This Is the Life Read Online Free PDF

separate Quebec. They wouldn’t speak English to you and made out that they didn’t know any, though they did and spoke it like natives when people weren’t looking. Louis had to learn some French or they’d have left him out of all the conversations. He got quite fluent as far as I know, though he spoke it with a Canadian accent.
    But things went to pot after a few years. Louis got his degree and went to work for a mining company out in the sticks. Chancelle got more deeply involved in French Canadian politics, and she and Louis only saw each other at weekends. She began an affair with another French Canadian who was also active on the political front (and, no doubt, the sexual one) and spoke better French than Louis did.
    Louis got disillusioned and disgusted and came back home. Like most academically inclined people who don’t know what to do with themselves, he decided to return to university. So he studied for an engineering diploma this time, and when he got it, he moved up north and worked in a straight and proper job for a while, but he got disillusioned and disgusted, as they didn’t know how to run a business and there was too much politics and the senior management were wankers.
    So he took his savings and bought a narrow boat and sailed it down the canal to Bristol. He moored up in the harbor half a mile from the flat I lived in with a woman I had fallen in love with, on account of—amongst other things—her Scottish accent. The trouble was, she was an artist, and her friends were artists, and Louis lived on a boat now, and he got into crafts and furniture-making and rented a small workshop by the docks. So everyone was a bohemian apart from me, and I had to get up on Monday mornings and go to work, as I was the one paying the rent.
    This narrow boat was the first of Louis’s wrecks. It neededso much work done to it, it would have been easier to start from scratch and build a new one. It had once been a fireboat on the Birmingham Canal. Its engine was situated in the middle of the boat, instead of at one end, which is more usual, and it had two driveshafts, so that the boat could go in either direction without the need to turn it around—which can be difficult in a narrow canal when you’re in a hurry to put out a fire.
    There was no comfort in that boat at all, just a couple of hard bunks and a stove to cook beans on.
    â€œIt’s a doer-upper,” Louis told me. “What do you think?”
    â€œI think,” I told him, “that the trouble with you and your doer-uppers, Louis, is that you never do do them up. You never get around to it, do you? You lose interest and start on something else, and you don’t finish that either. Because you lose interest again and—”
    â€œI’m thinking of doing it out in mahogany,” Louis said. “I’ll put some partition walls up and get it divided into rooms. Bathroom here, galley there, living quarters here, guest bedroom there.”
    â€œWhere are you putting the game room, spa, and indoor swimming area, Louis?” I asked. But he ignored me as if I hadn’t spoken.
    â€œIt’s going to be something special once it’s done.”
    â€œIt’ll be something special if it ever does get done. This is the story of your life to date, Louis,” I said. “Things taken on and not seen through. Great projects started and never completed. Remember that astronomical telescope you were going to make when we were kids?”
    â€œI made a start on it but was trammeled by lack of proper equipment,” he said.
    â€œLouis,” I reminded him, “you were going to grind yourown lenses. And the pieces of glass were a yard across and six inches thick.”
    â€œIf I was doing it today, I’d do it differently,” Louis said.
    â€œOkay, Louis. If you really want my opinion—and I know you don’t—the first thing I’d do to this boat if I were