If there is one thing I have learned (being an 80s child) which has been highlighted by this pandemic is that people have an intrinsic fear of the unknown. They like to build a strong castle and stare out via social media through their own little arrow slits at an ever-changing landscape but with a feeling of safety and security. I throw this in because looking at social media it would appear that some people possibly spend far too long or worse become obsessed with boat ownership, striving for perfection that cannot be reached but feeling safe and secure each weekend in familiar surroundings.

Ok where is this psychology lesson leading us? We all need different challenges in life and different interests. One of mine has always been motorbikes. So we need a way of combining boating and motorcycles, but first we need to sort out Dawntreader's interior as cheaply and quickly as possible because now when I do go there at 6 o'clock on a Friday night I won't be leaving until Monday morning. Nor can I leave the boat for more than say 20 minutes during that time.

On with the show.

I am bored of painting and luckily stumbled on vinyl sheeting (sticky back plastic to you and I). It has transformed the interior: glue on some angle plastic here and there and the boat suddenly looks almost new.

It comes in a vast array of colours and styles but I have gone for oak, plain white and pine.

Top tip is to use an old hair dryer to warm it up and using the special felt squeegee tool keep working out the air bubbles.

It’s so good, so cheap and so instant that you soon get hooked on it.

To the point I have completely remodelled the shower in pine effect over the old tiles for less than 20 quid.

One issue with boats is that we have leftovers from DIY projects at home and start using them on board and nothing matches or blends in. Covering my cheap hard board bunk sides with Wood effect sticky back plastic has hidden some real sins and is waterproof to boot. The effect has knocked 20 years off the age of the boat.

Now I need somewhere really comfy to sit and doze during the day, for this idea of combining motorbikes and boating will mean that on occasion I will still be up at three am.

My chairs that I built to recline into a day bed have been perfect for this but needed extra cushions, so I bought Mrs W a new sofa for forty quid and took the cushions from our old one. A bread knife trims the foam to the exact size and the old Singer hand sewing machine deals with the rest.

Around the front window was finally sorted by using cheap tongue and groove stuck on with resin adhesive and given plenty of coats of varnish to stop it warping.

Why am I doing all of this? Because I am going to be staring at it for 48 hrs on end, and for once I am doing it to make me feel better and not to please or impress someone else. I finished it off with some cheap plastic trim.

I need a desk or table to work from and the fold down cockpit picnic table has been ideal, stowing easily out of the way and can be moved about – this is so often overlooked when thinking about interiors.  I can take those folding bunk frames I made out into the cockpit and put my feet up, making an endless combination of seating as required. Rather than the static 4 -seater that takes up a third of an interior and no one is really comfy eating off.

Next, I need enough power for lap top, phone etc.

I have read reams on this with cleaver sine wave invertors etc., yeah I haven’t got time.

So some cheapish battery packs , enough to last a weekend, and I'm ready to go.

Then decent lighting: a leading internet seller had some plug-in map lights for cars going cheap - I suppose sat-navs have made them redundant - so I snapped them up.

They can be plugged into a variety of cigarette lighter sockets around the boat, giving me ample movable spot lamps depending on where I am on board.

Ok, so what am I doing with motorbikes and boats?

I am a Blood Bike volunteer and on the weekends that I am acting as Co Ordinator,  I lock myself on DT and respond to 60 odd calls for help from hospitals all around Somerset on a 24 hour basis.

Dt has been an ideal base for this , it's out the way, has a good phone signal, and doesn’t wake Mrs W up at 3 am!

It makes me use the boat in a completely different way, which means you think about what you need in a completely different way and where you need it - even stupid things like hand grips by the door as you hurtle through to answer an emergency phone call or a simple master switch by the bunk side to hit the lights when trying to record who where and what at silly o’clock.

And finally, when the sheer chaos and exhilaration of a busy weekend is over there is a stronger connection between boat and owner, as you feel you have been on a long voyage and the boat provided the comforting factor of a known and safe world.

Preston on the Hill, as it was then known, was a small hamlet of no particular importance sat by the old Roman road to Chester, and it was catapulted into activity in the middle of the 18th century with the coming of the canals and the joining of the Trent and Mersey and Bridgewater canals deep under the soil in the middle of a tunnel.

It was momentous. Cargo from as far south as Cornwall could now be brought up without the risk of having to put to sea, and coal from the north started funnelling down to fuel the furnaces of the Midlands. Indeed, even before they started digging the tunnel there appears to have been a reasonable amount of cargo arriving for transhipment; the Duke had faced stiff opposition from Sir Richard Brooke at Norton Priory blocking the canal to Runcorn and, shrewd operator that he was, he simply outflanked Sir Richard  with an over-land transhipment past the Norton blockage in the comfortable knowledge that sooner or later the man would have to capitulate and let him dig his canal.

The Trent and Mersey was completed in 1777, so it isn’t beyond probability that the minute the first boat unloaded cargo at the wharf that someone threw up a shed or two to put it in. We certainly know that there was a clay warehouse built by 1785, and the passenger services were long set up by 1788, indicating at least one passenger building.

Passengers were a big part of the early work for the wharf, not least of all with the Duke's own passenger packet boats which shot up and down the Bridgewater behind 2 or 3 horses at a spanking trot. The Dukes boats were classy, sleek vessels with the infamous ‘packet boat blade’ fixed to their bows (ostensibly ready to slice through towlines that weren’t dropped fast enough but realistically more for show,) designed to carry 120 and 80 passengers respectively, but usually grossly overcrowded with lower class passengers clinging to the roof and praying for it not to rain.

Not only did the packet boats carry passengers, but the fly boats running out of Preston Brook did good trade in passengers too; a goodly number were smuggled from boat to boat with the money going straight into the crew's pockets,  but also some legitimately booked for travel. The most famous canal passenger the wharf is perhaps associated with is none other than the unfortunate Christina Collins, who boarded the Pickford’s flyboat bound for destiny right on our very own quayside in 1839.

By the time of the railways, the passengers were fading away, but cargo was far from gone. A boat due in at Preston Brook Wharf could be arriving either side of the canal on a stretch of land nearly a mile long.

Stables capable of hosting 40 or more horses stretched from by the Norton Junction to opposite a warehouse known as “The Dandy” (sited roughly where Midland Chandlers now stands), a company fire-engine was housed in its very own garage adjacent to a stretch of wharfmen’s cottages and a boatman’s hostel. The towpath was crowded out with cranes belonging to a small warehouse (nicknamed the Bell warehouse owing to the timing bell hung in its roof) before coming to a dead end at the door of an agent's office, while on the off-side the mishmash of mighty warehousing and offices (by now collectively known as the Preston Sheds) bustled around an engine house that plumed steam all day and night to power the cranes and machines.

Through the bridge and past the toll house, boats could be called to the railway departments on one side or the flour warehouse (now known as the Stafford warehouse because of its railway connection) on the other before stopping to be gauged so they could carry on to the tunnel.

A boater stopping at Preston Brook could avail themselves of the Floating Chapel tied near the junction, get their horse shod by a farrier and checked by a vet and send their child for an afternoon of schooling. There were also the usual boaters facilities; houses that took in boatmen’s laundry, ropemakers, harness fitters, shops and a pub.

The wharf’s fortunes began to wane by the first world war but carried on fairly steady trade until the 1930’s, when some of the buildings were knocked down to make way for the widening of the Chester road and they took away her steam engine.

It may even have been this loss of the mechanical power for hoists and pulleys that meant the site fell silent, with trade going round the junction to the Norton Warehouses instead. A brief resurrection of wharfage in the second world war apparently saw Lard being stored on site, but then all fell silent until the demolition teams moved in and flattened nearly 200 years worth of history in just a couple of months.

In 1971 the M56 motorway roared across the landscape and shortly afterwards the wharf  came back to life as the home of hire boats belonging to Claymoor Navigation. Claymoor held the site for nearly half a century, before it fell silent once again.

But now, under the idiosyncratic care of yours truly, the wharf is waking up again, ready to tell new stories as well old.

Check out the website!

So that’s it then...

Boris has given us his road map.

To be honest it looks like an A to Z of the North Circular that a toddler has scribbled over, but at least it’s a map. Things will gradually begin to open up.

Of course all the things we really want to do, like go to the pub, pictures, football, theatre, etc., are pushed toward the back of the list, but hey - it’s a map.

Which all begs the question, ‘What did you do in the lockdown, Daddy?’

So sit here upon my knee my child, whilst I puff wistfully on my clay pipe and reminisce about the good old days.

the good old days...

And what days they were, eh?

We shall never see the like again.

We wore masks, sanitised our hands with alcohol rub until they were drunker than a hen night in Why Aye land and learnt the metric system at last - or at least that two metres was just about, appropriately, something like six feet and a bit. Give or take.

Meanwhile our lords and masters went into overdrive. Dominic pretending that he wasn’t really on his holibobs faked a trip to Specsavers. A cabinet minister's wife lined her pockets with our taxes supplying PPE which, rather like the government itself, was not fit for purpose. And poor old Boris, sick of being blamed for everything and anything became just that - sick - stricken by the very disease that he was trying to protect us all from by attempting to shake the hand of everyone in the country. Perhaps he’d caught a chill attempting to hide in a freezer.

Track and trace did nothing of the sort.

We sat at home and did nothing, saw no one and were careful to not touch our own face with our hands whilst simultaneously keeping a minimum of two metres from the cat, proud of ourselves for being so adept at multitasking.

We drank ourselves into oblivion whilst binge watching box set after box set and then so drunk on canned lager and cheap wine we forgot what we’d watched and went through them all again - backwards.

And we learned what it was like to be truly deprived as Corrie, EastEnders and Emmerdale slowly ground to a halt and we were forced to watch re-runs of Dirty Den and Ange struggling with the complexities of marriage, causing many of us to reflect on the merits of knife crime, poisoning and hiring a hitman.

Nervously, like frightened rabbits caught in the headlights we shuffled on to our doorsteps at regular intervals to give the NHS the clap.

We rushed out and bought a shiny new bike, because Boris bunged us a few bob to do so and rode it with vigour, determination and without due regard for the safety of others, until it started to rain and we chucked it, our helmets, fluorescent jackets, knee pads, elbow pads, emergency break down kit, into the shed with the intention of flogging it on eBay the next morning.

We blamed the Chinese, completely forgetting that Ozzie Osborn had been stuffing raw bat down his neck with no ill effects for years, watched in awe as Donald Trump eclipsed even the efforts of Boris, our own resident buffoon and completely forgot that we were supposed to be blaming him for Brexit.

And then, like a fog clearing, it came to an end and we all rushed out to ‘eat out to help out,’ while the pubs operated with reduced hours to compress us more densely into restricted spaces.

We hurtled around the shops (one way of course) blue in the face as we all tried desperately not to breathe lest we get infected and put a strain on the NHS which quite frankly needed the customers because no one seemed to be getting any illness that wasn’t directly linked in some way to Covid.

‘Been knocked over by a bus sir? Have you had a minor sniffle in the last twenty five years? You have? Sounds like Covid to me nurse. Book him in and phone Matt Hancock immediately.’

But, fools that we were, things weren’t getting better they were getting worse. The health experts tut-tutted, telling us that it was our own stupid fault, we’d brought it all on our own heads and totally deserved everything that we got. And those were just the experts on Facebook Tube. The experts in the media were almost wetting themselves in excitement. Nicky Campbell debated the subject endlessly on the radio, Robert Peston’s vowels got even more strangled by the day and dear old Laura Kuenssberg considered starting her own tv channel.

So they locked us down again so that we could stay at home an enjoy the frenzy.

‘It’ll be o.k.,’ Boris assured us, ‘It’ll all be over by Chrissymus, so we can look forward to that so long as we’re not too merry about it.’

I think they said something similar about the war.

And verily it came to pass that the great feasting and celebration for the birth of our Lord and saviour wast cancelled by Pontificating Boris forthwith and the plans and aspirations of the many were cast down into the eternal pit of despair ne’er to see the light of redemption again.

Bugger!

But at least Captain Sir Tom was still lapping his garden faster than Lewis Hamilton on a child’s tricycle. Irony of ironies that the new big C got him as he was busy doing what the government should have been doing all these years as he paid for the NHS.

And so it came to pass that lockdown v2.0 became lockdown v3.0 virtually overnight and the little children who had suffered to go to school one day were summarily incarcerated again overnight. Oh, and only stay local, commanded Boris as he circumnavigated the capital city on the Boris bike (a bit like the Batmobile but distinctly wobbly and with no dress sense).

a possible future...

But salvation was at hand.

In a dazzling move, which stunned the world and certainly the EU who we’d recently left although no one had noticed, we developed a vaccine.

In a move which left everyone totally gobsmacked, the government had ordered some. Bloody gazillions of  gallons of it. More doses than you could imagine. Not only that, but it had hedged its bets and also ordered gazillions of gallons of vaccines from other sources.

The EU caught short, chucked it’s teddy out of the pram and had a Paddy. Or not. Depending on which side of the Irish border you are.

Some of us, depressingly reminded exactly how old we are, have already got a little prick. Now, now missus, titter ye not!

We have to have another jab in 3 weeks, sorry, what’s that Boris? You meant months? Never mind we can see our holidays galloping over the horizon so we don’t care.