Soft music pipes me aboard as I pass through the immaculate airlock into Boat Yard. Yes, here there is no definite article. It’s just Boat Yard.
Once inside, an aura of unnatural calm and extreme cleanliness envelops me. I feel unsure if I am in a high-end OAP home, an I.C.U. or a weird cruising giant submersible designed to make one forget that there has just been a nuclear apocalypse and underwater killer drones are locked on to our position.
Throughout Boat Yard piano music tinkles, it’s not Barry Manilow or Ludovico Einaudi, but could easily be the Theme from M.A.S.H. (‘Suicide is Painless). Inside the controlled humanoid leisure zone one is soothed by the polished and buffed interior. Black-clad staff glide by.
Patterned seashell motifs, brick cladding, backlit glass bits, panelling, glowing orangey ceiling cut-outs, wooden floors and art of the anonymous kind vie for my attention visually. The toilets are also remarkable, so I will remark on them: laboratory clean, spacious, top-end grouting, weird basins. The lighting is orange, very orange. It is quiet. Except for that piano muzak. My blood pressure, heart rate and expectations were being lowered.
I seem to have stumbled into an undersea humanoid hospitality venue designed by an AI which has absorbed thousands of hours of drivel-ly interior design TV shows and a bit of 80s budget SciFi styling.
In summary: everything in Boat Yard that looks like wood, brick or metal is in fact plastic.
Outside the rain lashes the marine grey (plastic) planked exterior of Boat Yard with its jaunty portholes. Inside Boat Yard (missing the definite article is starting to rankle) I order a lemon meringue pie and coffee: black, 2 shots.
Boat Yard’s passengers are mainly older people who have parked the Honda or cast their mobility scooters aside and are maintaining conversations with each other, not a phone is in sight. They seem to be enjoying the inset fake fireplace and confusing displays of non-functional coloured glass things.
Is this what heaven is like, or just the Hotel California? You can check out any time you like. But you can never leave.
The coffee is fine/not bad/acceptable. The pie is good. The black-clad staff are at least Weegies so the metaphor that they are androids won’t quite take. I have always hankered after a butler and would instantly purchase a robot butler that could be switched into Weegie mode. Presumably the Weegie android would also constantly switch itself between complaint, total hedonism and near riot. Hold on, we don’t need to develop this android.
The bill is £12.65. Quelle horreur, £1.70 has been added for an extra shot to a small cup of coffee. No No No. Niet, Nein, Non. I have now glimpsed the horrible truth of this particular future: single shots, ersatz everything and no definite articles. I’m against it.
I walk out past the metal herons and a jaunty nautical monkey with a life preserver who inhabit the wooden clad fountain tanks, Oh, it’s plastic effect wood.
That piano muzak that was playing as I left, is it just my imagination or did it tail off into Creep by Radiohead?
THE Boat Yard, Lochwinnoch. What the hell am I doing here? I don’t belong here.
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