Tea For The Tillerman , please

FlyingTalkers By Geoffrey Arend

One of the joys of Summer, aside from the beach and the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations and warmed up weather and outside get-togethers is cruising along with all of the same, during August, on a long, slow languorous glide, like the water ride at Palisade’s Park into September. No need to rush, we have time.

Speaking of cruising there seems to be a lot of that going on right now. No need to blush either, boy: we have some other game in mind… The word cruising as well as the world of cruising hold some glamour, in particular in summer, although I can hardly imagine climbing aboard any ship with several thousand people onboard these days or doing anything unexpected now that we are all so much older and wiser, after COVID especially, right?

Elsewhere the pencil and the sword, thin river-boats of Viking Cruises all over Europe hold some allure even here in North America, but they seem to be less daunting, a bit more manageable today than they would have in Lindisfarne about 1000 years ago. We are telling a tale of swift development in logistics and industry, far from battle and invasion.

Great that YouTube and Amazon Prime TV here in the USA have picked up the narrow-boat phenomenon going on in the UK.

Small boats, in fact barges of historical nature, carrying mostly coal in the past, are a history lesson in cargo transportation in the land where you can ply the over 4,000 miles of canals and imagine how these waterways and former tow paths sparked the Industrial Revolution, the Victorian Era and in fact were key in making Great Britain a world power.

Actually the Thames remains today an antidote to London’s stifling traffic for some selected operators and as much as London, Amsterdam and New York have shaped global trade in the last four centuries, both grand and mean, depending… there are still so many smaller details in the waterways of Anglia that their full story cannot be entirely told.

For me especially, during the Dog Days with heavy rain here in New York City recently, confined indoors by the weather, watching a You Tube sponsored series titled “Travels by Narrowboat” for a couple of sessions was informative and fun.