As boat owners, we’ve finished with the business of wandering round the boat show aimlessly looking at demonstrations of drilling upside down, turning your house into a power generation installation, or clever appliances to help you remove a hot kettle from the top of the roller reefing in a hurricane. These days we want stuff. We have a budget and we’re in the market. We have purpose, we have The List.
For me shopping is like an Umberto Eco novel. I know that other people get a lot of enjoyment from it, I understand that it often centres around something I am interested in, and I realise that devoting time to it will likely leave me in an improved position; but I am not well versed in the mechanics of the process and I find it difficult to get into.
Spaniel OTOH, is a World Class Shopper. If she was a tennis player at the same level she would be Federer – were she into Motor Sport, she’d be Vetel (or maybe Lewis Hamilton) and if she played Darts, she’d be single... but I digress. There was no time to waste. Into the huge North Hall she strode, purse clutched tightly and head held high – tasting the air like a viper and preparing to strike with terrifying speed at whoever held the best value supplies of Cock Bungs. These are not, as you’d perhaps imagine, a facsimile of Russell Brand offering an ill- advised bribe to an undercover tabloid reporter, but instead a tapered piece of softwood intended for insertion into a leaking valve.
I followed behind like a junior apprentice, carrying The List.
The List was made out with the exact specification, size and price of the items we were looking for. If The List said 18mm Navy, three-strand, polyester mooring line, then woe-betide any foolish sailor who inadvertently paused at a display of 16mm warp, or ran an idle hand across any other rope of the wrong weave or colour. He was liable to be sharply reminded to stick strictly to The List.
We started off fairly gently at the Sheets, Lines and Halyards department and then hopped across to Hardware where we furnished ourselves with knitted nylon fender socks of an appropriate gauge. In the process we learned amongst other things, that Basildon is the UK capital of bilge pumps and that Alanis Morissette is the public face of the leading collapsible bucket manufacturer. We then stepped it up a gear and went straight into Dinghies.
This is where the wheels came off.
We spent an hour at the Dinghy stand being upsold from our initial choice, (which was a glorified LI-LO fitted with an electric strimmer engine) to a six seat, sub-woofer equipped RIB with five-point racing harnesses and dual Mercury 300hp outboard engines. This boat menaced into one’s ownership with certification from the CIA to say that it qualified as Military Hardware and was therefore subject to multiple export restrictions. Breach of any of these would earn the owner no less than a fourteen year (no-remission) stretch in the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, Nashville, Tennessee.
This was most definitely not on The List.
I was about to sign on the dotted line (thereby binding our house and all our worldly possessions to a staggering marine mortgage that continued into the next geological epoch at 10% above base) when Spaniel recovered her focus and suggested we go for a cup of tea first. We stumbled away from the stand, heads rapidly clearing and feeling as though we had been drugged and fallen down the rabbit hole. As we walked and talked we realised that with a beam of only 11ft 6” at her widest GB-SUE would probably balk at having a 28ft RIB strapped across her arse.
We decided to look for something more suitable and almost immediately came across a 2.3m Chinese-made inflatable that came with a warranty and in a choice of colours. Best of all - it was on sale for less than our budget.
“That’s the type of thing,” exclaimed Spaniel, “where’s the list?”
As I went through the motions of emptying my pockets I experienced the same sinking feeling that I felt after using my Stanley knife to score a straight line on the base of the liferaft.
“I left it on the dinghy stand,” I confessed.
A halt was called to the proceedings whilst we debated what to do. It was 3pm – we could go back to aimless wandering, trying to remember what we’d written: “Did we need an Eritrean Courtesy flag Hon?" or we could cut our losses and get out early, miss the traffic and come back the following weekend making an early start with a New List.
Filled with a revived sense of ambition and purpose we headed for the exit. On the way out (tucked away in a corner as though it had sneaked past security to get in) we noticed a Vintners.
“Shall we just have one little sample?” I said, gazing at the line of opened bottles, “After all, we do deserve it for not buying that RIB.”
Spaniel – herself an expert at twisted logic, readily acquiesced and we pulled up a bar stool and prepared to have a few drinks at someone else’s expense. I tasted an agreeable Portuguese red and wondered how many free-loaders like us they had to serve it to before they sold a bottle. I was safe from making a purchase because I knew that Spaniel had the credit card and she knew as well I did that we had a first class off-licence just yards from our front door at home.
An hour later we left, £245 poorer and the temporarily cheery owners of half a case of white port and a variety pack of Prosecco, none of which we had intended to buy, and, as I reminded her, none of which had previously appeared on the absent document.“Bollocks to The List. Let’s go and get pissed.” she said.
I thought that was as good a motto for the day as any - particularly as it rhymed, and I repeated it to myself silently as we pointed the car north and drove home to follow her orders.
