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Captain Burleigh and Rope Girl Judi cleaning up after messy visitors .
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The third and hopefully the last canicule
(heatwave) of the French summer ended last night, when rain pounded on the
canvas and Perspex surfaces of our boat for almost eight hours. These are the
times when the human brain is at its worst. Mine has trained itself to wake up
early on sunny summer mornings when the birds are drunk with song and the
Nespresso machine is straining at the leash, and it’s incapable of
understanding that rainy days are a rare chance to rejuvenate. Instead of
remaining comatose for a few extra hours, it chooses to think about things it
considers important; for example, the role visitors play in canal life.
Yesterday we completed a 12-day tour for two tranches of
visitors/friends, back-to-back, and instead of my usual antisocial snarling I
am delighted we all enjoyed ourselves and worked well together. I get that most
people don’t know what living in a small boat means in terms of co-operation
and privacy, but with a little forethought… our friends made sure they had the
minimum of luggage and they helped cook, helped maintain the wine cellar (wine
bilge?) and helped with other on-board jobs.
They were determined to pull their
weight. They made us feel good to be with them by simply treating us as equals,
not servants. With other visitors this hasn’t always been the case. If only the
supermarkets stocked a Visitor Repellent Spray.
Visitors come in all shapes and
sizes. Through the mist rising above my morning coffee, I see tourists wrapping
up their summer shopping before boarding their trains, buses, camping cars,
and boats. Their faces are pinched and tense, as if their final bout of retail
therapy failed them by falling below their compulsory level of expenditure.
Like Russell Crowe in Master and
Commander, we must be ruthless with those visitors who get through our
stringent qualification process, whatever their race or creed. We must
introduce a strict induction program – no stealing novels from the bookshelf,
no writing smart comments in the margins of the canal maps, no staying silent
when the Vodka and/or Gin drops below two-thirds of a bottle, always making
regular changes of underwear, and no singing Mariah Carey songs after 6pm. If
you’re too accommodating your visitors will take advantage.
They’ll use you and
your boat as a destination rather than a stepping-stone, consuming your food
and grog and shamelessly dirtying your linen. They ask us to be their travel
agents. If they stay for five days or more, they will ‘own’ us because we’re so
socially responsible.
Before you open your door to more visitors, consider what your not-negotiable Rules for Visitors might be. Of course your family relatives might be a different proposition, especially if you are currying favour from an ancient Aunt to be remembered in her will.
Before you open your door to more visitors, consider what your not-negotiable Rules for Visitors might be. Of course your family relatives might be a different proposition, especially if you are currying favour from an ancient Aunt to be remembered in her will.
Nevertheless, a list of rules for visitors can deepen their
understanding of your needs. You can
develop lists of rules under several groupings:Friends,Friends with Children, Tradesmen, Relatives (individual and en masse ),Authorities (police, paramedics , Mormons etc ).
Don’t be put off – after all, Christianity came up with the
Ten Commandments for Visitors to the Manger and they’ve been around for a
couple of thousand years. All your rules for potential
visitors can be gathered in a ‘Naval Regulations’-type file. In the Royal Navy
of the 18th century most breaches of regulations were punishable by death or
flogging. Of course, they used ‘Press Gangs’ to kidnap people to keep up crew
numbers, but this is not the intention here; rather it is to reduce the number of crew members.
*
Each morning before your visitors scrub the
decks, call them into the main saloon and read them the regulations and the
penalties for failure.
*
If you have visitors you don’t like, tell them
the lice infestation in their cabin may lessen as the weather gets cooler later
in the year, and meanwhile to have their antibiotics close to hand as doctors
are impossible to find.
*Issue a list of daily visitor-purchases,
including food supplies and wine & spirits, to be on board by sunset
irrespective of the environment (this is effective in rural areas). Remember to
keep a supply of fois-de-gras and lobster pate in your own stateroom.
*
Organise visits to repulsive locations to
encourage visitors to leave before their schedule requires. For example, take
them to a horse-meat abattoir, or an edible- snail farm, or to a wine bar
frequented by criminally-insane lock-keepers, or a Charcutiere who makes Tete-de-Veaux (look it up).
* Ensure you offer the option of marooning them in
an attractive town to make desertion their preferred outcome.
*
Organise stomach-turning activities like
communal colouring-in books, bingo (using verbal French numbers), joint
laundry-washing on the banks of the canals, cheese-inhalation races and so on.
When I tell a visitor that I write a blog ,they immediately expect to be
entertained by tales, intelligent quips, clever asides and quotable witticisms. Some ex-visitors ask “why haven’t you put me into one of your blog
pieces?”
“Oh, but I have,” I reply.“It must have been your inaccuracies that put me off,” they say,
dooming themselves to eternal banishment.
They expect spontaneity, but
spontaneity takes time. They expect Cordon Bleu cooking but when served the
French Supermarket’s idea of a Thai Red Curry, complete with neon-coloured
sauce and wan frozen vegetables, they complain.
A good visitor is someone who has a black Amex card and tells you to
‘help yourself’. With a black Amex card you can buy a canal boat as big as an
aircraft carrier, the island of Sardinia or a South American nation beginning
with a ‘V’. When you have one of those, money doesn’t just talk, it shouts…and
you’re welcome everywhere.
So, this should give you an idea
of how to manage the expectations of visitors to your boat, caravan or
asbestos-clad beach shack. Imagine how different the story of the Bounty would
have been if all their problems had been handed over to American Express.
And tomorrow we resume our journey. An unbidden vision of a cranky lock-keeper appears behind my drooping eyelids. He glowers at me. He’s the favoured candidate to become the ferryman over the River Styx after the incumbent retires. As dozing submerges into dreams, a woodpecker begins tapping at the timber boat moored beside us. Not a woodpecker – someone is clacking away on an old typewriter. Not a typewriter – it’s rain, tap-tapping on our roof again.
After Peter Burleigh posted this brilliant rainy day inspired dirge , his shocked wife, Judi , insisted he promptly send out an apology to all their friends , relatives , visitors (past and future , including Pete Steedman ) , Mormons , even Little Darwin, lock keepers , etc.
And tomorrow we resume our journey. An unbidden vision of a cranky lock-keeper appears behind my drooping eyelids. He glowers at me. He’s the favoured candidate to become the ferryman over the River Styx after the incumbent retires. As dozing submerges into dreams, a woodpecker begins tapping at the timber boat moored beside us. Not a woodpecker – someone is clacking away on an old typewriter. Not a typewriter – it’s rain, tap-tapping on our roof again.
After Peter Burleigh posted this brilliant rainy day inspired dirge , his shocked wife, Judi , insisted he promptly send out an apology to all their friends , relatives , visitors (past and future , including Pete Steedman ) , Mormons , even Little Darwin, lock keepers , etc.
