The Things You See Sometimes On T’Canals

I’ve seen some horrors, but generally it’s great. You get to see Ingerlund’s rump end, the “back garden” view. It puts all of the Neanderthal rejects abounding – and even those ladies using the towpath up above Cholmondeston Lock (and right in front of the Cardinal) as their toilet – into perspextive.

In almost the same way that you never see baby pigeons you almost never see baby boats, but this one cruised past a few days ago. It needs a hug, a dish of warm diesel, and a comfortable basket to sleep in.

GooseAir is a holiday company that has yet to get off the ground, although their pilots are in training. Please to m’excuse and accept mon applebogies for the quality of these phomatographs of their Flight School, taken necessarily at t’extremes of t’range of t’pocket t’rocket t’zoom.

…and then later, after lots of frantic radio calls of ‘Simon? Where the hell are you, Simon?’ and ‘Close up, Delphine, there’s room enough in your formation to lay a ruddy egg’ and ‘Fighters spotted angels twelve three ack emma pip pip gin for tiffin and a big pot of minty-fresh moustache wax to anyone who volunteers to take the lead’…

GooseAir are based at Hurleston Reservoir but are regularly disturbed – at least once every twenty years – when C&RT inspectors arrive to check the reservoir’s slumping sides. They then take off en masse to fly over neighbouring areas emptying their bowels. The geese, that is, not…

Although…

Anyway.

A lot of the stuff wot one doth see depends upon when it are that one is ight and abight. My schedule’s gorn raggy this yar but ‘early’ still features quite a lot. We had our first ice of the season a few days ago (only frosts before that, although technically I suppose…), discovered when I rolled off the bows in polyester onesie and curlers, fag ash flying, to squeegee the solar panels and found myself – to use the nautical term – thwarted.

Speaking of cold, I notice that despite their unequivocable “Energy Costs Help” promises (documented on double-ewes gov dot ewe K), and all others having already received their portions of the (fake, value-free, printed willy-nilly) money, there is nothing in place – other than a politician’s promises – to pay same to the four hundred thousand or so of or in households in Ingerlund that are not directly connected to Tory Chums Power Company Ltd. One can’t help but wonder why – it couldn’t possibly be that this scheme is just (yet another) money-laundering monumental fiddle moving dosh from taxpayer coffers to Eton & Rugby Alumni accounts, could it?

Quelle surpreese. Knock me down with a feather. Cover me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians. And other expressions of “not really surprised”. 🙂 As well as being afforded a grand view of the backside of England, when on a boat (or any alternative home) you also get a grand view of every politician’s backside. The MP for this neighbourhood – Edward Timpson – was thrown out of The Useless & Ignorant Self-Serving Idiots Club when I mentioned to the Chairman (over pudding during a recent Members-Only Dinner) that Dear Eddie simply doesn’t even bother to answer his constitutents’ enquiries. In a Representive Democracy he maintains himself, apparently, as a democracy of One.

Eddie was shown the door (and the binary workings of the handle explained to him, once again).

There are few if any trains running this weekend, a planned strike by Railway Vehicular Velocitation Controllerists having been cancelled too late for Management to cancel their own attendance at a wine-tasting in a vineyard*.

*A “wine-tasting in a vineyard” is much akin to a piss-up in a brewery, but is a managerial-level (only) event. Generally neither event is organised well.

Just to prove my blunt (I no longer have a ‘point’) a train clattered past just as I typed that…

Hey ho, ho hum, and hum diddle dee. Look at me; I’m a tree.

There are worse views to be had from the side-hatch, although it should be noted that there are few to no elephants roaming in this section of the countryside. This is only to be expected when endive is no longer endemic, and Edward Timpson is an Arsenal Villa are doing awfully well this season, are they not?

Now that it’s damned near officially Winter, autumnal colours are beginning to donnymate the landscape. How I love the cerulean sheen of a shivering pensioner.

Yestereve was Bonfire Night. I cerebralated by watching the film ‘V For Vendetta’ for the very first time (I’ve led a sheltered life, the Institute had a well-constructed roof). A most appropriate film on quite the most appropriate date. Lovely stuff. If wishes were ships I’d be bobbing about on the Thames watching those particular fireworks.

Couldn’t see any displays from these moorings, but ugly memories of The Somme were invoked by the distant glows and the gut-tickling semi-subsonic wallops of what could only have been small nukes being set off somewhere – probably Crewe, a not unusual occurrence there whatever the date.

There are (still) storm clouds on the horizon. I doubt that they belong to us, we probably rented them from some French corporation or are just storing them for someone. That’s the shame of England. Once upon a fine old time (not really, most of it was unnecessarily rotten for most people, just as now) we squatted atop twenty-five percent of the land-mass of the world.

Now we’re more ‘L For Lambretta’, and still everyone hates us.

History truly is bunk – as is the notion that it was somehow written “by the winning side”. There has been no “winning side” in that sense; there’s never been a battle. The status quo has been quo and our relative statuses (statii?) static since human society really began. Render unto Caesar &etc. It is the nature of humans. We are but baboons fighting endlessly for fifteen minutes of sitting upon the highest rock. Whatever the window-dressing that is all that we shall ever be, and it will inevitably bring about our species’ doom. Equality – and any equilibrium – are alien notions to the human brain; we all need someone to look down upon, which means necessarily that we all inherit someone to have to “look up” to. Opt out and “be nice” personally as much as you want to, that doesn’t alter the basic species-level human conundrum one iota.

And that wee observation is most depressing indeed.

As Crystal Hennessy-Vass so accurately observed; when the monkey gets to the top of the tree everyone can see its arse…

Still, mustn’t grumble. Look at the view, and whistle when it gets dark.

Chin-chin &etc.

Ian H.