Well, it was indeed the best of times. And at moments it also seemed like the worst of times. And it involved England and France. I thought it would be fun to introduce our four children to the pleasures of canal-boat holidays, and so I booked a long weekend aboard an English narrowboat in the Midlands, followed by a week living it up on a French hotel barge in Burgundy. Luxury should always follow austerity, in my view.
On arrival at the canal basin in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, we immediately encountered, if not quite the worst of times, then at least the strong promise of it. Before we could set sail in our 55ft-long narrowboat Joybringer II, we were given an introductory tour by John Sampson from Tillerman Boats, clearly a past master at turning urban novices into confident skippers. It was clear, however, that Sampson was not only interested in boating prowess.
‘Who here has very slim wrists?’ he asked. My wrists have often been praised for their narrowness, I conceded modestly. ‘Well,’ he continued briskly, ‘if this loo chances to overflow, deposits might have built up into a sort of pyramid just under the pan. Pop your hand down and just push it to one side. That should tidy things up.’
Ashen-faced at the prospect of having to grapple with human excrement during our holiday, I followed our leader somewhat unsteadily into the lounge of Joybringer II. At which point, things worsened. Forget Wind in the Willows – Sampson’s take on messing about on rivers was more like the horror film Saw V. Narrowboat operation sounded like an inherently dangerous hobby.
If you fall overboard, the key thing is to yell for somebody to turn the engine off – one person every year falls in and, if their engine isn’t turned off, they’re shredded by the propeller. Don’t run along the gunwales (sides of the boat) – last week, someone had their pelvis dislocated because they were playing silly buggers on the gunwales. If you worry about decapitation, don’t sit on the narrowboat roof when in a tunnel. Furthermore, don’t stand behind the tiller when you are reversing, since it has a habit of swinging and pushing people overboard (to be ground up by the propeller, etc).
Meanwhile, watch out at the locks. As Sampson explained in a low voice, locks (essentially devices for a waterway to manage going up or down hill) come fraught with deadly issues. Lock keys can come spinning off, hit you in the face and blind you. Lock gates can set up deadly whirlpools. And if you don’t remember to tuck away those bouncy buffer things on the side of your boat, you might stick to the walls of the lock and sink.
Four days on the Grand Union Canal was shaping up to be something rather daunting. Mr Millard and I were expecting a quiet break, pootling gently from Market Harborough to Welford, a village near the famous battleground of Naseby (where Charles I lost the Civil War to Oliver Cromwell). We envisaged that the high spot might be the sighting of a heron, not a visit to A&E. After our introductory chat, we were very nervous. As we glided out of the basin at a sedate 3mph, everyone under the age of 11 was in a life jacket. I was in the galley kitchen rustling up a 1970s-type dinner constructed entirely from processed food and Mr Millard was at the helm, nervously steering while ensuring no one was running along gunwales, standing on the roof, lurking behind the tiller and so on.
Actually, the junior Millards were confined to quarters, watching Bob the Builder on the onboard DVD player and playing Top Trumps on the dining table. That’s the dining table that folds down and becomes a double bed.
Life is basic on a narrowboat, although what with the credit crunch and the diving pound, family holidays which call for ingenuity rather than indulgence are enjoying a comeback, and the narrowboat sojourn ticks every box. You feel close to the countryside. Indeed, you are in the heart of it. You are not slobbing around on a beach, but focusing your brain on the practical niceties of lock keys, bilge water and the like. Plus, you have a mighty 16-tonne vessel to steer. Yes, it’s aimless, yes, it’s slow, but it’s eco-friendly and there is an interesting connection between the industry that is modern-day tourism and the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century, which depended on the canals to transport steel, wood and coal around the country.
‘Just imagine,’ whispered Gabriel, our eight-year-old, as we chugged creepily through the Husbands Bosworth Tunnel, a mighty 1,166 yards long and essentially a vast arch of dark, dripping bricks with a tiny oval of light glimmering in the distance. ‘In the olden days, people pushed their boats through this with their legs.’
Out in the open air, things were rather more jolly. During our wholly unambitious foray of about 20 miles, we passed stacks of pubs, hostelries, museums and coffee shops, all of which had been flagged up beforehand thanks to our onboard information pack. It was very social. The canal was crammed with other narrowboats full of waving devotees, including people who owned their own boats, those who lived on them, and one man with a boat festooned with balloons, since he was having his 60th birthday on it. Families of swans followed us. Ducks came quacking past for bread.
At the glorious Foxton ‘staircase’, an astonishing 19th-century piece of engineering overseen by Thomas Telford, which was opened in 1814 and involves ten locks and 25,000 gallons of water, the atmosphere was almost carnivalesque. Even though it was raining. Oh, yes, the rain never stopped. Everything got very soggy and stayed that way. Not much drying space on a narrowboat (although there are radiators, should you want to take a boat out in the winter) and no storage space for more than about two outfits per person.
But never mind. A proper English holiday should always involve stoic endurance amid brief interludes of pleasure. Our time on Joybringer II had both. During one of my rare moments away from galley duties, I actually saw a kingfisher, tiny and radiant, perched about three feet away from us.
We got wet in Burgundy, too, on L’Art de Vivre, although there the downpours were much classier. And there were posh umbrellas. L’Art de Vivre, you see, is a hotel barge. The notion of the hotel barge was born around 40 years ago, but has only taken off of late. Hotel barges do their best to transport people on to a cloud of perfection, albeit a slightly damp one. And forget all preconceptions about the narrowboat routine involving cooking out of tins, manual lavatory clearance and all that. Hotel barging is all about unedited, five-star luxury, and I can think of nowhere more suitable to experience it than on the elegant waterways of Burgundy.
