Still spanners, just a different vehicle

We must do this again, we said.  No, we will do this again - next year for sure, or maybe the year after.  But it’s been more than five years since the last blog post, since the last really proper adventure.  For me that’s quite a scary confirmation of how life trickles away if you don’t pay attention.

Lots has happened, don’t get me wrong.  We tried being campsite wardens but that was horrid:  a lot of cleaning and a lot of kitchen work where all the food was frozen and there were no ovens or hobs, just microwaves.  The final straw was being told that I had the “makings of QUITE a good microwave cook”.  Pete Sears wrote a lovely song about that, and once I’ve asked his permission I will put a link on here.

Edit:  and here it is - https://soundcloud.com/search/sounds...

We switched to domestic service then – better paid, and again with accommodation included – but we mostly failed at that too:  I found it difficult to be properly subservient if the Lady of the House was stressed because she had an art class AND a nail appointment on the same day, and Mike was similarly irritated by the Viscunt telling him that the stripes he’d mown on the lawn weren’t quite straight enough. 

We will leave aside, for now, the job where I was threatened by a drunk racehorse owner with a carving knife and told that I was a fucking useless housekeeper.  Madam may have been correct, but it still made sense to leave (under the by now usual cloud).  We found out later that, at three weeks, we’d lasted twice as long as the previous incumbents; not sure if we should be proud or ashamed of that.  The agency that sent us there came up trumps, however – guilt, PR, call it what you will – and sent us to a beachside villa in the south of France.

It was a lovely drive.  Good to be away from knife-wielding maniacs, obviously, but also sunny, lovely, leisurely and with the promise of working for nice people at last – a bit of driving, a bit of pool maintenance:  a nice, easy, semi-working holiday, we thought.

“Oh goody - the chefs are here, the chefs are here!”

“What?” we said.

“The kitchen is your domain!” they trilled.  “Did the agency tell you we’re low-carb?”

“What?” we said.

We did explain the mix-up, but it was too late to hire anyone else so we became chefs.  We even turned out to be quite good at it, thanks to a really fast internet connection (for the recipes) and our acting experience (for presentation skills and general aplomb). Cooking IS quite like acting, I think – or maybe a meal is like a play – but certainly you can’t stop once you’ve started and you always try to make it look as if nothing has gone wrong.  It was also a nice change to be welcome to use the swimming pool; at our previous job, the myriad incontinent dogs were allowed in but the staff weren’t.

We spent the next three summers in France.  In the winter we did building work, started a dinner party catering business, and worked in NHS communications skills training (we kind of fell into that too).  Maybe we have a low boredom threshold, I don’t know, but come the start of 2016 we felt as if another proper adventure was long overdue so we cleared our schedule completely and bought a canal boat. We tried to buy a proper steel one, but the surveyor seemed so astounded it was still floating, and so kindly in his advice that on our budget we really ought to be looking at plastic, that we ended up with Carisbrooke/Boaty McBoatface.

But then Mike’s mum was diagnosed with terminal cancer.  She wanted to stay at home, and Mike’s brother and sister lived far away and had work commitments so we stored the boat and lived with her in Cheshire until she died.   It’s a very strange thing, thinking about it now.  It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, the most wonderful and privileged, and also the most guilt-inducing:  I know I could have looked after her better, and wish I could turn back the clock and do it perfectly.  All we’re left with is the very imperfect knowledge that we did the best we could at the time.  The district nurses were wonderful, as was a particular carer called Marina (whose 11am visits we absolutely needed and clung to), but Mike and I were still knackered and floundering and wondering how long we could go on.  It’s a year ago, almost, and what I think now is that none of us in the so-called First World have enough experience of death.  Like birth, it’s been removed from the natural realm and specialised, medicalised.  We have lost our knowledge and our rituals, and I think we need them back.

The referendum vote was also a turning point.  I really didn’t think it was possible that we’d vote for Brexit but then we did, and the world we thought we knew changed overnight.  I know some people feel differently, but for me, Brexit represents the wanton destruction of the social and political progress of an entire generation for the sake of a long-standing Tory feud. I think Mike and I changed, on June 24^th last year, from people who had always had faith in our country to people who thought, for the first time, fuck’em then, we need to look after ourselves.  Overnight, we’d become fearful - ironically the very state which I think brought about the Leave vote in the first place - but also more determined to do things our own way.   There's nothing like losing your faith in society AND someone you love in the space of two months to make you sit up and take stock.

So - moving on from death and destruction - we’re on a boat now.  It's a small plasticky one, very vulnerable to big hulking barges and also to rain (!) but it's lovely.   We’ve been through Stratford upon Avon, Warwick and Leamington Spa, we’ve been through tinned food and enforced teetotalism (not as many canal-side shops as we'd hoped), and we’ve been through enough locks to make even unfit lazy people lose weight and tone up a bit.  

Turning right onto the Oxford canal soon and will be in Oxford next week and London a week or two after – unrecognisably slim, maybe...