Back to the barge, and to the title of this post.
When Dave and I are on a canal trip a deux, there are two givens. One is that I will fall over against the steel hull at least once, and come away with several large bruises, and the other is that on the very first morning we will have a spat. There are limitless possibilities for marital wrangling (as you will know). Last year the spat was about which one of us had locked us out of the barge on a chilly morning at 7.30 a.m. with me still in my pyjamas. I blamed Dave. He blamed me. He was stressed. I was relaxed (if shivering) as there has never been a practical mess we’ve been in that Dave hasn’t been able to get us out of. And my faith was justified: he got us out of that one, accompanied by much muttering.
Last week our first morning squabble began with my asking how to steer the boat in reverse. Dave – being an ex-teacher – likes to explain things from first principles. The problem with this is that first, I don’t have a practical mind like his, and second, I want speedy answers, not something along the lines of.. “OK, forget the reversing for a minute…think of the boat in this way…….blah….blah…”
However kindly it's meant, I don’t want a half hour lecture. I want specifics. e.g. “Look, all I want to know is…if I am this far from the bank with the stern pointing to the middle of the canal, and I want to get there. Do I point the tiller this way or that way?”
The way to resolve these disputes is not to talk things through, but to back off and go and get some breakfast. There wouldn’t be any fighting if a girl was allowed to wake up slowly and quietly and to have her two mugs of Yorkshire tea and her muesli before she was expected to be compos mentis. And I speak as someone who has just spilled her mug of tea on the bedroom floor because she put it on a sloping pile of books on the bedside table…
It doesn’t matter: after that little tiff on our first morning, it’s always plain sailing.
