Its not much fun being a lifeboat, especially when you are an old lifeboat and no one wants you anymore. I know because I'm 56 years old and once again I have been cast aside like a broken toy by my owners who promised to look after me. Let me tell you about it. I was only a few weeks old in 1949 when the RNLI sent me to Cleverly in Devon, to be adopted by a family of kind lifeboat men. I wondered how they would welcome me there. I had no need to worry, the whole town were out in force to meet me and gave me my own tractor and carriage. They also gave me my own little boathouse to live in and came to visit me every day and pampered me. They came and polished my propellers until they gleamed and every so often I was taken down the beach to play in the sea with my very own crew. My happiness was made complete in 1950 when my family had me christened at a ceremony and I was officially named by important dignitaries of the town. I really felt loved and wanted. I thought this was the place where I would spend the rest of my days. How wrong I was. In 1968 I was told I was too small and slow to play with lifeboat men any more. The truth was that they had found a bigger and better lifeboat than me, a big flashy boat twice my size. Much as I tried I just couldn't keep up with him and I ended up being kicked out of my shed and was punished by being sent to an outward bound centre for kids. What an awful place. Instead of being treated with kindness by real seamen, who were mostly fishermen and so understood how important it was for me to be looked after, I was instead subjected to the abuse of a different bunch of kids every week. Gone where the days when my brasses were polished and my paintwork touched up. My engines never got a drink of fresh oil unless I got hot under the collar and complained. In the end my health deteriorated until I could take it no more. Instead of sympathy and care I was tied up and abandoned to the elements. I felt so sad rubbing up and down the quayside for months on end without even a visitor, with only the birds for company. Then one morning I awoke to find myself unable to see through a dense cloud of smoke. All I could smell was the most terrible stench of burning rubber, old socks and ready rubbed Old Holborn. Before passing out I heard the words that would haunt me for years to come, "OH DEAR".
