A life aquatic?
For years my wife Kate and I have flirted with the idea of living aboard a narrowboat. Not a long boat (that’s got oars like the Vikings’ preferred vessel for pillaging) and not a barge (that carries freight) but rather a narrowboat - a canal boat less than 7ft (2.1m) wide with a maximum length of 72ft (22m) and steered with a tiller, rather than a wheel.
In 1976, at age thirteen, I went on a formative “third-year” school activity trip. Whilst today’s students go trekking in the Dolomites, scuba diving in Bali or skiing at Val d'Isère, our choices at Alec Hunter High were a little more prosaic. I had choices like: two nights camping at Jaywick Sands or three days dinghy sailing at Bradwell-on-Sea (just a few yards from the nuclear power station) which is where I travelled the 29 miles in the school mini-bus to suffer sea-sickness, sunburn and heat-stroke - 1976 was a very droughty, heat-wavey kind of a year. On returning to school it was the more affluent pupils who had been on the week-long “canal cruise” who came back full of it. Full of talk of winding holes, lock-gates, windlasses, aquaducts, Findus curries, elsan and canalside pubs where the teachers nightly necked a pint or three (of beer, not elsan.)
So much was the enthusiasm for the trip, something rather incredible happened - by today’s standards something nigh on impossible. The teacher who had organised the official school canal cruise, chartered a ten-berth narrowboat for a week during the summer holidays and offered the nine other places to any pupil who wanted to go along with him on an unofficial “school” trip. Different times, eh?
And I was one of the pupils who went. I don’t recall much detail other than the fact that we left from Braunston on a Willow Wren hire boat and had the time of our lives. Somewhere there’s a picture of us all standing atop the boat at Foxton Locks in Leicestershire - damned if I can find it though. I loved the active nature of the trip, being outdoors, working as a team to get through the countless locks as quickly as possible and, just turned fourteen, downing my first pint of bitter shandy.
And I did the same for the next four or so summer holidays that followed. I saved up the £60 cost of the fortnight long trip from my various jobs, serving in a greengrocers, hoeing sugar beet and picking peas on the farm. In 1979 I started dating one Katrina (aka Kate) Daines and in 1980 I introduced her to the canals. We went with an ever growing bunch of teachers and friends a couple of times before we married in 1984 and a couple of times after.
Years later, in 1995, when working for National Sales at NatWest, I went on a team building weekend - sailing in the Solent Channel. I had to join the bank’s Sailing Club before setting sail on The Surveyor of Hamble on which I was very, very seasick in a force 8 wind whilst the “team” roared with laughter at me looking fragile, grey and miserable. A few months later, however, I started receiving The NatWest Bank Sailing Club’s Newsletter and was bemused to read a report by the Inland Waterways Division. The newsletter announced that the “sailing” club owned two narrowboats, The Pride of Lothbury and The Rose of Lothbury (41 Lothbury was the bank’s HQ at the time) and that they were available for hire to members - at about half commercial rates. So in 1995, after a ten-year hiatus, Kate - expecting our first child - and I hired Pride and rediscovered the canals. During that trip we moored up at Stratford-upon-Avon, went to the RSC to see Romeo & Juliet returning to the boat for interval drinks - we were moored so close to the theatre.
After I’d left the bank I kept up my membership of the club and when our daughters Lia and Eve were five and three we took them for two canal holidays in 2000. It was brilliant, they saw herons, mink, kingfishers, ducks and ducklings, geese and goslings, swans and cygnets, moorhens and coots with their chicks. They saw no telly, walked miles through some glorious English scenery and we got to spend some real quality time with them. And so our love of the canals grew and grew with every passing trip, many of which we shared with friends and family, The Crisps, The Poultons, The Weirs, The Winns, The Carpenters, The Foleys and Kate’s Mum & Dad.
Every trip seemed idyllic and each and every time through our rose-tinted sunglasses we wistfully talked about how lovely it would be to one day move aboard a narrowboat to lead a more aquatic life.