Author Afloat: Travel

The story so far: a freelance writer and editor for 20+ years, I jumped ship in April 2015 from bricks and mortar to live on a historic narrowboat – currently permanently moored in a busy marina in greenest Staffordshire.

Tuesday 5 May 2015, 14 degrees, wet and windy

At the moment when someone asks me how I’m getting on on the boat, I say, ‘Up and down’. Yes, it’s a joke but with truth behind it. The boat doesn’t usually go up and down. Today is a rare day when we’re actually rocking and bumping into the pontoon both at the sides and front – the wind has to be blowing hard and from a certain direction to make this happen. And, whilst I’ve bolted the bottom half of the hall door (we have stable doors), the top part of the door with the handle, locks and keys, keeps being blown open every time I shut it.

As I sit on the sofa and fast-type these thoughts, the floor beneath me is wobbling from side to side. Yet it’s so subtle as to be comforting, like being rocked to sleep on a train or being wassailed by the wind (‘wassailed by the wind’? – ed.). While the boat is latched to land, there’s little movement compared with life on the ocean wave or I wouldn’t be able to live here: I suffer too badly from seasickness. The movement is enough so that when I stand on one leg to put on boots – normally no problem, thanks to my once a week yoga class – I’m thrown off balance.

But living here has been up and down emotionally too. Before I moved in, I predicted that I’d find it hard for the first six months, and then that I’d love it. I thought it would be like when I used to go travelling (by which I mean roughing it and backpacking) when, for the first three or four days, I was discomforted and physically uncomfortable, and couldn’t imagine letting go. Travelling on boiling buses with red dust and chickens and people who rarely had water to wash in was discomforting. I’d long for hot baths, for my mate Marmite, for a wardrobe of freshly laundered clothes. I’d itch and turn my nose up at strange smells and inwardly scream for home.

Then just as quickly that would dissolve and I’d actively love roughing it, would forget all about home. I’d love being a snail carrying my house on my back. On one long trip in a remote part of Kenya, I remember feeling that, rucksack attached, I had some small similarity to the tribespeople my friend and I gave lifts to in our hire jeep. They carried knapsacks made from red African cloth tied to the end of a stick.

The lack of belongings on such journeys was of course always freeing. I chatted to people openly, made on-the-road friends. Without belongings, I was free to let experiences unravel me, to be an onion peeled layer by layer to its core time and again – no matter how tough the learning was at times; I was then free to be re-wound in new ways. I must have ended up as a rare, hybrid kind of vegetable! I was free to suck up the experiences, to be exactly where I was in place, time and geography, or to go with the flow. It’s only on dry, stationary land, rooted to one place that we get stuck in our habits.

So with my new boat life: I’m looking forward to being peeled. I imagine that loving it will take a few months rather than a few days. My initial euphoria was replaced by liking it but not sleeping very well, not being able to find shoes or trews that were trapped somewhere in the transit zone between old garage and back of storage unit and car. It’s dispiriting not having a washing machine, or at present, any storage other than a couple of kitchen cupboards – I’m currently living out of seven see-through plastic boxes. At the backs of cupboards, there are tangled, old real-world cobwebs that need dealing with. Perhaps they mirror the cobwebs I have to clear myself by needing still to do a lot more sorting through of belongings. Time. There is time.

Whilst the boat is a perfect space to write in, I find it too womb-like for business work and admin. I’ve been working from my iPhone with no wifi for over a month. I’ve failed set myself up on the internet. I’m unable to Skype, something I use freely. I have to go to the library to make these blog posts live and the library is not compatible with my email system. My printer’s not working, and aargh!

On the positive side, yesterday evening, after a full Bank Holiday day, my chap and I sat side by side on the sofa reading for an hour or so while the rain pattered down. In my old flat, I never allowed myself to do this; I didn’t feel relaxed enough. It’s the sort of thing I only do on holiday – other things include sew on buttons or play Scrabble, a candle flame blowing.

Then at night we retired to our back-room nest. It’s not quite finished or airtight: the roof is wrapped with bright blue tarpaulin. In a storm or high winds this rattles round us while the rain funnels down. While I am exhausted, able only to wash my hair every few days rather than every couple of days (until we get the bath sorted), while my loveliest clothes lie hidden and sad in storage, I myself am much closer to nature, growing more alive.


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