Strange Cargo



I just heard a program on the radio that roused something long dormant within me...(ooer)
-the wish to travel to a distant shore on board a cargo ship (or, as I prefer to call them, a Banana Boat)

I think this would surely be a terrific way to travel, primarily for the selfish reason that there would be very little to do but stare out into the fathomless blue, read a mountain of books -
and play dangerous games of cards with scarred Lascars.

Perfect.

If it was a really big boat like a oil tanker, there might also be the chance to cycle round the deck, and discover if it was really true that big boats require 3 miles to stop. It would increase the excitement exponentially if you knew that the ship was carrying thousands of tonnes of some horrendously explosive material.

I would also spend as much time as I was allowed looking at the ships engine room and deck and just generally finding out how these amazing feats of engineering actually work.

Of course, knowing me, the card games would all go horribly wrong on the first evening, and I would spend the next two months hiding in a liferaft, surviving on a diet of raw sea birds, whilst murderous Latvian stevedors patrolled the ship with sharpened marlinspikes, baying for my blood...

9 comments:

Gareth Williams said...

And the piracy! Don't forget the pirates!

BTW I think the ship should be full of guano, which I would imagine would have explosive potential. (That would also mean guano pirates, sailing the high seas in search of something to perk up their Somalian allotments.)

May said...

There would be plenty of time to meditate. And then you'd avoid being suspended in the sky in a small iron box (a plane).

worm said...

yes I'm pretty sure a hold full of fermenting guano would only need a small flame in order to blow the ship sky high.

After a brief skirmish with AK-47's and a few deft swipes of my cutlass,
I would befriend the pirates by offering them their favourite cheese-

yarg.

worm said...

ps. hi may!

May said...

Hi, how are you?

worm said...

good! although life would of course be better if I was blogging this not from rainy england, but from the sunny deck of a cargo ship, having just repelled the somalian guano pirates with some cornish cheese

May said...

But perhaps if you were on the dirty cargo you'd miss rainy England and your cozy home.

Brit said...

I'd quite like to wear a red hat and join the crew of Cousteau's ship 'Calypso'. Or even better, the 'Belafonte' from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

worm said...

haha oh yes I would have loved to have been on the Calypso!!!