Narrow Margins by Marie Browne Page A

first lock.
    Watching the harassed youth workers rushing about, trying to stop the high-spirited lads from pushing each other into the canal, it struck me that it was an unlikely crowd to restore my faith in human nature after the earlier confrontation; but restore it they had. Maybe if there had been people like these long-suffering and ever-hopeful youth workers in Mr Blobby’s past, his current personality might never have existed at all.
    At the bottom of the flight of locks, a cold wind had picked up and it had started to rain. We found the first place into which we could drive a mooring stake and there we stayed, snug in our warm boat, listening to the wind, rain and the occasional grumble of thunder.
    Mooring up on a whim had seemed very romantic at the time and it was only when we poked our heads out of the boat first thing the next morning that we found that we had moored about 50 yards away from a bend in the M1. Sticking our heads out of the boat, we were buffeted by the roar of the traffic and deduced that it may not have been thunder at all. But the previous night’s weather, real or motorised, was completely forgotten as we settled down to make a full cooked breakfast only to discover that we had forgotten to bring a can opener.

Chapter Nine
A Can Opener – a Can Opener – 
My Kingdom for a ...
    S EPTEMBER 10 DAWNED BRIGHT and blue, filled with the promise of a completely lock-free day. However, the sunshine lasted for exactly 20 minutes before the rain, feeling it hadn’t quite expressed itself adequately the night before, decided to return for an encore. Geoff clattered off down the boat to wade through our boxes in search of waterproof clothing, and I approached the diesel hob with some trepidation. Half an hour later, life on board Happy was ... not.
    Geoff had worked out that we had carefully packed all the waterproof clothing in a box, marked it up with fluorescent ink and then just as carefully failed to read it and had stuffed it into storage with, no doubt, other carefully marked-up boxes containing things we needed; the can opener had probably climbed in by itself just to irritate me. I had had a futile 30 minutes trying to get our newly ‘fixed’ hob to light, then stay alight, and then stop howling, and I had also cut myself trying to get into a can of cheap beans with a chisel and hammer.
    â€˜What’s going on?’ Geoff yelled at me over the screaming of the hob. Biting down another curse, I stopped hopping around the kitchen in pain and waved my bleeding hand at him in a complete snit.
    â€˜This stupid cooker won’t light and then when it finally does light, it just makes this horrible noise. I thought those two idiots had fixed it – what the hell’s the matter with it?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Geoff yelled back over the banshee-like howling, ‘I’m not a cooker engineer.’ The howling reached new heights and I took my typical line with technology and started thumping it with a wooden spoon. Geoff reached past me and just turned it off, then wrestled the spoon out of my grasp and held it out of reach. A diesel hob does not turn off quickly due to the glow plug; it should just gently cool down and then turn itself off completely. This one just screamed until it had no more energy and then whimpered out into oblivion.
    As the noise dwindled away, Geoff and I stood, alternately staring at the hob and glaring at each other. Sam wandered into the kitchen with a pile of Lego.
    â€˜I’m hungry,’ he announced.
    â€˜Tough,’ both Geoff and I snapped. Sam, not at all sure why he was being shouted at, looked up from whatever fantastic monster he had been building, took one look at my blood-covered face (I had used my cut hand to push my hair out of my eyes while shouting at Geoff), burst into tears and rushed off down the boat. Geoff hurried after him to apologise and assure him it wasn’t his fault and I