with a Narrowboat on the Oxford Canal

BILDRUM (home)

	I already knew that Britain has a wonderful countryside with an interesting net of canals dug out all over it. But I didn´t know that travelling on the canals is so much more. What was once the veins keeping the industrial revolution going is now a refugee from the running life that the industrial revolution shaped. The days in October we spent on the Oxford Canal are no doubt among the best to be remebered from this year 2009. It all started as a surprise. My Wife Lena and I were invited to my daughter Jenny living in London. But the transport from Heathrow took off in an unexpected direction and ended up in a narrowboat with a good instruction for how to use it and how to beheave on the canal.

	Come rain or come shine, the slow trip makes you feel like floating through life in a golden dream pinnace. Trees, flowers, cows, birds, houses and people along the shores become parts of your own blood and you slowly come to feel at home in yourself.

	Jenny and Lena handled the boat by tiller and throttle when locks and liftbridges were to be passed and we housbands (Kenneth and me) run ashore to use our bodies for turning, lifting, pushing, pulling or whatever was to be done to get on in the canal. (Curiously enough it seemed that most other boats had the men standing at the tiller shouting good advices to their wifes working hard by cranks and booms.)

	The canal demands a bit of thinking. It sometimes seems impossible to get the long narrow boat through the sharper bends of the canal. And you just wish not to meet another of the same sort coming in the opposite direction. But you learn and you like the challenge. And the boats are strongly built and the canal shores are soft. When you find a lovely place you just stop the engine and press the mooring pegs into the ground. Perhaps sending a thought to older days when the narrowboats were propulsed by real horsepowers threading the banks as fourlegged tugs.

	So those wonderful days were the background for me to present the narrowboat we travelled on as a free downloadable paper model to all my paper model friends all over the world, wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New 2010 with lots of new exciting experiences.

To download the model, rightclick the cutout-sheet to the left an "save as". Then do the same with the assembly instruction sheet.

If you have any questions or remarks, please don´t hesitate to send me a mail at bildrum@bildrum.se

this door leads to my earlier Christmas cutouts

this door leads to the Bildrum cut-outs