The joy of going straight

Not my title, but that of a travel feature in the Church Times of 22nd January 2010! It's what I referred to yesterday and is a well-written account of the pleasures of boating by journalist and former boater Sarah Meyrick.



photo by Martine O'Callaghan

This is the photo which accompanies the story, giving sufficient clues to enable identification of the boat as Rigal.

Sarah Meyrick starts her article with THAT quotation from Kenneth Grahame.

"IT IS the Water Rat who puts his finger on it. “There is nothing — absolutely nothing — half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats,” he tells Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

“Nothing seems really to matter, that’s the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don’t; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you’re always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you’ve done it there’s always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you’d much better not.”

Ratty’s vessel may have been a skiff rather than a narrowboat, but it is still the most eloquent description of the joys of life afloat. First-timers sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that a canal holiday is about distance travelled, or locks ticked off; old hands know that too fixed an idea about the destination will almost inevitably lead to frustration and disappointment."

Sarah Meyrick writes about speed, bank erosion, moored boats, queueing at locks, wildlife (and, in parentheses, the tendency of boat-owners to sneer at those in hire boats). She tells of her experiences in the narrowboat she and her family owned near their Oxfordshire vicarage, Noah's Ark. She also describes the moment when they ceased to be boat-owners:

"Then, suddenly, we outgrew it, literally: limbs seemed too long, tempers too short, and the maintenance/pleasure ratio reversed. Noah’s Ark now belongs to another (clergy) family; I regularly see her from the train, and smile. We, meanwhile, have discovered other canals, and other ways of enjoying them. And yes, Mole, in answer to your question, it really is “so nice as all that”."