Gallic
Dreams of Boats and Caravans
By Kent Barker
If anything my mate
Mike is even more of a hoarder than I am.
But where it’s my house I fill with superfluous possessions, he fills
his garden. To such an extent that there
are times when it almost resembles Steptoe and Son’s yard, albeit in the depths
of the country rather than Shepherd’s Bush.
It’s not that the junk isn’t picturesque. In a vaguely post-modern way it could be
considered an evolving work of art.
Because - and this is the thing – where I only import stuff into my abode he, from time to time,
exports it too. Thus, one day, the old
Morris Minor, that sat rusting under a tree for decades, disappeared. Trampolines and handcarts, and a myriad of
instruments of a vaguely agricultural variety are there one year and gone the
next.
Mike is a member of the tennis club and our Ukelele band (both
activities conduced with – it occurred to me the other day - a stringed
instrument) and a co-conspirator in running the bar at our little music festival.
So he knew exactly where to locate a number of beer barrels in my field when he
found he suddenly needed some.
Why, I hope you are about to ask, did he unexpectedly need them? Well, for his boat, of course. Mike has salt
in his blood. He grew up around the estuaries and inlets of Bosham and
Chichester and now, landlocked in Kent, he pines for open water. There is generally at
least one dinghy and/or canoe among the garden attractions awaiting restoration
or disposal. And I seem to recall a
session in the pub when, after a few beers, we fell to discussing the idea of
taking a boat through France, down to the Mediterranean and then up the Canal
Du Midi. Visions of long languid days
pottering along Gallic waterways, pausing only for a riverine repast or to take
on another case of wine – or both - helped pass the long winter evening
pleasantly enough.
I pretty much forgot about the conversation, but not Mike. A week or so later he announced that he’d
been round to my place to collect the beer barrels. For what, I enquired, did
he need a dozen aluminum kegs? To
support the boat in the back garden, he replied as if everyone might be expected to have such a requirement. It appeared that, walking along the beach
near a childhood haunt, he’d come across this ancient clinker-built cabin
cruiser and, dreaming of France, parted with good money for it. The fact that it was totally unseaworthy was
of no consequence – Mike is a carpenter so relished the idea of restoration …. once
he‘d got it home … a mere 70 or 80 miles .... without a trailer. But our friend Simon – for whom no project is
too ludicrous – had an ancient car trailer and was inveigled into driving to
Chichester, loading the boat onto it and returning to Kent. No matter that the craft was about twice the
length of the trailer and probably three times over its legal weight.
How they got this massive craft off the trailer and onto the beer
barrels I’ll never know. But there it’s
sat, in pride of place, in Mike’s junk yard (sorry – garden) for the best part
of three years, completely untouched, let alone restored.
In the meantime he acquired a caravan. I think the idea was that he would cut the
top off and use the base as foundation for a shepherd’s hut. Why he wanted a shepherd’s hut I’m not sure,
but they are quite desirable, though not generally if mounted on caravan bases.
So this vehicle joined the pile of projects in the yard, happily
rotting away until a friend’s son, Phil, put out a call for a caravan to take
down to Calais for the refugees in the ‘jungle’. Here was a win-win situation.
Mike could get rid of it and do some good.
But how to get the rusting hulk out of the garden? Send for Simon and his Range Rover. He looked
it over and opined that it was unlikely to make it to the end of the road
without falling apart, let alone to the Dover ferry. But Phil was undaunted and Simon towed it
gingerly from its resting place to Phil’s dad’s house, where the green algae
was sluiced off and much of the mold removed from the interior. Then a man from the charity Caravans for
Calais turned up, put two heavy duty ratchet straps around it to keep body and chassis
together and, without further ado, drove it off to France. Where, presumably, it’s now housing some
deserving refugee family. Meanwhile we in
the pub await, with baited breath, news of the next addition to Mike’s yard.
ends
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