WHY I'M NOT A BIG FAN

摘要

I seem to have the knack of touching the raw nerves of some readers. A few years back, I happened to mention in passing that I was not convinced of the need for bow thrusters on boats, their popularity in my view being led by boat builders desperate to make a buck or two out of installing them, and newbies commissioning boats they weren't confident they could handle. I ventured the opinion that any half decent skipper should be able to control a narrowboat without them. Good Lord, you would not believe the antipathy I generated! The backlash was furious, immediate and palpable. People flew at me angrily on the towpath defending their bow thrusters, as if they were a much-loved family mutt and I was the dog-catcher from Disney. Letters were written to this magazine. Harsh words were voiced. And now - whoops! - I seem to have done it again. My offence was suggesting recently on a Facebook group that maybe - possibly - these ecofans that everyone with a solid fuel stove seems to have nowadays, weren't everything they were cracked up to be. This was based on my own experience. When we lived on our boat Justice, we had an ecofan sitting on the stove top for years comfortingly whirling away, apparently distributing heat throughout the boat in exactly the way it was supposed to do. It was so much a part of the ambience of the boat that it was unthinkable not to have one.