THE SCREW OF DOOM UNLEASHES COOL , NEW AGE FRANKENSTEIN

Correspondent  Peter  Burleigh’s latest despatch   from  France  where  he is  helping to revive  that  country’s  economy  by  fixing  the  many  things  that  need to  be done   to  the  good  ship  Butterfly   before he and  Judi   can  resume  canal  cruising .      

 

Captain  Burleigh  and   Judi eager  to blast off .

Some people are challenged by the necessity for high moral behaviour, or whether to  obey  laws they don’t respect, or simply to be kind to crippled Hungarians who need a  handout. We are in this latter category as well  as a toxic sub-category in which we suffer the conspiracy of technology.  

 

In other words, whatever the negative conspiracy de jour is we’ll be on its hit list. To people like me a screwdriver is like a supercomputer, a hammer like a spacecraft. Removing the defunct refrigerator from the boat is an apparently simple procedure, so simple that I can’t get it to budge and am forced to call in the services of a boatyard mechanic.

 Antony believes in force when dealing with boats. He swears at  machinery a lot – “Putain! Con! Batard! Bordello de Merde!” – and this means that  he, like me, has overlooked  the screw holding the refrigerator to the wall. Mutual tugging and heaving eventually wrenches the fridge from its foundations, breaking the metal support. If the fridge wasn’t broken before  it  sure  is  now.

Getting the new fridge on board without deforming the railings or ripping up the deck is a  crisis overcome by herniating our stomach muscles by lifting it to head-level and pushing it onto the stern. Then we must assemble it (and reassemble several broken bits using that old favourite, Gaffer Tape). Although branded as ‘WAECO’ we note it has been manufactured in Hungary.

REVENGE  OF  THE  MAGYARS

 

Its label should read ‘Made and Dropped in Hungary by Resentful Magyars’.  Some of its protuberances have been bent beyond utility so we cannibalize the old machine to build a kind of Frankenstein’s monster. Ice runs in its veins. Finally, by calling on all our electrical skills, we connect and gaffer-tape the red and black wires in the correct sequence and move the hinges to the other side of the door. The fridge slides into its space as if it has been tailor-fitted. It switches on without starting any electrical fires or setting off  the smoke alarms.

Fridge surgery is just one of a series of issues to confront us. They include a leaking stern hatch which threatens to fill the rear compartment of the boat, an insidious leak in the engine compartment which never drips while you’re watching but becomes deep by the morning, and the impending replacement of our UK gas bottle fitting with a new French version which  disregards the EU Parliament’s attempts at standardisation.

 

 This requires a visit from a qualified French gasfitter/plumber. These people are as rare as virgins in Parramatta. “When might he come to do the work?” we ask.“You know the saying,” replies the Marina Manager. “Jesus’  return is  a certainty, the  plumber’s arrival only a  possibility.”

 

To our delight Laurent the Gasfitter does turn up, and he’s a day early. He’s polite, efficient, and speaks not a word of English. He promises to consummate the new gas bottle and the boat’s gas distribution system the next day, and once again he arrives early, fully prepared with a little brass dingus which he does not have to weld in place (welding and propane don’t seem to go together, but in France you never know), tests it, tells us the whole thing will cost 50 euros. He gets 55 euros and leaves happy.

The day of our departure is nigh. No it’s not, the bow and stern thrusters break down. Without these the boat will soon resemble a bucket of rusted metal. Thrusters are propellers in tubes run by electric motors which allow us to park the boat sideways  and to avoid stone walls.

 

Antony explains the technical problem: “The whoring illegitimate sons of Romanian sheep molesters (the thrusters) are kaput. They are not acting rationally and need new…(here he mimes the working of some secret part).” Later the Marina Manager says they need new brushes. These parts cost 100 euros each plus labour. They must be ordered from Holland and may take several weeks to arrive unless ….”Yes, yes?”, we exclaim…unless we pay an extra 15 euros for express delivery. Sigh.

The thruster parts do arrive from Holland and Anthony returns, dismantles the motors and judging by his foul language does something unspeakable to them. They work. The day of our departure is nigh, although we have said  that before. NEXT :  Up  the  Limpopo?