An Inspectre Calls #narrowboat #boating #boatsthattweet

Yesterday, when all my tribbles seemed so far away, a gas-qualified Boat Safety Scheme Inspector called – and a very nice chap he was too.

Mark from M & L Canal Services is the chap.

Yesterday – this probably being the reason why all of my tribbles had taken themselves far away – was also cold, lashing down with rain and blowing a hefty 40mph+ wind through the willows. Yes, lovely indeed for a day when all of the covers would have to be off and some poor chap would needs must crawl around into the gas locker and the engine bay and wotnot.

Happy, very happy, to report that Cardinal Wolsey passed muster without hiccough or itch, and we are now – or we will be when the paperwork is done and the “the online” updated – certified until Feb of the Ruary of 2024.

I shall be hanging the Cardinal’s fresh certificate on the wall next to mine.

He’s officially safe and I’m officially sane.

[Although, it must be noted, the Cardinal’s certificate is more recent than is mine.]

Safe and sane, when you think about it, is more, much more, than may be said for England at the moment. Tomorrow, in case you had forgotten, is the day when Her Majesty’s Sheople get to choose between voting for the various parasitic-personages and hyena-parties of:

something nasty that dangles off the U.S.A.’s arse;

something that ought, by rights, be sitting next to a garden pond with a little wheelbarrow and a fishing pole;

Typhoid McMary – who, being self-declared McForeign and actively campaigning to have nowt further to do with England ought by rights not be elegible to stand for office in Westminster;

and some other blank metropolitan quarter-wit who is green or liberal or both or something and wants us all to have a gender-fluid unicorn each because emissions, yeah, innit, yeah, gimme a skinny latté and an oyster-and-cress baguette with silver sprinkles.

They’ve all (apart from Sturgeon, who utterly despises the English) promised us the earth of course but, silly me, given that in my lifetime they’ve delivered da nada, naff all, total sodski apart from the current monumental mess, why the hell would I believe one word out of their mouths this time. That was a rheorical question, so no question mark.

We’ve voted and voted and voted until we’re blue in the face and what we’ve ended up with is this lot. Why would anyone imagine that voting again for someone from the same political, social and “intellectual” puddle would produce a different result this time?

Beats me.

There is, sadly, no “None of the above” box on our ballot papers. Would that there were.

Ho hum. Ho humski.

I don’t have a television aboard the Cardinal (or anywhere else for that matter – I don’t even have an “anywhere else”).

I refuse to pay money to the B.B.C., a once-great organisation that is now so infested with ideologues that even Rentokil would turn down the contract to clean them up.

You can’t watch television – or even live broadcasts over the interwebnets – in England without paying £154.50 per year to the marxist-feminista-politically”correct”-climate-shrieking cause.

Rather splendidly, not having a “Big Brother” screen in my home does mean that I can (and have) mightily reduce my exposure to the nonsense. All of the nonsense.

Boing. Boing boing boing. Time for Florence, said Zebedee.

Have I mentioned that the Cardinal passed his B.S.S. inspection yesterday?

That I am chuffed about.

Now, to begin saving up for the Canal & River Trust Boat Licence (which has gone up by 20% in the past four years, in stark, stark contrast to my pension!)…

That licence, sadly, I cannot opt out of.

At least, not until after the bloody revolution.

Dream on, Hutson, dream on.

Chin-chin.

Ian H.