Dullard boaters, rats on string, Thunderbird machines and Sunday, Bloody Sunday #narrowboat #england

It must be said, so I’ll say it. Humans really are not the brightest little lumps of squishy protoplasm wandering the planet. This dullard in particular would probably fail to register at all should he be subject to an IQ test.

The Cardinal has one-way glass in the windows and portholes. Provided that there is no direct sunlight streaming through, I can see out but others cannot see in. Ninety-nine and two-thirds people out of one hundred think that because they can’t see me, I can’t see them. Smoke from the chimney, music on, bow doors open, engine running, you name it, they think that there’s no-one home. This seventeen-second video sums it up.

Blokes pee in the bushes right alongside the Cardinal, dog walkers stand and watch their charges cr*ap on my mooring lines, folk stand and discuss their most intimate of (usually boring) intimates, not knowing that they are but a yard away from a grumpy old git.

This Dilbert let his rat-on-a-string take a dump, carefully bagged it in a white plastic bag – and then clambered down to the fence over the culvert alongside the Cardinal. When he came struggling back up and walked off back to his own boat, sure enough, no white plastic bag in evidence. Not many dog walkers put scooped poop into their pockets, and nor had he. There it is, lovingly bagged against biodegradation, ready to sit there until it’s joined by enough colleagues to block the culvert. Or be swallowed by a lesser-spotted badger, or some such.

Out of his sight, out of his mind. Admittedly, there can’t be a lot of spare room in there, what with his thought (just the one) flying around in circles. Night time – day time! Night time – day time! Night time – day time…

He was a couple of hundred yards away before I could find my passive-aggressive nimby shoes, lace them up and nip out to check my theory.

Sighs.

So many of my species that need eradication, so little DDT.

More usually it is non-boater dog-walkers who don’t want to deal with the output of Frou-Frou’s bowels. I suppose that it is because this chap owns a narrowboat and loves the canals that he went the extra mile (eight paces) to soil the infrastructure rather than litter the towpath.

Behind blue one-way glass I see this sort of thing every day. Here’s something you don’t see every day though. A lorry, reversing at speed along the main west coast railway line.

Tis – twas – up on the embankment where the line crosses the canal, just a hundred and fifty yards or so from where the Cardinal sits at moor. It is one of those lorries with little railway-line wheels that come down on hydraulic rams so that it can skim along at speed. How I wish that I had little wheels that came down similarly, so that I might skim along at speed too. I suppose that they’d have to install a hydraulic pump somewhere though, and I have precious few places where one might bolt such a thing without attracting the wrath of my tailor.

There was another, smaller but similar vehicle that followed it on its mission a few minutes later, but I was too slow with the old Box Brownie for that one. With the daily traffic on that line including Virgin Expresses (long and short), local grunters, the nuclear waste train twice a day and sometimes several steam excursions the antics rather put me in mind of St Trinians.

My name is Amber Spottiswoode, Headmistress of St Trinians, and I claim the reward for the Great Train Robbery…

A truly great classic film, but bugger all really, if truth be told, to do with peculiar yellow vehicles.

…unless, perhaps, that nozzle dangling at the front of the lorry that I saw is for sucking up cretinous dog-poop-scattering boaters?

I can but hope. Approach from behind in a low gear, position the big pipe over the shallow skull, turn up the suction power and – thrrrpppps-plonk – one worthless human lump in the tank, ready for disposal at the Soylent Green factory.

It’s raining here at the moment. I mean Datsun Cogs rain. Stair-rods. Fit to make one consider laying the keel of a new Ark. That sort of rain. The Cardinal is getting a good wash down, although the solar panels will need a squeegee once the rain is done, to remove the Saharan sand or Pensacola Dust or whatever it is that we’re doubtless being treated to this week.

The rain in Spain may be rather plain, but the rain in England is never clean…

So what have I been doiing with myself, aside from watching St Trinianesque railway workers and being passive-aggressive NIMBY with nincompoops?

More marketing for the books AND FOR THE LATEST RELEASE, AVAILABLE ON PRE-ORDER NOW, he said, subtle as a bull shouting in a china shop. Please let ten thousand of your closest friends know, with a share or a tweet, or a note through the letterbox or something. I’d really be ever so &etc, if you did put it about (the word, that is).

😉

You can find them all over on the equally unsubtle “My Books” page in the menu at the top here, FREE samples to read, the works. It’s all very tastefully done.

This afternoon, while the rain drums on the boat? This afternoon I am working on the beginnings of a boaty novella labouring under the title of

‘Miss Giving’s Narrowboat Brothel.’

Yep, you heard it first here, folks.

I hope that you’re all warm and dry and having fun wherever you may be.

I mun away and garner myself an even more dodgy Google history with the researching of brothels and brothel management and brother etiquette. Greek and Roman gods alone know what my history already looks like.

Chini-chin.

Ian H.