Womblin’s World

For those of you who neither know nor care that I used to haunt the canals of Britain in a narrowboat, please don’t bother reading this. Anyone who does boat, or is interested, this is a rant. Be warned.

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Is it one, two…three or more? Boats, I mean, going through lift bridges. How many is enough before one of the steerers takes the initiative and asks that person standing with her daughter and her push bike if she’d like to cross the bridge? How long should a person be reasonably expected to wait? Should boaters have to wait for pedestrians, or even (gasp) vehicles to cross said bridge before they take a turn? Yes, take a turn.

I’m not asking that every boat’s crew should lower the bridge after them if another boat can make use of that open bridge, I’m asking for a little less of the blinkered view of boaters I find happening on the canal running through my village. They don’t seem to see anything past that narrow ribbon of water sometimes, as proved by the man who did come back to lower the bridge today so that we could cross, but under utter protest. “Well I didn’t know you were waiting to cross,” he said. Okay, so we’re standing there alongside a very long and straight stretch of canal while four boats have gone through, my daughter very obviously poised to go over on her bike, but do we get preference? Are we even asked if we’d like to cross? No, we are unnoticed, not on the boater’s radar, we are less important. When I say something I am told, “Well, there’s a footbridge there.”

Sigh.

Does this help the pensioner I saw waiting in disbelief a few weeks back as boat after boat motored past him with not a wit of politeness from those on the back decks? Does it, indeed, help the people who need to cross in their cars in order to get up onto the main road from their houses down in the valley?

And when I’m told by these people that all kinds of people hang around bridges, so how were they to know…when I’m shouted at by two females on the same boat after I cross who obviously couldn’t care less about anyone not on a boat, then I despair and vow never to return to live and work on the canals as I once did.

Yes, thirteen years living and working on the cut — not just holidaying once or twice a year — give me a little authority on the subject. Perhaps thirteen years is no time at all, eh? So I ask again, boaters… exactly how many is enough?