To be friends with the swans...

This winter seems never ending. We do have daffodils beside the boat but I must admit I still feel cold. How I used to laugh when people would ask “Is it cold in winter?”

That was before our dodgy diesel stove kept breaking. At the moment we’re using the “back-up” heating which is a portable gas heater.

We’ve known our local swans for nearly a year now, since we took a permanent residential mooring. I call them Bonnie and Clyde: I don’t know why. They visited us regularly for bread, throughout Autumn and Winter. My little ones would sit on the front deck and call down the canal,

“Swan ATTENTION!”

For some reason they feel this is the appropriate call that should be used to summon the swans. And the swans come. Then the ducks come and try to fight for a bit of bread too. If there’s any left over the big fat carp jump up and have a bite as well. It is one of the loveliest luxuries of living on a boat to be friends with the swans. Although it can be a demanding friendship at times. Clyde has now become bold enough to knock on the kitchen window with his beak if we are not on deck at a time when he wants feeding. Recently when I sat chatting with friends on the front deck he actually pecked me in the small of my back to let me know that he was there: ready and waiting for his bread.

But where is Bonnie? She has not been seen for some time. We discovered their nest beside the next canal bridge; safely on the offside, undisturbed by towpath walkers. She sits and waits, guarding her eggs. Clyde glides protectively before her, on the surface of the water, head held high and aloof, surveying the area.

When we return from the school-run the girls say,

“Can we check the swans?”

If it’s freezing and raining I grumpily say no, and drag the girls back to the boat for mugs of cocoa. But mostly I smile and say yes, and we sit on the bank opposite and watch, and talk about the swans.

This morning Clyde knocked on the bedroom window; wife in tow, with three gorgeous grey fluffy cygnets too! I grabbed some bread and headed for the front deck calling for the girls as I went.

“Girls! The swans have had cygnets!”

Just yesterday she was still on her nest, so they must have been born today and are straight in the water already!

“It must be their first outing” said The Doctor.

“Those proud parents,” I mused. “They must have said to themselves this morning, Let’s take the little ones down to The Bread Boat.”

“Yes,” laughed my five year old, “To the café!”

The girls threw bread, I took photos, The Doctor took a video. And we gleefully announced the news of the birth to other boaters and walkers on the towpath.

“The swans have had cygnets!”

It is sunny and the Spring is finally here.

Not my best pic - but they were moving fast, trying to escape the cries of "Swan ATTENTION!"

When boaters come to visit...

Last week, just as I arrived home I saw this unlikely pair moored up at my local water point. The lovely hotel boats Snipe and Taurus were once again in my local area. Although we have plenty of beautiful pictures on Flickr I couldn’t resist taking a few more of the red-painted boats and traditionally colourful water cans. Even on a gloomy, rainy day these boats are a sight to make you stop and stare (also known as ‘gongoozling’!)

There are very few traditional working pairs of hotel boats on the canal system today. It’s lovely to watch the motor tow the butty towards an ancient ‘bridge hole’, unhurried as they travel onward. Yet Neil, Corinne and the crew can cover a surprising distance in the space of a week, always offering their guests a varied trip that can include big cities and tiny hamlets.

That night Neil and Corinne came round to my boat: It’s always a novelty to have friends to visit who have arrived by boat, knowing that their own home is conveniently moored a short walk away down the towpath. I had just put my two little daughters to bed, but upon hearing the arrival of Neil and Corinne they immediately got up again to see ‘the lady who turns us upside down’! There were a lot of giggles, running about and tickling before Corinne persuaded them back to bed with the promise to visit again in the morning.

I love to chat to Neil and Corinne about their unusual lifestyle, their travels, their boats and adventures, and how they got into it all in the first place. So while the girls obediently settled to sleep in their boatman’s cabin at the back of our boat, I shared a few glasses of wine with my travelling friends and talked about all things boaty. They’ve done many more hours of boating than me and have learned traditional techniques that I’ll never need, like how to take a butty and motor safely into a lock. At the moment I’m reading the memoir ‘Maiden’s Trip’ by Emma Smith. She learned to carry cargo with a traditional working pair during the Second World War and the descriptions in the book make you realise how very different things are manoeuvring a pair of 70ft boats together.

The next morning my youngest (age 3) opened her eyes and immediately said,
“Can I go into the living room?”
“Yes…. But why?”
“To see if Corinne’s still there!”
I explained that Corinne had returned to her own boat, but shortly after breakfast Corinne arrived with home-baked biscuits for the girls. Her boats were already in the lock beginning to climb the Marsworth flight and since then they have travelled all the way to London.

I noticed on Twitter recently that Corinne shared a cool picture of narrowboats moving faster than lorries on the M25 and smiled to myself. You may think the lifestyle is slow and relaxed but they sure do get around. As I write this they are now preparing for a trip up the River Lea. Catch up with them soon and grab your own cabin (much more affordable than hiring a whole narrowboat),  with a £50 discount .

Disclosure: I was paid to write this on Neil and Corinne's hotel boats blog but re-published here as it is also part of my Real Life! I realise I am not writing much about my real life lately and this is because work and other personal commitments are making me super-busy at the moment!

Peggy
x

Beside the sea side

When I was little we lived in a village beside the sea. I wanted to write a beautiful and lyrical post about being connected to water, but in the end I think these pictures speak for themselves. Our narrowboat is moored about the furthest distance you can get from the sea in England, so my girls have rarely seen it. On this day in half term I took them to the beach near where I grew up and enjoyed watching them discover sand, shells and rock pools.

What part of your childhood would you like to share with your children?

It’s not all roses n castles

Rather than acknowledging that mothering on a boat is a difficult choice, and therefore that it makes me quite a good mother, I seem to default to beating myself up about not being good enough. It’s almost as if being ‘The Narrowboat Wife’ has become my whole identity. It makes me interesting in social company, and it’s given me a writing niche on the Internet that I have turned into a career.

However, I am beginning to think living in a house would be easier, and if I’m honest with myself, if I won the lottery right now I might buy a house, rather than a better boat. After all, I can always return to boating when my kids are older.

Since I was little I dreamed of living a romantic gypsy lifestyle. I have a good friend who tells it like it is so I asked for her ‘no nonsense’ style of advice. She said,

“Please don’t feel that you are failing your dream by moving on to the next stage in your life.”

That was really helpful for me. I think that is how I have been feeling.

She pointed out that the ‘periphery crap’ like trying to make sure there is heating and running water, or simply getting rid of rubbish and recycling by walking to disposal points on foot; these things all take time: Time that I could spend enjoying my children or running my business.

I love my boat. I love the canals. I love the little roses and castles in the girls’ bedroom and the swans visiting the side hatch in summer. Most of all I love that I own my home and no one can take that away from me. To live in a house we would have to rent one.

“But there’s no reason why the girls’ bedroom couldn’t have roses and castles in it,” said my friend.

"Rapunzel began to worry. If her dream finally came true - then what would happen?
Flynn knew just what to say. "Well, that's the good part, I guess. You get to go find a new dream."

Memory Book – Hobbies

Dear Daughters,

When I was little my hobbies were reading, writing and drawing. I have always loved books and we have read to you two since you were babies, so now you love books too! I remember enjoying learning to write my letters at infant school and writing poems and short stories at junior school. I was so proud when a short story I wrote was on the front page of the junior school magazine. By the time I was thirteen I was reading Jackie and Bunty comics and creating my own versions. I would pain-stakingly draw picture stories with speech bubbles for the characters. Then I would feed the pencil –coloured pages into my car boot sale typewriter and type words into the speech bubbles.

In my later teenage years I wrote angsty poems, dreamy poems and funny poems. I loved studying English literature and writing essays about Wuthering Heights. I did Art, English and Theatre Studies for A-levels and then spent four years at Art College. After a patchwork career that took me through the building industry, music industry, Friends of the Earth, the NHS and hypnotherapy, I finally got back in touch with my first true love: Writing. I became a performance poet, then a blogger and now a professional blogger and writer.

So what can I tell you about hobbies? Take notice of what you love. Do what you love to do. Never give up. Follow your heart and follow your dreams. It’s not just that my dream was to write. It’s more that I could no more stop writing or not write than I could not breathe.

Follow your dreams.- poem for my daughters.

Love

Mum

Xx

Memory Book is a monthly slot on The Alexander Residenceblog where Penny writes down some memories for her children, there’s a theme each month, and a linky.

Water Gypsy Gets an Address

My five year old had only been in school for a few weeks when we decided we needed to move schools. When we applied for a school place last spring we were continuously cruising and so we picked a school roughly in the area where we cruise. But then we got a residential mooring and I don’t drive, so I ended up  cycling with the children in a bicycle trailer for half an hour each way to get to school and nursery: That’s two hours cycling a day, and it was going to get cold for the kids doing that in winter. Plus, they are growing too big for the trailer and it was starting to be really hard work!

So we applied to change schools to the little village school near our mooring, and you know how important an address is to a school application. The school is so small, there are only five children in reception class. One of the children in that class also lives on a boat, so I asked her mum,

“How did you do the paperwork, I mean without an address and everything?”

“Well, I just use the boater’s post-box.”

“The what?”

“You know. There’s a little post-box nailed to a wooden pole on the towpath. All of the boater’s post goes there. I can cut you a key if you like.”

Wow! I am going to have an address that is actually near to where I live! I was so excited. I have been travelling for ten years and explaining to doctors and other authorities that I do live within a certain area code, but that my post goes to a mailbox service in a different place. I actually have a post-box, and get to receive letters addressed to my boat name, in our little village. How cute!

A few weeks later I bumped into another boater at the bus stop.

“There’s post for you in the post-box you know.”

“Really?” I was surprised. I have hardly even told anyone my new address yet. It must be some admin thing from the school. My youngest and I walked down the muddy towpath and opened the little box with our key. There was a little letter addressed to our boat. Inside the letter was a home-made card from the five year old daughter of my friend who lives in a house in the nearby town. The card has a hand-drawn picture of our boat on the front and inside it says, “Hope you’ll be very happy at your mooring and at your new school/pre-school.”

What a lovely welcome to our new life in the village, and what a brilliant thing to get for our first bit of post.

A Crime on the Canal

I am new to the school run as Big Sister only started school a few days ago. We do the school run with the bicycle trailer, and leave it locked to a sign post overnight. Imagine our surprise one hurried morning when I hassled a two year old and a four year old up the towpath and onto the lane to find: no bike, no trailer. I double-check my memory; yes we did lock it up here yesterday after school.  I can’t believe it’s been stolen! Especially from a country lane in the middle of nowhere. We’re away from our home mooring at the moment and moored in a beautifully rural isolated spot, overhanging with trees. There’s only one other boater moored here, some distance down the towpath from us. As luck would have it that boater arrived home at that moment and offered us a lift to school in his car. His dogs were in the boot and the girls giggled all the way as the dogs licked their fingers. 

Later at Tring police station the constable takes my details and finds it hard to imagine the kind of trailer I am describing. We do get people stopping, staring and pointing as I cycle to school and nursery with my two princesses in their red canvas carriage behind. The policeman says that he will put a sign up in the police station and get a feature in the local paper.

“Really?” I said incredulously. “I used to live in London. You’d say, I’ve had a bike stolen, and the police would say, Oh yeah.” Meaning, “whatever”.

He laughs.

“But this is Tring!”

For the next few days we make long journeys to school by foot,(me) by pushchair (little one) and by scooter (big girl). The school teacher, nursery staff and the other mums are shocked at the theft we have suffered. Soon enough the crime reference number is generated and five or six days after the theft I am planning to claim on the boat contents insurance. That morning I’m busily hurrying the girls ready for school and nursery. The Doctor has just left the boat, heading to work when he phones me.

“The bike trailer is back!”

“What?”

“The bike and the trailer, they’re back where we left them!”

The lock of course is gone, and the bike seat has been lowered to accommodate the size of someone much smaller than me but other than that it’s our same old familiar and super-useful trailer. Did some thieving  kid’s parents insist that they take that right back to wherever they got it? Did someone have a pang of guilt that they’d stolen from a young family? Or is there just not much call for a bike with one broken brake and a tatty child trailer on the black market in Tring? Tring is a charming Hertfordshire market town, and even the thieves are good at heart it seems.

Neighbours

About two years ago we were travelling the waterways with two very young children. My love of the gypsy life-style and exploring the beauty of rural England was arguing passionately against my cravings for adult company and a good night’s sleep. I had a critical inner monologue that berated me for being unhappy and I wrote a wish list to try to figure out what exactly was lacking in my life: Friends, neighbours, a community, a washing machine, more storage space… it goes on. 

But I notice that my first three wishes were for other people; human contact.

Now here we are, settling in on our residential mooring and enjoying the full benefit of neighbours. The couple on the boat next door introduced themselves on our first day, shared their homemade elderflower wine and offered to babysit sometime. Next-door-but-one is a lovely lady who grew up on a boat. She’s brought up two kids on a boat and took me and the girls on a countryside ramble; a short cut across the fields to show us the way to the farm shop. When our alternator belt snapped we couldn’t run the engine to charge the batteries. I was working at home and knew that before the end of the day I would run out of electric; no lap top, no fridge, no fun. Our boating neighbours recommended a handy boater moored just opposite who agreed to come and fit a new belt as soon as he’d finished his cup of tea. At the church playgroup the lady who delivers the parish newsletter assured me it would be no trouble for her to make a detour down the towpath on her deliveries, so that I can be kept updated with community events.

I did moan on this blog about the price of our new mooring, but did you know that neighbours, other people, human contact, are sometimes worth their weight in gold?

(The story of why and how we got a mooring: The Continuous CruisingControversy.)

The Continuous Cruising Controversy

“The code is more what you'd call "guidelines"than actual rules. Welcome aboard the Black Pearl, Miss Turner.”

Captain Barbossa,Pirate of the Caribbean

Like a pirate I have always roamed the water in summer time, and like a good BW customer I pay for a winter mooring in winter time. A winter mooring allows us to settle down conveniently, somewhere near childcare.Cruising in summer allows us to explore, see new places and use the boat for what it was meant for. But when you’re off on a summer cruise you may find yourself up at 6 am to catch two buses and a long walk to the town where nursery is.Then you do the same journey backwards and manage to get home to start work by 10am. I’m tired and it’s not fun anymore.

A residential mooring became available near our nursery; my eldest is starting school in September, it would be so nice to settle down in a community. But the mooring is too expensive for us, we struggle to make ends meet as it is. And we do love the variety of travelling. Would we really want to settle down?

But then we got a stern letter from British Waterways saying that this year we have not covered enough distance and would we like to either get a mooring or continue our journey? We do move every 14 days but according to the Guidelines for Continuous Cruisers we do not move far enough. We always used to move far enough, going off on great voyages over the summer. But my big girl is starting school in September and I feel myself gravitating towards a community.

We could continue travelling. When I pass my driving test I could commute back to nursery and school from wherever we are. After all, The Doctor commutes quite a distance into London every day for work. Some boating families home educate. Some register their children as travellers and attend different schools along the way.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place we decided we’d haveto bid whatever it takes to get that mooring. The bidding went pretty high; almost double what some marina moorings cost. Probably because all the continuous cruisers in our area have received a similar letter and 70ft residential moorings are pretty rare. I console myself with the fact that it is cheaper than a London mooring.

The guidelines are not law. The law is the 1995 Waterways Act, but complying with the guidelines is a requirement of the continuous cruising licence. The Act requires you to move to a different place every two weeks but ‘place’ isn't defined by law. I’m not the sort to go for civil disobedience and I don’t want to be an inconsiderate boater, but all over the country there are communities (like the London Boaters) who travel within a short stretch of waterway.

My question is this: If "continuous moorers" moved on and covered the distances described in the guidelines then would the towpath in my local area simply be occupied by different boats that had been forced to move here from their preferred ‘home’ area? There are not enough residential moorings available out there to accommodate all the people that currently live on their boats. The towpath is not over-crowded*; there is plenty of space to moor for all. In 12 years of cruising the River Lee, Stort and southern Grand Union the only place I've been unable to find a mooring space was Camden. What happened to the idea of a ‘roving permit’?

There are three kinds of residential boater; those with moorings, those who are continuously cruising the network and those who travel short distances to be near a place of work or study.

We won the bidding, and will be joining those residential boaters with moorings.


*London Boaters BW Consultation Response 2011, Appendix D. contested claims of 'congested' London canals when their survey concluded 1`boat  every 137 metres in London. 

Guest Post: A Village of Support

Last week I was approached by Heather, who asked if she could share her story on my blog. While my blog is mostly about narrowboating, it is also about parenting. Heather’s story struck a chord with me because I wrote about cancer last year when my friend died suddenly; leaving two young daughters behind.

My Mesothelioma Journey – A Village of Support

“It takes a village” is a recurring phrase that describes the responsibility and communal commitment to raising a child. I had a chance to experience a “village” with the birth of my daughter, Lily, on August 4, 2005.

My pregnancy was relatively uneventful with no complications, until my unexpected emergency C-section during delivery. Many family and friends surrounded me, including my parents and my husband’s family, to welcome our new baby and to wish us well. Everything seemed fine, but nothing could prepare us for the storm that was about to come.

Within a month of returning to work full-time, my health went downhill. I felt tired, breathless, and had no energy. I thought this was from being a new mom, but I knew something was wrong. I scheduled a doctor’s visit and, after a myriad of tests, we found the culprit.

On November 21, 2005, just 3-1/2 months after Lily came into our lives. I was diagnosed with malignant pleural mesothelioma – a cancer caused by asbestos that attacks the lungs’ linings. I was unknowingly exposed to asbestos when I was a child and 30 years later that exposure became mesothelioma.

My first thoughts were about my baby, not me. The news was hard to bear at the doctor’s appointment – I was told I had 15 months to live if I did nothing. I thought of Lily; I looked at my husband; I thought of the two of them living a life without me. I knew I had to do whatever it took to save my life, for myself and for them.

Mesothelioma has a grim prognosis, so we chose the most intense form of treatment we could. My husband and I flew to Boston to seek treatment with one of the best mesothelioma doctors. On February 2, I had surgery to remove my left lung and all of the surrounding tsissue, an extrapleural pneumenectomy.

I spent the next 18 days recovering from the surgery in the hospital, followed by two additional months of further recovery. I then started chemotherapy, and then radiation-- all of this as a new mom.

We could not have done all of this if we didn’t have the support of our village– the family and friends who surrounded us with love, support, and prayers. People, who we would not have expected, came to support us, while some we did expect support from, fled. The funny thing about this cancer is it really helps to weed out those who will be there from those who will not.

Lily stayed with my parents while we were in Boston. My parents, in this short amount of time, went from being new grandparents to becoming full-time parents to Lily.

It was amazing to see a village of support come together to help them care for Lily. The girls is used to babysit when I was a teenager – now married with their own children – volunteered to babysit Lily while both my mom and dad worked their full-time jobs. People I grew up with in church surrounded my parents with support and love.

While in Boston, we made new friends who shared the same cancer experience with us. This is how we managed to get through each day, with the support and love of the people around us.

Back home in my native South Dakota, my baby girl graduated to eating food and learning how to scoot and roll around. I had to witness her growth and development, though, through sketchy black and white copies of the pictures my mom emailed to me and my husband managed to print at a community printer. The nurses looked forward to seeing the new pictures, as I did, and we all tried to not cry. Lily was the reason for my treatment– she was the reason I decided to fight for my life.

As a family now, we try to embrace all that life gives us, because we know how fragile it is. My favorite quote is, “life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Cancer is a funny thing– with the bad comes a lot of good. With my dire diagnosis, a whole lot of good came from it, and for that, I am thankful.

Heather Von St James is a 43-year-old wife and mother. Upon her diagnosis of mesothelioma, she vowed to be a source of hope for other patients who found themselves with the same diagnosis. Now, over 6 years later, her story has been helping people all over the globe. She continues her advocacy and awareness work by blogging, speaking and sharing her message of hope and healing with others. Check out her story at the Mesothelioma Cancer Alliance Blog.