Funtime

 

Over at "Shadows and Light", Tasker Dunham made this assertion: "I bet you've never seen a boat named Tasker." This rang a bell in my head so I looked back through my extensive photo archives and found the picture shown above. I took it at Cayton Bay on the Yorkshire coast several years ago. It was little more than a rotting hulk then and I am sure that by now it has - to use a Trumpian term - been "obliterated" by North Sea waves.

Another "Tasker" boat was spotted on the lake at Roundhay Park in Leeds. This sturdy red pleasure craft may be hired out for £12 per hour and was once rented by former prime minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty, nine months before their first son, Taska, was born.

Meantime, entering the port of Immingham on The River Humber, I once spotted this huge oil tanker that had arrived on our shores from Nigeria. Can you see the name on the bow? It's "King Tasker" usually known as King Tasker the Munificent who was, I believe, the leader of  the Igbo people with fourteen wives and 64 children. He also ran a worldwide e-mail scam, harvesting money from the gullible and unwary.

Over the years, I have seen several other boats named "Tasker" - including a battered aluminium canoe on Derwentwater in The Lake District and a grey, homemade inflatable packed with desperate migrants on the beach at Pevensey in  East Sussex. They were being helped ashore by two elderly American migrants who were squatting in a beachfront property at the time with their "land shark" - Fido.