Canal Boating: Running the Gauntlet of Humilation

I know I have intense bad luck with holidays. It is now six years since I wrote: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2008/03/when-holiday-is-worse-than-no-holiday.html and in that period I have only had one holiday which has lasted more than 2 days before something has led to it being terminated. The last week-long holiday was in December 2012 in a cottage 45 Km from home. The last holiday I took did not even last two days as on the morning of the second day we woke to find the electricity had been cut to the whole district by a storm; power was not restored for twelve hours, so we simply went home.

I remain the eternal optimist and having finally got some compensation, after seven months of battling, for the car which lasted me 13 days before breaking down entirely, never to move again, I decided to go on a canal boat holiday. This is a very British style of holiday. Americans and Canadians do not have this kind of holiday and fall enthusiastically in love with it. Even northern continental Europeans prefer our quaint, narrow canals to the vast still industrial/commercial ones of Belgium/Netherlands/Germany. I am part of the canal generation. Growing up living near a canal I saw it transformed during the 1970s and 1980s from a disused channel with little water in it and a lot of rubbish, into a functioning canal which attracted the growing leisure boat crowd. Yachting and power boating has always been popular among the well-off of southern England where I lived, but canals now offered a whole new opportunity with less risk of storms and less distance to travel to reach your boat. With boats on canals limited to 4mph (6.4kph) it also appears to be a relaxed way to travel. Canals were built originally to move heavy goods like coal or stone to industrial areas and for this reason they are densest in England in the industrial Black Country of the West Midlands. However, also linked to rivers, they also pass through rural and former industrial areas which are more pleasant to go through and connect historic towns which are tourist attractions in their own right such as Oxford and Bath.

Aside from the 'boating set' canals have also had an attraction for a more 'hippie' like clientele. The association with moving freely around the country, tying up mostly where you choose, obviously has an appeal for people who like a less tied-down way of life. Certainly in the 1970s canals were heavily associated with folk music and handicrafts. It has only been in recent years that the styles and decor of them has been allowed to diversify from the black, red, green colouring of 'trad', i.e. traditional, boats. More and more have been built, many these days with modern facilities such as televisions and washing machines; steps are now in place to allow wi-fi on them. Perhaps the fad is passing as the number of canal boats for sale has reached an all time high and you can pick one up for as cheap as £32,000 (€38,700; US$54,000). This may seem a great deal, but new ones cost double or more that price. You are buying something 2.1m wide (for what is called a narrowboat, i.e. one that will fit all canals in the UK) and 16m long. The longest are 24m (72 feet) long, made of steel with water and toilet tank, a cooker, etc. on board. You can live on a narrowboat and in many parts of the country you will find people doing so for part or indeed all of the year, though it can get cold. You find the entire range from modern ones with double glazing and solar panels to traditional ones with the engine visible in the middle of the boat and a coal oven on board.

All over the UK you can hire canal boats for a holiday. They typically sleep six people but you can get ones accommodating more. For £1000-2000 depending on where you start from and the quality of your boat and its facilities, you can rent one for a week. You are permitted to drive it with only one hour's training. This is one challenge, people moving vessels 72m long in channels sometimes only a couple of metres wide with other canal users, notably canoeists and people on the towpath running beside the canal, including pedestrians, anglers and increasing numbers of cyclists. The other thing is that the momentum of a canal boat even when moving at 2kph is immense and water does not provide much friction. Lock gates weigh anything from 800Kg to 2 tonnes. There is a lot of room for bumps and knocks. One woman described it to me as 'a contact sport'. However, despite this, given the attitudes of canal users outlined below, you have to move as if walking on eggshells.

On paper a canal boat holiday might seem ideal. You can move at your own pace. It is like camping without having to give up all the facilities or having to queue to have a shower or use the toilet. In addition, if it rains you can retreat inside and watch television or a DVD; going through urban areas you can even use your mobile phone. The trouble is, the thing that ruins it is the British and indeed foreigners who aspire to behave like middle class Britons. You can do nothing in the UK these days without someone telling you very loudly that you are doing it wrong. They do this for two reasons: 1) to assert their social status, through having a privately owned boat or one that is 'proper' or better equipped compared to what you might be aboard; 2) to massage their egos, by showing you up to be ignorant or a fool.

Encouraged by the woman I used to live with and her son, I hired a 33-metre, 6-berth narrowboat on a canal in southern England for one week. In many ways this holiday was a 'success'. It lasted 5 days rather 2 days, though it was supposed to last 7 days. I lost a hat and a map; a watch strap was broken but no electrical items or money were lost. I had some scrapes but no serious injuries. It did not rain and the weather was fine, with some reprieve from intense sunshine. We moved very slowly, covering around 7Km per day. In part that was due to the number of locks and swing bridges along the way. A lock is a large mechanism sometimes 3 metres deep with usually four, though sometimes two, of the large gates already mentioned. They allow the lifting or dropping of the water level in an enclosed space, so permitting a boat or sometimes a pair of boats, to go up or down hills. They are marvels of 18th century engineering and can be entirely operated by a single person if required, though it is typical to use two or more. You also need someone on the boat to move it in and out of the lock. To operate the lock there is no power bar that from your arms and legs. You let water in and out of the lock by turning ratchets and you open and close the locks with the strength of your back. Thus you need to be physically healthy and fit. However, of course, the British work at two extremes, either they lay utterly passive on the beach or they insist on a holiday which in centuries passed would have been deemed labour.

I knew locks well. Probably better than almost anyone we met. When the canal behind my house was derelict friends and me would climb down the tunnels that run through the locks. They were dry then and are now literally filled with tonnes of water. I have climbed up and down lock gates that most people now only see as they pass them. I am unfit and overweight, but thought I remained strong enough to do the job. Despite some 'sticky' lock gates, this proved to be the case. Indeed the 12-year old boy (1.67m; size 42 feet) with us was able to operate them alone.

The trouble with the holiday was not the mechanics, it was the people.  It was the not so wonderful British public who cannot let anyone pass without making some jibe or instructing them about how pathetic they are or simply insulting them.  When you are in a hire boat, you are the lowest of the low.  The company you are hiring from has its logo, its name and telephone number emblazoned on the boat.  Everyone knows precisely where you have come from and that you are not a 'proper' boater despite all the exhortations in the canal associated publications that people like us are an important source of revenue for the upkeep of the canals and for restoring the many miles of canal that still remained disused.  However, the British cannot stop themselves and it even seems the hobby for people to hang around locks simply to shout advice/abuse.  Within the first hour you get used to person after person telling you exactly what you have been told in the training you have received.  You smile and nod thanks.  However, this does not seem to be enough.  The people seem to want you to bow down and kiss their boots for the wonderful enlightenment they have given across.

We had a Dutchman not even bother to talk to us, but in the middle of us operating a lock simply walk up and take over.  I stepped back trying to stay calm and not say anything.  By dropping the vent (the piece in a lock gate that lets the water in or out) early, he actually made our job harder.  We had people bellowing at us that we were not doing it the 'correct' way, even when we were in fact the right.  One man became indignant when we started to use the barge pole to move the front of the boat away from the bank, though that is its purpose.  He insisted that the 12-year old insert his foot between the side of the boat and the lock wall, even though this risked it becoming crushed.  He would not accept our rebuffs.  We had people trying to race into a lock before we had exited it, making it far harder for the pilot, only a few days into driving anything let alone a 33m boat.  We had people 'speed' (if you can call 8kph speeding) past us, and they scowling at us when their wash meant we were sucked into buffing the stern of their boat. Always we were deemed to be on the 'wrong' side or opening the lock too fast or too slowly.  We were even chided for 'not having come far today' as if there is a set distance you must cover every hour to be deemed an appropriate boater.

Every passage through a lock we made, every peg we hammered into the ground, every knot we tied was judged as having failed and we were told very vocally that that was the case.  I tried to throw one rope aboard the boat, missed and cursed.  This resulted in a woman pursuing us for 1Km down the canal, bringing with her the representative of the boat company we had hired it from to harangue us for ten minutes about appropriate language.  Clearly you are not permitted to 'swear like a bargee' (i.e. someone operating a barge, a commercial version of a canal boat) however, the locals are into 'trad' boating.  To be told off for swearing such distance from the incident made me feel like a child.  I swallowed all the abuse, all the snootiness, all the patronising behaviour, all the haranguing, all the people pushing their way in to take over my task and all of this with the expectation that I would be grateful for their intervention.  I feel utterly debased from my five days on the boat.  I feel as if I have given up all dignity, all initiative and am fit only to be ordered around by people apparently so superior to me.  As you can imagine, I snapped and abandoned the boat.  No-one else would come with me.

I returned to the yard where we had started from.  The woman on duty was surprised to see me leaving.  She has the faith that canal holidays are the very best that anyone could have and was unable to tolerate the fact that someone was having such a humiliating time that they had to go home early.  Of course, I have absolutely no interest in going nowhere near a canal ever again and will be happy if they all fade back into blocked up obscurity where they should have been left.  Dried out they could have provided decent roads between many towns.  The British (plus representatives of the Dutch, German and even Canadian populations) have to bring their egos and their suppression of people around them to everything they do.  You see it constantly when driving; you now see it if you ever dare venture out on a bicycle; I am sure you have long seen it on the golf course or the tennis/squash court.  They cannot be happy unless they are pressing someone else down and not just with a simple cutting remark but with sustained abuse, at best patronising; at worse insulting.  If you are thinking of a canal boat holiday, I would utterly advise against it unless you have skin as thick as a rhino or enjoy being made to feel small on an hour-by-hour basis.  The alternative is to go to another country where you do not speak the language and when treated this way simply plead lack of comprehension.

What Annoys Me About ... Applying for a Job

I have always said that if moaning was an Olympic sport the UK would win gold every time. British people love sitting or standing around waiting and complaining about the service/the weather/foreigners/the cost of living/youth today, etc., etc. A very popular television series was 'Grumpy Old Men' which featured middle aged male celebrities facing a TV camera and complaining about things. This spawned the even more successful 'Grumpy Old Women' which amazingly has now also become a stage show. Yes, British people will pay to watch three middle-aged women sitting on a stage complaining about things. For the British it is not an issue of Schadenfreude it is the reverse more about proving we are actually worse off than other people, you could term it Schadenzorn. Perversely I think it gives British sense of being more moral, it is like flagellation in Christianity and Islam, the perception that those who suffer most are the more holy and this in turn allows them the power to judge those who are less holy.

Probably the best summing up of this attitude in the Monty Python sketch titled 'The Four Yorkshiremen', (northern English are probably the most accomplished complainers in the British Isles). In the sketch, four well-off middle-aged men seek to outdo each other in describing how bleak their youth was ending up with the following lines:

Right! I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay millowner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!

Aah, you trying to tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you!

Maybe Schadenzorn is wrong, it is not an anger about the suffering it is actually a pride in it: Schadenstolz. Sorry, I am getting well off track, this was not meant to be an analysis of the British psyche, rather I sought to contextualise this series of postings I am initiating today. I soon turn 40 which is the official start of middle age and as my life expectancy is shorter than average I see nothing wrong with starting my middle age a little sooner and indulging in the right to moan, that that status gives me.

Today I am going to look at things that annoy me, at times infuriate me, about applying for jobs. Since 1998 I have had ten jobs, so am averaging just over one per year at the moment. In the UK it is common these days to get short-term contracts and it is rare to be employed on any job for more than two years. I had three jobs for the same company over a two-and-a-half year period and was always on weekly contracts, they could lay me off at the end of each week if they chose; naturally this made it difficult to plan ahead and myself and the 100 other staff on such terms never dared take a holiday or fall sick. On average I get 1 interview for every 25 job applications I make and I get a job for every 120 applications I make, so I average around 4-5 interviews each time I am out of work. Only once in my life have I managed to get a job somewhere near where I wanted to live and that was with this current job and even then my house is 30 miles (48Km) from where the company is located, but that is a common problem in the UK as the rent is often highest where there are jobs. On all other occasions I have been buffeted from town to town as work has turned up which is why I ended up in Milton Keynes a town I otherwise would have stayed clear of. Obviously I recognise that I have very little control over my career or where I live, but in all this experience I have encountered a range of incompetent and unpleasant behaviour that just makes all of that worse, I will list a few of the incidents that I can remember.

• Having to make 8 copies of the application form and pay for the postage to send them all in. I thought I was lucky when a company asked for only 4 copies. Do companies not have photocopiers of their own?
• Companies, and this is very common, never telling you if you have got the job or not and being very vague about when the deadline has passed; conversely companies who wait 3-4 weeks before telling you that you actually have the job.
• Companies who send out the wrong time on their letters for interviews so when you turn up they have all gone to lunch and you look stupid even when you have the written proof that they got it wrong; of course then they have no time to fit you in.
• Companies who admit at the end of the interview that actually you never stood a chance of getting the job that you were simply there 'to make up the numbers' that their company rules require. [I was astounded that they were so callous as to admit this, I would have been happier to have been deluded that I was an actual contender.]
• Companies who will not accept you because you do not use Powerpoint in your presentation even when it is not appropriate for what you are presenting.
• Companies that tell you that you are over-qualified for a job. Who defines this? Anyway, maybe you are looking to downsize or have particular reason to want to work for the company (most people working in television and radio are over-qualified but want to be in the media) or in a particular town and surely, is it not a good thing for them to get a well qualified person at the standard rate. [Behind this is the widespread English (not Scottish) resentment of learning which is another topic for complaint].
• Companies that tell you they are not certain if you will ever be a 'proper' lawyer/accountant/official/sweeper no matter how hard you try, as if there is an Elect that you are either born into or otherwise stand no chance of entering. [This was made clear to me at the company I had worked for on short-term contracts for 2.5 years after I had applied for 6 longer-term vacancies at the company. Though I had been doing the job it was felt I was told my answers were clever but I would not get the post as I was not a 'proper' worker for the company and should give up applying; with such attitudes I did. I heard them discussing another colleague in similar terms. They were uncertain if she was a 'proper' official and never discussed her skills or capability of doing the job.]
• They tell you your CV was bad but never indicate in which way it is bad. If you ask them what was wrong with it they can never say. The weirdest incident of this was at a company which had employed me 2 years earlier on a 2-year contract and at the time said I was the outright choice. I applied for a job within the same company for another 2 years using the same CV as I had originally except with the addition of 2 years' experience working for them. They said this CV was terrible and when I asked why it was so much worse than it had been 2 years before when it had won me the job they did not know what to say and blamed it on 'fashions' in CV writing that I was oblivious to. Companies are supposed to give feedback on interviews and most promise it, but such feedback is frustrating and useless.
• Your tie was not done up tightly enough in the interview (this at an internal job interview) so you did not get the job. Following this comment which was the only criticism and sexist as the women candidates did not wear ties, I actually had official training on how to tie a tie the British civil service way (and this was in the 21st century, not the 19th!).
• Poor interviewing: people sitting so you have to twist around to see them; reading questions in a monotone from a list; paying no attention to what you have said; getting confused in themselves about their own roles in the company. People are supposed to be trained to interview. The interviewee has put a lot of work into performing at their best in an interview at least you can do is match it. Employers forget that the best interviewees are testing out the company too and may turn the company down even if it wants to appoint them.
• Once you are in a post and ask if you will receive training now that new systems are being introduced being told that there is no need for you to be trained, they will simply employ someone in your place with the relevant skills. Again a very British attitude that training is always the responsibility of other people not the company and that staff are to be picked up and discarded with no concern for the human cost or the benefits of developing staff the company already employs.

Recruitment in the UK is handled very poorly and so wastes time and money for companies. There is a sense lingering from the 1980s that the companies that do best are those which can pick up and drop workers month by month, neglecting that countries like Japan which continues to prosper and upcoming economies like China and India, keep their employees and develop them, it is not only beneficial for your company but for your country's economy as a whole. As I age, it is going to get even harder to get and hold work and I envisage sitting here in 2016 having had at least another ten jobs and have seen a score more incidences of poor company behaviour when it comes to job applicants.

The British and Foreign Languages

Given that in the UK at any one time you are usually an hour or less flight time to a country which speaks a different language; in parts of Kent you can even see France, it seems odd that the UK has such a poor record in speaking languages. I can understand the difficulty if you live say somewhere in Nebraska or in Alice Springs, but leaving my house now I could be in a foreign country quicker than I could be in Scotland. London is actually closer to Prague than many Scottish islands and closer to Berlin than it is to the Shetland Islands. Yet, when travelling you find most British people have no grasp of a single other language. Contrast this to people you meet from the rest of Western Europe who generally have English in addition to their own language, and often have German or Russian or French too. Many Spanish speak Italian and vice versa; Finns are brought up speaking their own language and Swedish from the start. Of course a lot of British people or their parents or grandparents come from another country and speak languages such as Urdu, Hindi, Cantonese. However, even among such communities it is common within a couple of generations for people to lose knowledge of this kind. There are British people with language skills, but they are seen as eccentric. The British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden (1955-57) spoke fluent Arabic and Farsi at a time when the British were having difficulties with Egypt (Arabic speaking) and Iran (Farsi speaking), so he could have addressed these people in their own language, understood nationalist radio broadcasts, etc. Yet, he never revealed this ability publicly because he knew it would make him appear suspect in the eyes of the British population.

Why are the bulk of the British so poor at languages? Is it simply a fear of appearing 'suspect'? You see them failing to grasp things or even have a smattering of local languages and we are not talking about ones which are far away such as Arabic or Japanese, but ones that are in close proximity, such as French and German. Some (Anglo-Saxon) Americans can be as bad, but these days more and more of them can speak Spanish at least. Is the British problem that so many people speak English? Apparently 380 million people have it as their first language, and primarily because of US culture, it is dominant across the world in pop music and movies, and so it is usurprising that a fifth of the world's population (about 1.3 billion people) can speak English to some degree or another. So does this simply make us lazy? Is it a hangover of British imperialism? Whilst checking some facts for this post I came across blog entries asking why British school children should bother learning any foreign languages. If at most you have to wait until the fifth person comes along to get someone to speak to you in English, I guess that is a fair argument. However, it is one I will contest, if you give me a moment.

One reason why the British are so poor at languages is that they start late. If you begin before the age of 8, learning any foreign language you will find it far easier to develop that language or pick up another. However, until recently most British schools started no languages until a child turned 11. This has improved. However, if the parents speak no foreign language there is no support for the child's study at home in the way there is with things like English and Mathematics. If you go to a university as I have often done, you will find that many of the students who do well in languages have parents of different nationalities, I have encountered many with one French and one British parent or even one Chilean and one Norwegian in one woman's case. In the latter case she was operating in a third language, English. It is far rarer to find children of British-British parents with any foreign language skill. The situation has deteriorated since the government stopped making any languages compulsory once pupils turned 14; now they are backtracking furiously because recruitment on to language courses at higher levels, even GCSE (the examinations at 16 years old) which is very basic conversation level, were falling sharply.

So British people do not exposed to languages much at school. They do not seem to pick them up elsewhere either. This is despite the fact that the ownership by Britons of homes in France and Spain has reached high levels (250,000 houses in France are now owned by British people). I think this can be explained by the fact that the British form enclaves in which they eat, sleep and speak English. Talking with a British builder's merchant who now runs his business in Bordeaux, he said that there (which unlike regions such as Normandy or the Dordogne is not renowned for having lots of British) he never spoke French as all his customers were either British builders working in the region or British home owners. (As an aside when the British complain about immigrants in the UK they should remember that 1 in 10 of the British population now lives outside the UK; though still not learning the local language).

Another reason why British people do not grasp foreign languages is that there is a real snobbery. In the UK someone will ask you if you speak a language, if you say 'yes' they assume you can speak it perfectly and will get angry if you make any mistakes; even, as is common they know no foreign languages. It is all or nothing for the British in contrast to much of the world, who as someone recently noted, 'get by in bad English' when they do not have a common language. Yet another factor, certainly in contrast with neighbouring countries in Europe, you cannot pick up any foreign television channels in the UK. In contrast many Dutch, Belgians and French write in to programmes shown on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation).

Yet another reason I have had suggested to me is that 'all the intelligent British people have left the UK'. This argument goes along the lines that with migration to the empire in the 19th and early 20th century and to the Commonwealth and especially to the USA after the Second World War (the so-called 'Brain Drain') and now with middle and upper class people choosing to live abroad (saying which when in Milton Keynes you would encounter people who commuted from Caen in France because with budget airlines the combined flight and coach ride to reach the city was £16 (€23; US$32) compared to £36 (€52; US$72) for the train journey from London), the argument is that those with the intellectual ability to grasp foreign languages have left. They have been replaced by the people with 'get up and go' from South Asia and now Eastern Europe. Certainly, if you look at successful businesses in post-1945 Britain many have been founded by immigrants or first generation settlers.

Why does all of this matter? If the British in the UK are the dim leftovers who rarely travel abroad and when they do go only to British enclaves why do they need foreign languages? It is about more than the language, it is about the mentality and analysis that knowing another language provides. As I age my memory is deteriorating rapidly, so I have forgotten so much of what I learned when younger, but I have been having ago at learning Mandarin Chinese and I have found out interesting things about its sentence structure. Questions are sentences with a question word put at the end. In English we would say 'Are you hungry?' in Mandarin it would work out 'Hungry, are you?'; 'Is it raining?'; 'Raining, is it?' and so on. (Someone said to me today it is speaking like Yoda from the 'Star Wars' movies, and that is the case, because Yoda intentionally is supposed to be a sage and in the West we often see sages as being Oriental, hence such a sentence structure). Now, people say to me, 'Chinese people never ask any questions' and no I know why this appears to be the case. If I asked you 'Are you ready? Do you have any questions?' and you are Chinese you have to track down the actual question word and then make your own question sentence, bringing on board all your vocabulary, but getting it in the backward questioning way that us English speakers like. By the time you have done that the average English speaker has assumed you have no questions and have moved on.

So, my argument is, that until you begin to learn another language, you do not come to understand the other ways in which people of the world structure their thinking. Neither do you know how hard it is to get across what you want to say and the embarrassment of getting it wrong. Someone who bellows all the time in English is never going to appreciate such perspectives. It allows them to make sweeping judgements about other people's attitudes and so they see hostility rather than co-operation. Individuals do not notice that the best jobs are now going to educated people from continental Europe who speak two or three languages and British society, increasingly uneasy with dealing with the rest of the EU let alone markets in China and elsewhere, is shutting itself off from both intellectual and financial benefits.