After a couple of months scraping by in Paris I was looking for a change when I stumbled across an ad for a hostess on a canal barge in the north of France. I spoke to them on the Thursday and was on a train to Dijon Saturday morning with the first week of guests due to arrive Saturday afternoon. The first week flew by, the crew were good fun, the guests surprisingly down to the earth and the barge seemed manageable.

As time went on however a few things became apparent: The canals in France are filthy. They often haven’t been dredged since the Second World War, and all of the sewerage from the barges goes straight into them, as does a lot of the rubbish and leftover food, and they’re only a couple of feet deep. The barges themselves range from the high-end luxury barges to old coal carrying barges that have been converted to carrying guests. Fortunately ours was custom built as a hotel barge, unfortunately it wasn’t built well.

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