The most offensive boat name?
In our six months of cruising the inland waterways we’ve passed an awful lot of boats. As we are now into holiday season we are seeing more and more on the move leaving us to marvel at some of the names people give their craft. We’ve noticed that boat names fall into a number of camps. There are boats with female names; “Lily Ann”, “Mary Jane”, “Salome”, etc; boats with male names, “Bob” (possbily my favourite), “Alfred”, “King Arthur” and “Gordon Bennett”; boats named after birds, “Sandpiper”, “Heron” with “Kingfisher” being the most common name of all craft on the waterways, with over 300 registered boats sharing that moniker. Some boats are named to reflect the new lifestyle anticipated by the new owners, “Winding Down”, “Adventure Before Dementia”, “Moor 2 Explore” “Just Us” and “Are We There Yet?” Some boats nod toward favourire bands or songs, we’ve spotted “Smoke on the Water”, “Penny Lane”, “Lady Kar Gar” , the very niche “Lord Byron’s Maggot” and a couple of “Comfortably Numbs”. There are boats with mythical names, “Pegasus”, “Valkyrie”, “Merlin”, “Poseidon” and of course our own “Dædalus”, the mythical architect of the Minotaur’s labyrinth and father of Icarus. We passed an “Icarus” a few months back.
And then there are the “funny” / “original” names that quite frankly make me wince. We’ve seen loads of “Narrow Escapes” a smattering of “Knot so Fasts” a couple of “Moor Often than Knots” several “Slow Gins” and more “Dreamcatchers” than I care to remember. But it’s the “Eh?” category of boat names or the “What on earth were they thinking?” class that make you ponder people’s sense of humour. There are boats out there called “Knockalees”, “Fenakapan” “Muchgigglin” “Ship Happens” “A Frayed Knot” and “Equus Plod-a-Cuss.” A sense of humour is a personal thing, so I absolve all the owners of the craft named above.
But there’s one boat name that has offended me more than any other. One for whose name I can never forgive the owners or indeed the sign-writer responsible for accepting the commission to paint it on both sides of the boat. It sits in a vomit-inducing class all of its own. A name that on sight triggered a gut-wrenching reaction; a surge of upwardly moving bile that left a nasty, steely taste in my mouth and whose image offends mine eye and is burned into my retina, possibly until the end of days:
“Lazy Day’s” or to give her full name “Lazy Day’s On the Caldon Canal.” Grrrr… grocers apostrophe’s eh?
