We do ourselves down in the UK too often, and on the maritime front we've created a whole new class of vessel that to my knowledge didn't really exist prior. This fine inflatable is yours for less than £1200 on Alibaba, where the online world is buoyed up with 'super dinghies' in all different colours and sizes and with a range of fittings. Though marketed as 'high-quality rescue boats', law enforcement is raining on their parade by calling them 'DIY deathtraps'... as they do my own efforts.
Some super dinghies now carry as many as many as 130 people, so that's less than a tenner each if there's 129 of my readers out there who'd like to chip in and go for a ride with me this summer, celebrating a unique form of transport on a day that includes baguettes in Calais and scones at Dover Castle; and a lecture by me on the origins of inflatables (see merch page, 200 people are also looking at this and there are just two seats left at this price).
For my readers elsewhere the English Channel is just twenty-two miles wide and is viewed by most Britons as a shittier Straits of Hormuz. It is also the world's busiest shipping channel, hosting super-tankers and container-ships besides inflatables like these. Occasionally the Royal Navy uses it and there are spotters online who like 'twitchers' race to the coast to see them. Beside all this the RNLI do a sterling job in re-rescuing people during the inevitable deflation that starts a mile into the journey.
We began keeping figures on the number of tourists arriving by these means back in 2018, since when over 200,000 have done so... thus it is reasonable to assume we can celebrate a quarter of a million arrivals of this kind. They peak whenever the weather's nice and the seas are calm, though the French police sometimes spoil the show by taking box-cutters to these fine craft, which in my view is a crying shame.
As a result, travel agents organising these tours have upped oars and decamped to Ostend for departures from farther shores, a place we'd often drop into for cheaper aviation fuel beside an ample choice of crossings. My only beef about this is ~ and I wrote to Skier Starmer about it ~ that revenue could be diverted to treasury coffers instead of being steered into East European accounts.
Quite why anyone would want to come here escapes me anyway, but it's probably considered a spring-board to life in North America the way they use tenders to ferry you to cruise-liners from ashore. You must admit then that we are among the nicest people in the world, and even publish stats on how many use 'small boats' ~ a description stemming from days they sat seven including the skipper. It is too an alternative to tracking merchant ships, as we do here on the blog on quieter days!
People moving from one place to another in great numbers is, when it comes to the way law-enforcers might handle it, not unlike prostitution, drink or drugs. Because we've a protestant ethic in the UK and US and despite the fact Luther swore like a trooper and was obsessed with the scatological (poo-poo to Christians reading), we don't do it very well at all.
In Holland they have cafes where you do drugs and Danish pastries, and Germans have official brothels of a kind I visit by way of research for the blog. So instead of gang-banging like Skier Karmer does and sound-bites like 'Smash the Gangs!', why don't we take a sensible view and instead of letting others price-gouge migrants, organise the trips and accommodation ourselves? What better way to celebrate a unique means of travel that's up there with hovercraft I once used from Ramsgate?
I can do PR for a pink super-dinghy that includes a cocktail bar, water-slide, Richard Branson figure-head and 'Pump It Up With Virgin Rescue!' along each side... has to be an improvement on the PM moaning and droning! I do have a friend who arrived on a small boat, who is studying English as I write and that's no mean feat for a Georgian... and that's the real one, for any Americans reading. She's also our fastest female park-runner: so she may be an economic migrant, but she's our economic migrant!
Ed. And that's me migrating to the troll-shelter.
