it doesn’t handle like a speedboat. In fact, it doesn’t really handle at all, it just kind’a drifts, very slowly but at 38 tonnes, rather brutally, through the water. Which would not be much of a problem. If there weren’t other boats around or if the bridges, at approximately every 200 yards, weren’t approximately 9 inches wider than this boat. And of course, when you own a boat which is about half the width of the canal, you’re never going to be the most popular man on the water. Though fortunately, The Boatman was never the most popular man anywhere and so remains oblivious to the abuse which would have Captain Ahab in tears.

To be continued…

Happy Saturday

A xxxx