More Toad of Toad Hall than Ratty...

It's hard to believe, but after only two and a half days on a barge, (the top speed for which, in case you don't know, is a mighty four miles an hour), and a day and a half off it, I still feel as though I'm tilting from side to side, which is most disconcerting. It feels rather like a hangover, but minus the attendant Fear that you've done something dreadful, which you can't remember, but you know that other people can, or said something offensive, which you equally have no recollection of, but which a vengeful 'friend' is going to post onto your Facebook wall for everyone to see. Although as I have about 2.4 friends on Facebook, that wouldn't necessarily bring my reputation crashing down around my ears.

The barge trip was with four other girls and was in honour of my sister's birthday. Although, carrying on the tradition of disastrous boating holidays undertaken by my family (of which more in a moment), my sister didn't actually make it aboard. She was summoned two days beforehand to France, where she is producing a film, in order to try to Sort Things Out. (Such is the lot of a producer). The film has thus far been blighted in myriad ways, the most impressive of which have been their lead actress pulling out two weeks before shooting was due to begin; half of the crew having to apply for Irish citizenship because of complicated funding issues; one of their leads getting swine flu just as he was about to fly out to France and their location, a wood full of well-established trees in full and glorious leaf, being reduced to a less aesthetically pleasing collection of stumps, with no warning, last month. I receive a text from her as we're handing the barge back on the Monday morning saying, 'I'm in an area of oustanding national boredom. It is pissing down with rain. I've eaten something that I've had an allergic reaction to, and I'm now wandering around with a face that looks like Raging Bull'. Poor thing!

So, yes, back to the boat. Much like Emma Kennedy's brilliant and pant-wettingly hysterical The Tent, The Bucket And Me, which details her family's disastrous attempts to go camping in the 70s, my family has quite a varied history with disastrous boating holidays in the 80s. We tried a motor boat on the Norfolk Broads, and a couple of barges round Oxfordshire. Our mishaps, in no particular order, included:
1/ Taking possession of the boat, driving out of the boatyard and then deciding to moor up about an hour and a half later. None of the four adults on board (including my dad and my uncle, both of whom had reached senior positions in the army) could work out how to turn off the engine. As this was pre-mobile phones, we thus had to spend an hour and a half motoring back to the boatyard. Where a despairing man rolled his eyes extravagantly, pushed a button somewhere on the boat's dashboard and our motor stopped.
2/ Finding a lovely spot to moor up and my uncle inadvertently hammering the mooring post into an underground wasps' nest. Much stinging of all aboard, including Daisy the spaniel who'd come on holiday with us. This caused her to have the runs all over the boat once we'd all gone to bed. My sister, naturally, had no idea of this until she ventured to the loo, in the dark, without any slippers on...
3/ Getting rope tangled round the propeller. My uncle did what is still referred to by the whole family as A Very Brave Thing and disappeared into the murky depths clutching a bread knife between his teeth to try to cut us free. He failed, and we had to call out an emergency frogman, in full wetsuit, flippers and snorkel garb.
4/ Nearly killing our French exchange boy. My uncle and cousin took him out in a dinghy, which promptly capsized, trapping him under the sail. He really nearly drowned.
5/ Going under a very low bridge, and knocking all the deckchairs that we'd balanced on the back of the boat straight into the canal, never to be seen again.
6/ Crossing a very choppy stretch of water, and smashing half the glasses and crockery in the boat's sink.
7/ Taking a tin of maggots on board, because someone thought we might do some fishing (to my knowledge, no-one in my family had ever fished before, nor have they since). Putting said maggots in the fridge, because the cold would... I've no idea what the reasoning was. Managing to leave the tin lid ever so slightly ajar (so they didn't suffocate? Maybe). Realising, when awoken by small wriggly things dropping into your hair from the ceiling whilst you were lying in bed, that the maggots had escaped the tin, the fridge and the kitchen area as a whole, and were, lemming-like, all making for one end of the boat. Panicking. Waking up the other adults, and trying your best to sweep all the maggots off the side of the boat and into the water with a broom, without waking up the children. Going into the children's rooms, flicking on the lights and frantically checking for maggoty activity, whilst telling the youngsters that there was a swarm of mosquitoes on board, and they wanted to make sure there weren't any in here. Reassuring them that everything was fine, absolutely fine, yes, go back to sleep, no need to worry. Realising in the morning that the spag bol that you'd made for next day's lunch, for 8 people, and that you'd left in the fridge, was somewhat tarnished by having maggots rampaging through it, building themselves up for The Big Push. Throwing the spag bol promptly over the side, thus affording the local fish the biggest free lunch they'd had in many a year.

So, it's fair to say that I was a bit apprehensive about getting on a boat again, especially when the girls merrily declared that I was the expert, as I'd house-sat for my friend Jess when she lived on a barge (that, I was swift to point out, was entirely stationary, and the only challenge I'd faced was trying to get a pill down her cat every day). Yes, I'd been out on Jess's barge a couple of times, but it was a long time ago, and I was never allowed near the steering mechanism. Plus, you know, there'd been men aboard, so I'd left most of the tricky stuff to them. The boatyard man giving us the lesson on steering, locks and how to turn the boat around looked a bit worried. It might have had something to do with the fact that one of us was wearing Strictly Come Dancing-style silver sandals, and one was holding a four month-old baby. We looked like some sort of Channel 4 reality show on dim-witted city dwellers who'd decided to downsize in search of a life filled with bucolic charm.

He took us through starting the engine, stopping the engine and where to fill up with water. He showed us how to flush the loos. He pointed out the fridge, the cooker and the 12-volt hairdryer. He gave us a pair of windlasses for cranking lock gates, and a mallet and a couple of mooring pegs. We started the engine, cranked our way through a lock, turned the boat around and came back through the lock. He told us you have to steer the opposite way to the way you want to go, and that it was best to stick in the middle of the canal, as it's very shallow and it's not the easiest thing in the world to move 15 tons of metal when your propeller is jammed in the mud. He told us that you can only turn around at certain places and roughly where that would be on our trip. And that was it. We were off!

I promptly refused to do any steering, volunteering for lock and chain-bridge action (there are quite a lot of these - basically you have to pull a big chain, it goes up like Tower Bridge, you and a friend sit on either side of it like a see-saw to keep it up, then let it go crashing down and jump back on the boat), throwing of ropes and getting of glasses of wine. I knew it couldn't last, but I was determined to avoid crashing into things for as long as possible. Sadly, when there are only five of you aboard, and one of them has to spend quite a lot of time breastfeeding a baby, you eventually have to take a turn at steering.

I managed to avoid it till about lunchtime on Saturday, by which time it was pissing it down with rain in an almost biblical way. We'd moored up for lunch, then discovered halfway through that we were drifting backwards at quite a rate, having come totally unmoored. (Good job that hadn't happened at night). So I was already feeling a bit nervous. 'Come on', I thought, 'can't be that tricky, you've just got to concentrate'. I rapidly remembered why I gave up any attempt to learn how to drive at 18, as I steered totally the wrong way, panicked, and drove straight into a tree, in full view of an angler and his son. We spent the next 15 minutes trying to untangle the boat, whilst the angler helpfully told us that it was shallow at the sides, and deeper in the middle of the canal. I tried to shimmy down the side of the boat (there's a running board that's about two inches wide) to get the big pole that was on the top of the boat, that I could gondolier us off the bank with. And promptly got attacked by a swan that'd sidled up next to us. It hissed at me in that famous, 'I'm going to break your arm!' way that they have. I shrieked and leapt back into the boat. I screamed at it to fuck off, and told it that I didn't give a toss if it belonged to the Queen, I'd kill it and roast it if it didn't leave me alone. It hissed some more and followed us for three miles, in a quietly menacing fashion.

I managed to steer for about three minutes at a time, if I concentrated really really hard, and moved at the slowest pace possible (my constant cry every time I was required to take the tiller was, 'Can you make it go any slower?!', as someone else had to do the gears for me.) Going round corners utterly defeated me, as did any sort of 'getting the boat near to the bank so that someone can get off and do a lock' manoeuvre. If I couldn't park my mum's Renault when I was 18, there was no way I was going to be able to park 50-foot of cast iron, steering the opposite way to that in which you wish to go. It's a total headfuck. We were passed by a boatload of men wearing Hawaiian shirts on a stag do. We were passed by another boatload of blokes all dressed as pirates. The girls at the front of the boat beamed at them. 'Do you need rescuing?' they chortled cheekily. I panicked as their boat came past us with four foot to spare and drove us straight into another bank.

Anyone who thinks that life aboard a barge is all 'messing about on the river' should really try it. Your shoulders end up in agony because you're reaching behind you to steer, constantly correcting the boat and it's really bloody heavy. Plus if you're not that tall, you have to stand on tiptoes to see over the end of the boat to try to ascertain where you're going and if you're in a straight line. Cranking open the sluice gates on the locks requires some pretty serious biceps and then you have to give the gates a huge shove to get them open and closed. Then you have to contend with the fact that the sleeping arrangements are somewhat challenging. I spent the first night trying to sleep in the top bunk, which I only realised once I was wedged into it was quite a tight fit for an undernourished eight year-old, let alone an overnourished 38 year-old. Like an aquatic Goldilocks, I decided to try out the lower bunk for the other two nights, which was marginally wider, but did have a bit of a coffiny feel to it.

Still, it is good fun. You meet a lot of very smiley people. You also, if you're mean types like us, laugh at the barge pros, who all look like characters in a Mike Leigh film. The women all have big droopy boobs and look like they should be called Maureen. The men are either entirely spherical, with Captain Birdseye beards, or weedy, henpecked sorts who look like Nigels. Every time we started to get a bit misty-eyed about how lovely it was to move at such a slow speed, and really take in everything around us (fields, ducks, trees, cute cottages with thatched roofs), we'd shriek, 'Yes, but think of how DROOPY YOUR BOOBS WOULD BE if you lived on a barge!', cackle wildly and go back to talking about property prices and having to attend church in order to get your kids into the right school. I got confused by a sudden outbreak of sunshine on Sunday, and managed to get a hopelessly chavvy cleavage sunburn because I hadn't put on any suncream, having spent all of the previous day under a mammoth golf umbrella, wearing a huge waterproof coat and barely being able to see through the driving rain.

The British countryside really is beautiful. We stopped off at a village to have tea and to buy sausages for supper. I saw the most idyllic cottage, which had hollyhocks and a plethora of other flowers in the garden, as well as a thatched roof. 'Look at this, it's gorgeous!' I said. 'Hmm, this place is a bit Midsomer Murders, if you ask me', said one of the other girls darkly, alarmed by the village's manicured perfection. Well, I liked it.

We managed to return the boat to the yard unscathed. We hadn't dropped the baby over the side. We'd only broken two wine glasses, and we hadn't been attacked by maggots. We'd played two games of Trivial Pursuit from 1980 (that's quite confusing, when there are vaguely 'topical' questions, by the way). We'd turned the boat round with help from a lovely Captain Birdseye. We'd laughed our heads off at a family that included a granny sporting a minidress and cycling shorts and a bouffant hairpiece, who had clearly been an early adopter when it came to facelifts. I had been a kind of Tourette's version of Rosie and Jim, swearing every time I had to negotiate a row of parked barges, a bridge, a speed of more than half a mile an hour or a particularly moody swan. I'd also narrowly avoided falling in and being crushed by Helen driving the barge straight at me. I had extravagantly weird dreams, probably caused by claustrophobia. I'm hoping that when I wake up tomorrow morning, I will have stopped gently rocking and gradually morphing into Alison Steadman.