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chipped mugs depicting badly drawn, very kitsch cartoons (mostly of people falling into various locks around the country) and cheap cutlery were all stacked higgledy-piggledy on old, warped shelves that clung tenaciously at strange angles to the back wall of an open-fronted cupboard.
    The greasy, beige, faded curtains, which, at one time, I imagined, were patterned and cheerful, now hung lank and miserable from the four remaining hooks still attached to a tarnished fake brass curtain rail. Fixed at only one end, it and its resident curtains drooped sadly toward a floor resplendent with greasy, pitted, beige and brown 1970s classic lino.
    Happy Go Lucky was built in 1994, so the seventies decor struck me as a little odd. The whole thing had a horrible similarity in both furnishing and smell to that in my grandma’s flat just before she passed away. She had steadfastly refused to replace anything and had been living in the same surroundings for about 50 years.
    I wandered through the kitchen – this took about four steps – and into a seating area furnished with more greasy curtains in the same material, a very straight and hard-looking settle upholstered in a knobbly grey material with frayed edges that allowed the grubby foam beneath to leak through. The settle could just be seen, skulking, embarrassed, behind a wobbly-looking folding wooden table.
    To stop items sliding off the top, someone had fixed proud-standing strips of wood to each edge. As I couldn’t imagine that Happy Go Lucky ever had occasion to battle manfully through huge rolling waves while travelling at four miles an hour down glass-still canals, I could only assume the proud edges of the table were either merely decoration or put there as an irritant to anybody trying to clean the wretched thing.
    Trying to move the table out of the way without having to actually touch it, I lowered myself gingerly onto the settle and spent a couple of minutes studying the literature packed into the bookshelves on the opposite side of the boat.
    I assumed that holidays on board had been so boring that the books were there to stop the passengers committing mutiny. There was certainly no book less than ten years old. A collection of Dickensian Classics cosied up to the Great Book of Vampire Stories – this, in turn, was wedged beside a set of well-thumbed Mills and Boon love stories; a book for every taste, obviously.
    These packed shelves ran down the length of the boat; tens of feet of them, filled to overflowing with either novels or small books and pamphlets covering ‘Things to do on canals’. I was rather confused – as far as I was concerned, a canal holiday entailed getting on the boat; floating about a bit; getting off the boat; there couldn’t be much more to it than that, surely? However, the sheer amount of literature cluttering the insides of Happy gave me a bit of an insight that I might be mistaken and that a canal holiday could be much more exciting than I had ever imagined.
    Bored with looking at the books, and needing someone to pick an argument with, I went in search of Geoff and Sam. Choosing a door at random, I reached across the passageway and pushed it open to reveal a tiny bathroom.
    There was a small cream-coloured and yellow-stained toilet lurking in the corner, next to it was a shower, half hidden behind a faded and mould-ridden curtain. At first glance I thought it strange that someone had decided to put a black carpet in the shower tray, but, on closer inspection, it turned out to be half an inch of stagnant water. A tiny sink attached at a slight angle on to the buckled and damp-stained wall opposite completed the ‘bathroom suite’. It made a perfect picture of decay and neglect which the smell did nothing to dispel. In fact, the whole thing presented the perfect site for a cholera-breeding program.
    There were six cabins, each boasting a double bed filling the space wall to wall, and a vanity unit