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I have a very great attraction to Narrowboats.
I'm an Australian, we don't have such things here as we have no canals. None, anywhere.
About 5 years ago I went to England for the first time, my first time overseas, ever. I went there to meet up in person with a girl I'd met online a year earlier and she, apparently, loved narrowboats. She used to live on one, years previous, transporting coal to and fro under contract to survive. She'd sent me links to sites about the things, before I flew over, to educate me about what she was on about and I said they looked nice. So...
After a 32 hour flight on the cheapest ticket I could find to get there, having stopped at every damn airport between Adelaide and London, my first time on a plane too no less, let alone out of my home country, I arrived extremely hyper, jetlagged, awake and exhausted at Gatwick and what did this girl decide to do to introduce me to England? Drive me directly from the airport to a narrowboat tour up and down some canal near Milton Keynes.
It was bloody lovely! I'd only met this person in the flesh about two hours previously but we got on this rickety looking thing and it was the most relaxing, peaceful and beautiful experience of my life up to that point. There was a television crew aboard filming and interviewing everyone as it was some anniversary of somethingorother but we shot them dirty looks and they left us alone. The scenery was amazing, green (I'd just come from Australia remember) and... stuff. From this moment on I loved narrowboats.
I've been to England 4 times since, the last time for 6 months, and have grabbed every opportunity to get on or near narrowboats each visit. We had plans to live on one and to me it seems an idyllic concept. You can pull up next to pubs, get drunk and just putter away on your boat afterwards. Everyone involved with the things seem to have an amazing sense of community. They are a bugger to steer but the world goes by so slowly that it really doesn't matter and most of the time you only want to go straight anyway. It's 180ing them that's the problem but there are areas alloted and designed for the task all over the place so this isn't a big problem. Going through the locks is a buzz. Having to get out and move bloody great levers and pull ropes and shit, it's like another, far more real, world than the one most of us are stuck with.
If I ever moved to England I'd live on a narrowboat for sure. |
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