Narrow Margins by Marie Browne

overhanging trees swayed gently in a warm breeze shattering the sunlight and creating moving patterns on the water. It was very quiet after the hustle and bustle of Braunston. Geoff had decided that we would moor at the water point which was situated at the top of a seven-lock drop and all too soon the moorings appeared with another couple of boats already in residence.
    We brought Happy alongside without too much of a bump and got chatting to the holiday boaters who were already filling their water tank. After my altercation with Mr Blobby, I found myself worried and a little wary of these folk, especially as whimpering ninny was still firmly at the reins, but I needn’t have worried. It seemed as though fate had decided it was a day to experience extremes of character and these folk were as nice as Mr Blobby was foul.
    After chatting to them for a while, we found out they were youth workers piloting two boats (one of which they had lost) filled to the brim with inner-city teenage boys ‘experiencing the countryside’. We could hear lots of screams and thumps from the inside of their boat and, noticing our questioning glances, the youth workers informed us that the lads were getting ready to go to dinner at the pub over the lock for a last evening of revelry before they returned home. They always went to this pub as they had brought kids here for quite a few years and the landlord could ‘cope’. It occurred to me at that point that there are two sides to every coin; to allow inner-city teenage boys to experience the countryside, the countryside has to experience inner-city teenage boys and I’m still not convinced the experience is an equal one.
    All dressed up and ready for a ‘relaxing’ evening, the boys boiled out of the boat and hung about looking menacing. Sam chose this point to take an evening stroll as well; it took him all of two minutes to find a soul-mate in the shape of an 18-year-old lad called Jes with more tattoos and piercings than I have ever seen on one person before. Watching them closely, there was a sharp intake of breath from both Geoff and myself when Sam happily poked Jes in a lip piercing, but there was no explosion and after that they spent a happy half hour discussing each piercing and tattoo in depth:
    â€˜How much did that one hurt? Does it go right through?’
    The youth workers, after watching them both for a while, smiled and explained that Jes had a little brother who he had been missing, so he was probably enjoying himself, and we could see that Sam certainly was. The pile of clothing and the sounds of pained awe from Sam grew as Jes unveiled more and more of his coloured or pierced flesh. Jes was down to his shorts, when, laughing at something Sam had said to him, he looked up and caught my eye. I raised my eyebrows at him. He blushed and, looking down at himself, called a halt to the proceedings; I felt he had more to show, but had decided to keep it all under wraps for my sake.
    I was very grateful to him as I was unsure I could have coped with the subsequent questions from Sam who was obviously in complete awe and had found a hero. I listened to him cataloguing Jes’s decorations: ‘I’m going to have one of those, and one of those, and one of those ...’
    It was at this point we discovered the first of our ‘forgotten items’. Trying to fill Happy’s tank with our hose, we found that we were missing a specific nozzle that would attach our hose to the tap. Luckily the youth workers came to our rescue and lent us theirs.
    Since we had managed to reach the mooring much faster than expected, we decided to press on. As we waved goodbye and headed toward the top lock, their lost boat turned up with the occupants in fine form, waving, grinning and shouting loudly; ecstatic that they had caught up with the other part of their little band, but even in these high spirits they were quite happy to stand around and help us with our