The workings

People on a Sunday go to museums, to town to do shopping, to pubs to have Sunday roasts, stay in bed to have sex, stay in bed to masturbate, do their nails, go to work, do their laundry, sleep under a bridge, take kids to the movies, take kids to friends parties, lock kids in a room with videogames, go to feed pigeons by the canal, eat food, shit, die. On a Sunday, I like to put on a fresh pair of latex gloves and dry the engine room with stolen gym towels and nappies. It has become my favourite pastime. I’m not sure what I will do with my life once I go back to live in the flat. I guess I could always take a photography course or join a choir.

My editor has asked me to write something about my experience of living on a boat since most journalists who write about living on boats don’t actually live on boats. The problem with those articles is that then boaters discover them, post them on the Facebook boaters group and let the nasty comments pour in, calling for the head of those journalists who dared romanticise an experience they know nothing of. But sometimes boaters just get pissed off because they don’t have anything else to do, having already dried their engine rooms, so they get all bitter and petty and self-praising, just like the majority of people who comment on online articles. So anyway, I promised my editor I will write something on boats and boating, and I must say I’m quite looking forward to it. I have total freedom of self censorship! I’m thinking I could start the article with more or less the same intro of this post. That would allow me to simultaneously reassure boaters that I’m not going to go all cheesy about the ducks and the nature, but instead focus on the hard work that living on boats requires, while also give my middle class readers someone (childless, immigrant and single) to look down to from their warm living rooms with screaming children and ugly paintings on the walls. Then I could sneak in a small factbox at the end about shitting in plastic bags and how that works. I can’t, can I. It would be absolutely glorious though.