Stepping out

I was flicking through this month’s Waterways World the other day and ogling the boat porn that was to be found in the Crick Show report. Lots of very nice looking boats, which appeared remarkably spacious. Now I’m sure some of that was down to the wide angle lens trickery of the camera but equally things were not touching other things, you could see the floor, every interior had a light and airy feel to it. Put another way, you’d feel confident swinging a few cats around whereas with mine, I’d hesitate to risk a gerbil. Perhaps it might also have something to do with the inevitable minimalism of today’s show boat contrasting with the triumphal ‘maximalism’ of dog bed central here.

One other thing caught my eye and that was the phenomenon of the ‘side hatch as glorified window’. Where were the steps? The word hatch would seem to intimate that it’s something you go through and both of ours encourage entry and egress with nice, chunky steps beneath. Extremely handy when you want to leave and simply don’t fancy vaulting five dogs to get out the front or back – and even better when you want to come back in and you catch them unawares because they’re expecting you to come through the front like normal people. The one slight problem is that we put things on the steps, so they technically become shelves. Every time we go out, we tend to stand on the Soreen so that by the end of the week, we have a malt loaf that’s 1mm thick and 2 feet wide. No good for buttering but quite good as a Frisbee...