I think I'm addicted to videos of men living on narrowboats.
Matt gets hooked on watching YouTube series about men living on canal boats to escape stress and find utopian bliss.
My name is Matt and I'm addicted to watching YouTube video series about men making new lives for themselves on canal boats.
I don't know exactly how or when this addiction started. I remember late one night, perhaps during a covid lockdown, browsing the Amazon Prime Video listings to find something, anything that was new and unchallenging. The days and weeks were long and intense, and you switched on the TV for an escape at the end of the evening.
I ended up watching a whole season of "Britain by Narrowboat", which documents the journey of two men who sell their house and quit their jobs in order to become canal-based vloggers. The show tagline describes the premise as "a last-ditch attempt to save his mental health", referring to one half of the couple (who indeed experiences a breakdown while aboard his vessel).
Whatever floats your boat
I was hooked. To be slightly callous, I was less interested in watching this man's journey through his mental health recovery. I really just wanted to watch the soothing footage of Britain as seen from the deck of a narrowboat. Ducks paddle past the camera, long overhead shots feature a lazy narrowboat ambling towards a marina as the evening sunlight dapples the water and the sound of conversation from a nearby waterside pub echoes pleasingly. Sitting on my sofa, stressed and exhausted, this was a kind of utopian bliss.
Even the high-octane moments of drama were slow and low-key: witness the boat's propeller getting mildly tangled with some weeds! See the moment they had to merge into a river system and navigate safely into the quicker current! Watch as the newbie canal navigators figure out locks! Stressful it wasn't (perhaps it was for the two sailors, though).
This week I found myself doing it again, this time with another show (confusingly called "Travels by Narrowboat"). This show was a similar premise to the first one, but the main character featured strong "recently divorced energy" (sorry, mate) as he downsized into a narrowboat.
Maddy, my long-suffering partner, was watching me dredge the depths of Amazon Prime Video to discover this new show, and started laughing at me as I watched, rapt. "I've figured out why you like this stuff", she told me. "It's because you just want to be alone". Indeed, watching this chap boringly explain his boat and its setup really did appeal to me.
Don't get me wrong: I don't want to wave goodbye to my family and move into a cramped narrowboat and sail into the sunset (especially now I've finished converting my shed into a man cave). But maybe there is something that speaks to me here about the solitude, the simple back-to-nature of it all. There's a kind of desire for freedom that all of these canal-chasing men seem to exhibit: a longing to return to something more primal and natural, even though they're still loading boats up with fuel and are completely dependent on staffed facilities and conventional capitalism. But it's there, I think.
Maybe I just need to book a weekend holiday and hire a boat, get it out of my system. But what if the lure of the open water (well, the closed canal system, but still) calls out to me? What if the siren song of the Birmingham canal network tempts me on a voyage of solitude? At least Amazon Prime will likely commission a video series off me, at least.
Mini feels this week
The cube of games
I spent fruitless hours this week trying to repair my old GameCube. I had to buy rubbing alcohol to clean the laser in the hope it would return my old games to the screen. Then I realised my TV no longer had the right inputs to accept the ancient GameCube wiring, so I had to buy an adapter to convert/upscale the signal. Then I realised there wasn't a charger for it anymore so needed to replace that. When I finally wired it all up, only one of the games worked and it wasn't the one I wanted (Super Smash Bros Melee, of course).
Now I'm faced with dumping it in the electrical recycling bin. I can't bring myself to throw away the memory card with it: this thing has all my hours of time spent completing Resident Evil; all the characters I unlocked on Smash Bros, and the Jedi-like achievements I made on some Star Wars game now forgotten. It will never be useful for anything ever again, but it turns out I'm incapable of throwing away anything that literally contains "memories".