As I sit on my boat, moored in the heart of Birmingham, with
the city centre, currently throbbing with the Frankfurt German Market, just a
couple of hundred yards away and surrounded by apartment buildings where a
penthouse can cost £1m, I am listening to the radio.
It is telling me of floods, of gas and electricity bills
going up by yet more hundreds of pounds a year, of people unable to feed their
families, even though they are in work, and yet more transgressions by bankers
and financiers, to say nothing of politicians.
I can’t help wondering why the figure for the number of
people living full time on their boats isn’t growing even faster than the Canal
and River Trust says it is.
By comparison, we have many fewer things to worry about.
There may be floods but our homes float and can ride out high water, if we moor
them properly.
Diesel may be creeping ever upwards but as we can generate
our electricity from our engine and even from sunshine we are not in the hands
of the greedy power companies to the same extent.
The CRT may be less efficient than we would like and charge
us too much for our licences and mooring fees but it is not as dangerous as an
out of control banker and probably only as greedy as an MP filling out his
expenses.
Once you have bought the boat, living on it can be cheaper
than living in a house, even though the trade off is emptying your own waste
and keeping the water tank full.
On top of all that there is the freedom. Tomorrow we could
be moored out in the country with only the birds for company. You can’t do that
with a house.
Guest blog from
Peter Underwood
Contrasting a life afloat with a life on land, is a very misleading title for this blog.
ReplyDeleteI expected interesting detail of someone who is 'living the dream' aboard a narrowboat, particularly when that boat is moored near to the vibrant city centre of Birmingham.
How different that must be to the normality of us house dwellers, how interesting to learn of ‘a day in the life’, for example from a genuine live-a-board.
Unfortunately we didn’t learn much from this blog because interesting elements were forsaken, as the author put his personal gripes at the forefront when making his many totally unnecessary snide comments about certain professions and organizations. This leads me to suspect that Peter would swap the life afloat for the £1,000,000 penthouse lifestyle anyday,given half a chance.