things I love and things I miss

Getting stuck in

The weekend was spent tending to our new home. I'm honestly surprised by how pleasure it gave me to get stuck in to the things that needed doing. When we discovered the heads (toilet for the uninitiated) had been leaking into the belly of the boat a week ago, I spent the whole time fretting on deck whilst R drained the mess. I was about as useless a crew-member as you can imagine and got pretty worried that this was a sign of things to come; me flapping like a unhinged dragonfly whilst R just got on with it. But after last week's rain revealed a multitude of tiny leaks, we knew the varnishing couldn't wait any longer. The boat was looking pretty tatty too after several years of general neglect. So, after a weekend of sanding and varnishing we have a new look home, and a little bit of RSI in the old elbow (whinge, grizzle). The varnish seems to have solved the little leak problems as the rain is lashing down now and no sign of water inside. Fingers crossed.

It also felt pretty special to be working on such an historic boat and lapping up the complements from passers-by on the jetty. Everyone is pleased here that we're giving the boat the attention she needs. I feel very fond of her and tending to the problems made me feel a bit like I was nursing an old gal back to life - am I getting carried away here?!


Living a greener life

One of my intentions for the last few years, when we were talking about down-sizing in some way or another, had been to live a simpler, greener life. We already lived in a small country cottage with a big veg plot and tried to shop as ethically as we could. I imagined our next step would be living in a yurt in the woods, meeting only our basic needs and really being conscious of our duty to nourish the Earth. Yet I was also a bit scared of that eventuality...I wasn't sure that I was ready to drop out completely and smell like a musty old badger, wearing frumpy hand-made costumes that wouldn't look out of place at the Weald and Downland museum (hey, check it out http://www.wealddown.co.uk/ - I love that place). Call me a consumerist but I still like to look (relatively) goodish. I wanted to be able to still be a part of 'normal' society whilst adopting an alternative approach...if this is half-hearted radicalism, then I'm guilty as charged. But somehow the idea of flitting between appeals, being impossible to pin down, neither one nor the other but enjoying the best of both. So the boat is like a half-way house in that sense. We still get to wash in the swanky toilet and shower block at the marina (and I don't have to clean the bathroom, whoop whoop!!!) and we opted to keep some nice, going out type clothes. But R gets to give up being a mindless commuter, trekking to an office to fritter away his hours staring at a computer so that we have enough cash to make ends meet. (I am self-employed so do what I love doing anyway and work far less hours.)

And yet, my greener lifestyle here is actually - irritatingly - more difficult. There are recycling bins nearby so that's great but nowhere for our compost to go. Eeek, it really gets me down to put compost waste in the bin. Some has been taken to my sister's chickens and her compost and I have done a couple of surreptitious journeys to the little patches of greenery at the nearby flats and fed the soil there under cover of darkness. Without running water (the water pump is broken and the tank has a leak) I found myself buying kitchen roll the other day, just to tackle the spills and messy table etc. The big fat kitty relieves himself in kitty litter rather than the garden so that adds to our weekly waste.

On the plus side, we use far far less water (how much did I used to inadvertently use just to rinse dishes, clean sinks etc.?). In fact, we currently just fill up a big bottle at the drinking water tap at the toilet block and use that during the week and fill a kettle from the hose on the jetty for washing up. I kind of have to let go of my old adage 'if it's yellow let it mellow, if it's brown flush it down' now I use a communal toilet so probably flush the toilet more but maybe I'll talk to the marina about getting those water-saving devices fitted. We consume far less power. We have been relying on candlelight a lot in the evenings and used £13 worth of electricity in our first month here. Without a washing machine I'm really selective about what needs washing and just do one wash a week, if that. Can't dry on the line in the garden any more though and have to use the driers despite gorgeous weather which feels very strange. There's a little washing line on deck but it won't accomodate much. I'm still cycling most places and that's a lot easier as we're much more central now. Just got to let go of the little addiction that has built up for the nearby 24 hour supermarket - guilt guilt guilt. Found a little newsagents that sells lots of useful things at reasonable prices and even a few organic and natural products so will be switching trade to them. So, on reflection, whilst there's been changes to our green choices, we still are doing the best we can do and overall might be doing better than before???


Green spaces


One thing I am really struggling to get used to is the lack of green spaces. The marina is a bit of a concrete jungle and, with the elderly and increasingly slow sausage dog, it takes a long time to walk anywhere to feel bare earth under our feet. Our walks from the cottage every morning would involve magical woodland, rolling hills, acres of dew-kissed grass, mist-mystical fields and lots of warm living earth underfoot. Being in a man-made enclosure is therefore a whole new and difficult challenge. There is a park about 15 mins away and, succumbing to the eccentricity having an elderly dog seems to entail, I put the dog in a backpack and carried her up there, much to the delight of passing children. We'll get used to it I'm sure and there are so many pluses to our new life, it seems silly to focus on the negatives, but it's just one of those things the heart calls for. The sea, the wild and dramatic and beautiful sea is, after all, what we're now living on and I can walk to stand at her shores and marvel at the tides and rockpools and waves and moods of the water.

Life aboard begins

I don't really eat sausages, I'm a vegetarian of 20 odd years. But I live with one, in the form of a middle-sized dachshund (her mum was standard, her dad a miniature, apparently a deeply illegal form of breeding according to the anxious woman I met in the garden centre last week) aged 13 and a half. She has taken to life on the boat with her usual nonchalance. As long as there is food available and a sunny spot to sleep in, this gal's A.O.K. Which says a lot more for her than it does for her two owners who veer from exhilaration to complete what-the-hell-have-we-done? anxiety.

The boat herself is 90 years old and not without a few signs of ageing. She's a beautiful 'gentleman's cruising yacht' (not sure where I fit in this description, but am happy to don a moustache and deck shoes if needs be); all mahogany and brass portholes. But there are leaks and holes and sinister problems with rotting wood. We leapt into buying her like a pair of overzealous lemmings. The previous owner advertised her on Gumtree for the princely sum of all our savings. R came home clutching the advert. 'We finally get a chance to live our dreams, we'll move onto a boat!' he exclaimed delightedly to his slightly more dubious and home-comfort-orientated wife. There had been a lot of talk about going off-grid, living more simply. Perhaps we'd buy a plot of land, build a house? Perhaps we'd buy a van and drive across Europe? Perhaps we'd just talk about it all until we had haemorrhoids and a mortgage and grandchildren with dreams?

In a fit of stupidity it's too complex to go into, we bought the boat and then got the survey. The surveyor came crashing in with a scythe to our Field of Dreams. Wake up kids! Smell the coffee! This boat's got more problems than a pair of hapless individuals with no prior boat knowledge or experience can cope with. He valued her at a third of what we'd paid and poked a couple of holes into her side with a hammer for good measure. But dreamers are good at dreaming, it's what we do best. So R and I moved onto our floating home armed with the goodwill of our marina community and began life aboard.

So far...a week into our adventure we discovered a week's worth of, ahem, urine festering under the floorboards of our bed'room' (really just a bed in the prow of the boat, no room to speak of). It turned out the pump wasn't working on our toilet or 'head' as they're called aboard (see, I'm learning all the time!). There had been one hell of a smell in the bedroom and my detective nose was hard at work from Day 1. So it was good to discover the root of the problem and get to work on fixing it. The recent rain revealed a number of sneaky leaks. Apparently freshwater is a wooden boat's worst enemy so we'll be up on deck varnishing this weekend.

But our new life has turned up a whole host of wonderful things, not least a boating community eager to advise and help us. Turns out our little home is quite the historical wonder and everyone wants to lend a hand restoring her to her former glory. One of our (slightly crazy) new neighbours was so keen to get stuck in at the weekend he insisted we start the engines. They hadn't been run for nearly 3 years but started first time, coughing out thick black diesel smoke and making enough noise to drown out all but the keenest of conversationalists. Along with the noise came the most dramatic of vibrations, sending the last of our few possessions skittering and smashing across the floor. Gone are the engagement present champagne flutes - smash! Gone is the new mobile phone just 2 days old to a watery death in the bilge tanks. We were left with a scene of havoc and destruction and the wise words from our (really pretty crazy) new neighbour, 'glasses are no good on boats'. We're learning all the time.

In preparation for our life aboard, we had to dramatically down-size our possessions, getting rid of pretty much everything bar 5 large boxes of books ('not the books, don't make me get rid of the books!') which are quietly gathering dust and mouse-droppings in my mother-in-law's loft. How liberating this exercise was! And crazily difficult...as the charity pile grew and the take-to-the-boat pile shrunk, I found myself yearning to hold on to that old handbag, cardigan, tealight holder etc. etc. We put our possessions outside the house and watched as they were feverishly gathered up by passers-by. New homes for our old stuff.

As we began this adventure, I'd turn again and again to Henry David Thoreau's quote:

'Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. As you simplify your life, the laws of the universe become simpler.'

It helps me to remember why we made this choice to turn our backs on a mortgage or sinfully expensive rent, slavishly working 9-5 to make ends meet, paying council tax and water rates and heinous electricity bills....yes, problems and all, life is a lot simpler now.