大象传媒

The original "Three Men in a Boat", with company...

Three men, a dog, and a boat trip up the Thames. What could possibly go wrong? Jerome K Jerome published his travelogue Three Men in a Boat back in 1889, yet there is much we can take on board from his tale of the men’s mishaps on the water.

Broadcast as part of Radio 4 Extra’s Dive into Summer season, hear how three young men called J, Harris, George, and Montmorency the dog get themselves into, and out of, all sorts of trouble on the Thames.

Based on the trips of Jerome and two of his friends, there are late night wanderings, falls into the water and a hangover or two, so not a whole lot separating these Victorian "lads on tour" from their 21st century equivalents. Here are six lessons in life and the art of holidaying that we can take from their adventures…

At the start of the story, J, Harris and George are all feeling under the weather. Both Harris and George have come down with fits of giddiness, whereas J is seemingly more seriously ill. He’s done the 19th-century equivalent of turning to Doctor Google, and has looked up symptoms listed in medical advertisements and books. He self-diagnoses liver disease, typhoid, gout, cholera, diphtheria – everything, in fact, except "housemaid’s knee". “I walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck,” he reflects. After a frantic trip to the doctor, he is prescribed regular walks, 11pm bedtimes, and not to “stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.” Over 130 years later, many of us are still guilty of turning the slightest discomfort into the brink of death when we over-research our symptoms. Best leave the diagnosing to a professional.

Beat burn out

While none of the men can decide quite what they are suffering from, they all agree it has been brought upon by “overwork.” George decides that the overstrain on their brains from work has made them depressed, and concludes that a “change of scene, and absence of the necessity for thought, will restore the mental equilibrium.” And so J, George and Harris decide that a fortnight’s boat trip up the Thames will cure them.

After more than a year with holidays a rarity, work and homelife overlapping more than ever and health scares abounding, many of us are probably in the same, er, boat. Companies are even handing out surprise days off to try and ease the pressure on workers who are at risk of burning out. Some much-needed rest and relaxation without a thought for work could be just what the doctor ordered. But will this boat trip give our three protagonists their much-needed recuperation?

Countless holidays have been derailed by misread tickets and misremembered travel times. Setting off for the airport hours and hours before your flight may feel like a slog, but at least if your car breaks down, your train gets cancelled, or you can’t find your terminal, there’s a fighting chance you’ll still make it. In Three Men in a Boat, J and Harris learn this the hard way. Both of them know their train time, but neither can work out from which platform the 11:05 from London Waterloo to Kingston departs. None of the station staff seems to know either, leaving the men and dog to run frantically between platforms, laden down with their luggage, before bribing a train driver to stop off at their destination. A bit of forward planning could have saved all sorts of stress. And if that fails, we would advise only packing what you can actually carry, to make those last-minute dashes slightly easier.

Pack your bags

In the planning stages of their trip, J, Harris and George attempted to pack for their trip collectively. Everyone knows you should pack your own bags alone when you head on holiday if you want to avoid customs upending your belongings in search of contraband. There’s the added bonus of making sure everything you want is included and in its rightful place. Far from having extras added into their luggage, the men’s chaotic packing practices meant that all sorts of necessities were left behind. When arriving at Maidenhead for a picnic, J, George and Harris were deeply distressed to find no one had packed mustard to accompany their lunch. The discovery of a tin of pineapple chunks lifted spirits briefly, but then came the realisation that no one had packed a tin opener. Their attempts to open the can left Harris with a bad cut and a broken knife, George sustaining a head injury and a near-miss with some scissors, and J falling into the river. Taunted by the indestructible tin, the men threw it into the Thames, and were left with neither mustard, nor pineapple. If only they’d each made a list and stuck to it…

The saying goes that a watched pot never boils – i.e. time drags when you’re waiting for something to happen. While patience may be a virtue, Jerome instead teaches us to seek out distraction when you’re anticipating something. He swears that it is the only way to get a kettle to boil upriver. “If it sees that you are waiting for it and are anxious, it will never even sing. You have to go away and begin your meal, as if you were not going to have any tea at all. You must not even look round at it. It is a good plan too, if you are in a great hurry, to talk very loudly to each other about how you don’t need any tea. Upon which the kettle boils over. We adopted this harmless bit of trickery, and the result was that, by the time everything else was ready, the tea was waiting.”

There’s almost certainly a sophisticated metaphor in there somewhere.

There’s no place like home

After a trip involving wet clothes, injuries, dodgy cooking, dead rats, all manner of destruction and the occasional crash, it was rain that made the men appreciate their home comforts. When faced with a choice between a night out in the elements or a well-timed train back to London, they abandoned ship and headed straight back to the city for a night on the town.

Sometimes we all need time away to remember what our home lives have to offer after all.