The story so far: a freelance writer and editor for 20+ years, I jumped ship (ha!) in April 2015 from bricks and mortar to live on a historic narrowboat – currently permanently moored in a busy marina in greenest Staffordshire.
Saturday 4 April 2015, 7℃, overcast after a week of rain and high winds
Today I discovered that walking boots are the right footwear for this new life. My everyday Doc Marten, Chinese revolution style slip-on bootees, which I thought would be perfect for sliding into to march to the marina shower block first thing in the morning, don’t cut it. Yes, it has been unusually wet and wild since I moved in, so my DMs are splashed up the back with mud and growing inside as I navigate puddles and stones and dips in the path. But they are just not solid or structured enough for this new landscape. It took me longer to walk and in places I had to go on the grass to avoid hazards of the road (goose shit is a key hazard).
In the face of (poor pun) the right terrain, feet feel good in walking boots, and this is the right terrain. Yes, it was a slight annoyance to bend down to lace up first thing, but once out on the pontoon, I felt properly and happily shod. The marina paths are un-tarmacked mud with a smattering of stones. Potholes have been haphazardly filled but, as the weight of cars press down daily on the mud, new ones emerge. These are currently full of mudwater (this coinage/compound seems to describe the wet opacity better than ‘rainwater’).
So, clad in walking boots, my feet verily bounced along the ground this morning as I walked to the shower / loo block to do my ablutions. My feet felt protected, bolstered against the elements. There’s something rigid and chunky about walking boots that prepares the feet and the soul for adventure. I realised that I would have to wear my walking boots from now on to waltz around the marina, my new mud puzzle of a home (it feels about the size of a figure of eight racing track, a Scalextric for boats, though of course boats are more slug-like in motion). And I decided I was okay with this. I’m ready to accept the proper and correct footwear for this new place rather than rebel and pretend I’m living on a road and pussyfoot around in dainty soles. I’ve been liberated from urban pavement life.
Yesterday, I took a pair of high-heeled shoe boots out of storage and brought them to live with me on the boat. They are my favourite pair of shoes. I think this is going to be a life of adventurous variety: walking boots for flubbing about in near home. Smart shoes for going out, and going out means in all senses of the word: out of the marina into the other, house-facing world, as well as out as in out for the evening.
Today’s experience reminded me of a writing sabbatical I took in 2007 in rural North Yorkshire, the summer of rains, when I did not get out of borrowed green Hunter wellies and a woolly jumper for six weeks and loved it. There was one amusing interlude when I had to travel to London to run a literary event at a club on the Strand and, due to long train delays, couldn’t get changed, so ended up standing on stage in said wellies and jumper. It felt very awkward but I don’t think anyone noticed, or if they did perhaps they thought I was festival cool.
I took that sabbatical after a difficult time in my life with the intention of re-writing a novel I’d been working on. What happened instead was that I came alive again. I remember the joy of standing in the middle of a puddle to the tops of my wellies; the joy of walking every day through wet fields waist-high with grasses that soaked my trousers; the joy of lying on a rug at midnight watching a sky drip with shooting stars like splashes of white paint. I remember staring at foliage and thinking I had never really seen the colour green before; it cut me with its intensity, its purity. What happened was that I abandoned that book and started writing another that was filled with this joy.
Today, walking back from the shower block in my walking boots, I was thinking about this sabbatical and how much I’d enjoyed it and how it had come at just the right time. I thought that perhaps living here in boatworld is going to be like living a sabbatical every day.
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