Musings

…since your last post, its almost certain that you had a baby, got married and decided to start a company at the same time.  And then you discovered that your wordpress blog was about completely expired and you needed to spend 5 entire days updating and reinstalling and accidentally deleting it before finally coming to a compromise about what it could look like and how you can incorporate photographs.  Here’s to a new era!

Last night Eric woke up to find a fox licking his face.  He thought it was someone out to get him, but it wasn’t.  It was a fox.  Tonight on our way home we saw the fox.  It was smallish and brown.  Apparently, according to Eric, there are wallabies in England.  And not only that, the other day he thought he saw one in the night.  Pat looked them up today and it’s true, they reckon there are about 50 of them living here in the UK.  (Not so much in London).  We also learnt that Eric is a fan of Oliver Cromwell.  And he knows a lot about history.

Today the boat is making a lot of noise.  It creeks and whinges and then there are loud crashes above my head.  When it’s windy and the tide is high, the boat sways incessantly.  When other boats go past they create huge waves and it feels like you are on a voyage of discovery. And then one becomes rather tired in a nice way.  So trying to work in the afternoon is an exercise in staying awake really.  More than anything else.  Anyhooo.  I felt I should write to discuss progress.

The main progress relates to the stove in the front room.  I called ‘Woodwarm’, who are the only people we can find to make a double sided stove in a vaguely reasonable way (one which doesn’t look like a designer crematorium for small creatures) and went through our requirements.  Bear in mind that we have spent around 3 months researching stoves and have not found the optimum, and then finally decided to go for this one. So, I had a conversation with the stove man that went a bit like this:

….’blah blah 9kw stove, multifuel, delivery address is xxxx, and that’ll be how much please?’ (me)

…’Hmmm. Hold on a sec, I’ll check for you’… pad pad pad… ‘I make that one thousand, six hundred pounds including VAT. Do you want to put that through now?’. (stove man)

…. gulp. ‘Ok then’. (me again, it’s a little pricier than I had anticipated)

…’How are you planning to get it in the house?

‘It’s not a house, it’s a boat’.

silence.

‘It’s a boat, not a house’. (I repeat)

…’um… it’s a boat? Are you sure? What kind of boat? It’s quite heavy, you’ll need help.’

‘It’s fine, we’ve got a cast iron bath in here, and we had to make a hole in the roof for that. This isn’t as big as a cast iron bath.  Surely you sell lots of stoves to boat dwellers??’.

Anyway, to cut a long and mostly boring, (so I don’t know why I felt the need to recreate it word for word above) conversation short, it turned out that the stove was practically as big a a cast iron bath and rather larger than we realised.  This panicked me terribly, so in order to really get to grips with it’s size I decided to recreate it in a Michel Gondry sort of style.  This way, we would be able to see just how large it was.  And also it kept me occupied in an arts and craft way for most of the afternoon.  This is what it looked like:

I think it is ridiculous, so I didn’t order it.  It might look a reasonable size in the picture but believe me it is not appropriate.  It is effectively a furnace, suitable only for industrial purposes.  So now we are looking again at alternatives.

Meanwhile we also have bought an induction cooker, to cook with, for the kitchen.  It might be faddy, but it means we don’t have to have gas on the roof.  Instead we can have seagulls and herons!  Apparently the Japanese love induction cookers- so there are lots of demonstrations online about how you can cook with them.  This is all for now.

I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t know it would be quite as GRUESOME as this.  So, in February they turfed out the friendly  eco-village gang who lived on the plot of land opposite our mooring in order to commence building a new development.  The thing is, they haven’t realised that their plot is actually in Brentford.

Check it out:

A NEW DAWN of DREAD

IT’S IN BRENTFORD.

BRENTFORD, BRENTFORD, BRENTFORD, BRENTFORD. (See how it’s just vanished from the map! How funny!)

When did the world go mad?  When was it decided that holding a jacket over your shoulder using just one finger would be an exciting way to live?  This delightful contraption, that has been beautifully designed to look just like a boat (you can tell from the fact that it’s made only of glass and emeralds) will be my new view.  But doesn’t it look like a boat, though?  You can almost see Leornardo and Kate strung-up on the penthouse, sipping champagne (from their local Morrisons) through those narrowed, sexy-beady eyes!  SEXY!  Skips ahoy! Let’s give the chumps a home! In BRENTFORD!

POOR, jellied-eeled, silenced, lovely, old, industrial, scabby and above all, CONFUSED, Brentford. It deserves better. (I could write a dissertation on this but I’m reigning it in).

I’m clearly writing too often, which is probably boring.  Still, just an update- the pump: KAPUT.  I have tapped/slapped/poked and prodded it at various points during the day to day, as no water comes out otherwise (before it started OK and then needed a prod, now- no prod no action).  But the final tap did nothing, and nothing has come out or gyrated or wiggled since.  Not a peep from the pump since the final nudge.  (Now I think about it, I remember the pump suddenly became very animated over night- rumbling and clicking and hissing in the distance).  So I filled up a bucket, a jug, another jug and a water bottle from the tap outside to keep me going over night- one for cooking, one for drinking, one for weeing (not to wee in, to flush down the wee I mean- maybe this is a little more information than anyone really needs?).  SO- tomorrow, a new pump needs to be purchased.  I also had an issue with the communal toilet on the mooring which involved me not being able to flush it, and then a pile of furniture and toilet paper falling in it when I turned my back to get a bucket to flush it with (hence the idea for the on-boat bucket).  So all round, an eventful evening.  Oh, and I also had a dinner of one-pot water cooking, to keep with the ‘water-in-pots’ theme of the night.  Corn on the cob, boiled egg and asparagus.  All cooked in one pot!