Begin at the beginning

Oh what am I doing?

I have no real idea about blogging and here I am attempting to start one from the confines of a sardine can. And that means awful "connectivity" and a requirement for the patience of Mother Teresa as my wonderful smart phone attempts to tether to my iPad and allow me to type this message in the hope it will eventually soar into the blogosphere or whatever it's called.

Having only been introduced to Facebook last year in an effort to maintain contact with my uncommunicative sons I posted updates of travels vainly hoping for the odd 'like' or message but apparently one or two of our friends rather enjoyed my ramblings and tart commentaries and kept saying 'do a blog on your canal trip'. In denial I resisted and didn't bother to even find out what a blog was let alone how to start. But failure to upload onto my Facebook has forced me to attempt a blog and after minimal research here we are. If this works it's a miracle of technology and nothing to do with me.

It all started with early retirement and the apparent availability of "free time". That was the cue for my wonderful wife to start the drip drip torture of achieving her childhood ambition of living on a narrow boat for a year and travelling the canals and navigable rivers of England. At 6'2" tall the idea of a 57x7 foot steel coffin bore little attraction to me and my different spacial awareness to that of my 5'5" wife, but a year of negotiation (with no recourse to marriage guidance I might add) we agreed on a 3 month excursion.

And so her search for a suitable vessel began. Several false leads and a near miss left her disappointed and frustrated so what did her idiot husband do? He bought a Waterways World magazine in a spontaneous gesture of solidarity only for her to locate in the small ads a private hirer prepared to risk his boat with us two for the full 3 months. Making it affordable limited my room for manoeuvre and before you could say Grand Union we were booked for an April start.  

And so that is how I find myself a novice blogger. Attempting to tell the tale of 3 months in a vessel drawing its heritage from a long past age of British transportation and now the preserve of alternative lifestyles, ardent traditionalists and holiday makers of every hue. It will hopefully be a slowly unfolding tale (max speed 4 mph remember) of one man's observation of the life and sights that line the network of canals that criss cross middle England. He may even be converted to the joys of a slow life punctuated by bursts of energy winding away at those tiresome locks!

Oh yes. And why the reluctant sardine? Well, any Spike Milligan fan may recall his poem about a baby sardine's encounter with a submarine and his wonderful accompanying cartoon. Well, it may not be a submarine but there is an uncanny resemblance to the confines of a submariners home!

Wish me luck.......