Firstly, I feel I should apologise for the lack of activity on Man Writes Blog over the last week or so. I confess I've been suffering a little from blogger's block and it's been lack of inspiration rather than lack of desire that has left MWB looking a little neglected.

However, I was listening to the Film Weekly podcast a couple of days ago and Jason Solomons was interviewing Garth Jennings (writer/director of Son of Rambow) in his floating studio housed on a barge in North London, and it reminded me of an old (but true — honestly) story that might serve as a useful stopgap until normal blogging service returns.

I hope you don't mind. Try to think of it as the blogging equivalent of when on telly they sometimes have to show a favourite episode of a sitcom in place of a scheduled programme, usually because something nasty has happened in the news that renders the planned programme tasteless or at least unsympathetic.

Except, in this case, what I'm replacing 'normal' programming with is, in itself, pretty tasteless and unsympathetic.

But anyway, here it is, The Barge Story. I hope you like it. It genuinely happened. I promise.

The Barge Story

A number of years ago I was invited, at rather short notice, to spend a weekend on a barge for the stag 'do' of an old school friend. Although I'd been reasonably close friends with the stag and his nominated best man during sixth form, we'd only had very occasional contact since leaving school and to be honest I was surprised and rather flattered to have been invited.

At school these particular friends had been fairly heavily involved with the church and in fact as it turned out most of the other members of the stag party had some kind of church connection; as a card-carrying heathen I felt a little bit on the periphery, but did my best to fit in.

We picked up the barge on the Saturday morning, received some very basic instructions about canal etiquette and the handling characteristics of the vessel, and were soon meandering down the Grand Union Canal stopping at various pubs on the way and having a perfectly nice time and enjoying unseasonably good weather.

It wasn't exactly the wildest stag party I'd been part of, but they were a nice bunch, and it was undeniably pleasant cruising down the canal in the glorious sunshine.

We stopped for a boozy lunch at a lovely canal-side pub and by mid-afternoon we were back on the move and the mood was decidedly relaxed. A few of the guys were down below sleeping off their lunch, I was at the back of the barge watching the world go by and the rest of the gang were at the front sunbathing.

Despite enjoying myself I still felt conscious of being the outsider. Although I'd been chatting perfectly happily with some of the rest of the group, there wasn't anyone I'd particularly gelled with and it seemed selfish and not a little cowardly to monopolise my two school friends.

There had been a slightly awkward moment early on where I was asked which church I went to and I tried to make a polite, respectful case for my conscientious atheism but I sensed that it hadn't done anything to further my integration with the group.

It had also come up in conversation that I'd 'done a bit of comedy' at university but so far my attempts at humour had fell on at least partially deaf ears so I was starting to feel the pressure in that department too.

While I was gazing over the canal pondering all of this, I spotted a dead rabbit floating near the edge of the water, and so driven by some latent schoolboy instinct I grabbed the barge pole and managed to fish it out of the water.

I glanced towards the front of the boat and soon realised that no-one had noticed me retrieving this rather macabre prize from the canal.

And then it occurred to me that this could be an ideal opportunity to liven up what had so far been a fairly pedestrian stag do and simultaneously demonstrate to everyone that I was in fact a comedy genius.

So I edged very carefully along the running board at the side of the barge, still holding the barge pole with its soggy payload draped over the end.

When I was within a few feet of the front of the boat I shouted "Incoming!" and lobbed the waterlogged corpse in a high, soggy arc onto the deck where the others were sunbathing.

Far from the exhilaration of a well-executed stunt, I soon felt a sickening, sinking sensation when I realised, at almost exactly the same moment as everyone else, that I'd just thrown, with no small fanfare, a dead puppy on the deck of the barge.

Not a rabbit. A puppy. It was unmistakably canine. In fact, it was difficult to comprehend that I'd ever thought it was a rabbit in the first place.

Never has the mood of a group shifted so quickly. "You sick, sick fucker!" said one of the stags in disgust and it was clear that he'd accurately represented the sentiments of the others. My protestations that I had mistaken it for a rabbit were met with not unreasonable scepticism, and I could tell from the look on everyone's faces that they all just thought I was a sick, Godless, puppy-hating bastard.

The commotion had woken the guys down below and they came up on deck demanding to know what was going on and I then had the indignity of standing by while my crimes were explained in full, with multiple references to Exhibit A, which was still lying, crumpled and sodden, on the deck.

The puppy was a very prominent reminder of my sins and so I very sheepishly tried to put it back into the canal. Unfortunately, while scooping a soft, floating object out of deep water with a pole is relatively simple, lifting such an object off a flat surface with the same pole it not. And so for several seconds I achieved the astounding feat of making the situation even less dignified by pushing the puppy around the deck like some horrific animal mop.

Then one of the guys pushed me out of the way, wrapped the pathetic-looking corpse in his towel and lowered it gently and respectfully into the water, perfectly defining the circle of decent and normal behaviour and leaving me firmly on the outside.

The final nail in the coffin of my self-esteem was when I overheard one of the stags ask the best man why on earth I'd been invited in the first place, only to learn that it was because one of the original members had dropped out and they had to find a last minute replacement to pay his share of the barge hire.

Suffice to say I was entirely shunned for the rest of the weekend and I never spoke to any of these people again.

But on the plus side, several years later I did win some gig tickets on Zoe Ball's XFM radio show when she asked listeners to contact her with stories of practical jokes gone horribly wrong. When I sent in the barge story, they closed the competition 15 minutes early...