Of Moving Tales Of Boats Part 5 - Interlude and Diary

Miscellaneous journal entries and replies to messages from November/December 2011

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!................................... Nope, that doesn't work either

Move -9 days

Possibly only nine days left to finish clearing Dad's house. Whatever I do it looks worse than ever and the buyers want to visit on Sunday. The house is still full of surprises - after today's excavations I have to ask why one man would need so many boxes of carbon paper? He kept EVERYTHING - I've just found a folder containing the little goodbye messages I left on the table on the days I would leave for France before he got up. He also recorded, stored and catalogued every weekly rehearsal and performance of the many groups he sang with. If only I had a use for cassette tapes I'd never need to buy another. I have already dumped thousands of cassettes and if you are quick you may find a few hundred on sale in the charity shops in King's Lynn. It feels so wrong to be throwing out his singing, but I have nowhere else to keep it. Also today I discovered a ton of sheet music, which will probably end up in a skip unless someone can give it a home - I'm sure some of these must be historical documents. As well as clearing Dad's things I'm trying to get my own belongings safely stored in a container a few miles away, which has meant dismantling and re-erecting the Dexion shelving that Dad put together in a pretty permanent way. I'm going to have to find a hacksaw to get the last three units into the container. Dad’s car hasn't sold on GumTree, so I've put it on the Auto Trader web site today. I need to sell it before the next credit card bill comes in. If I continue ignoring thinking about what I'm going to do with the piano I don't think the problem will disappear. I'd love to be able to take it with me, but that's not going to happen. One good thing - Tim at Savages came up trumps and I got a good deal on drum cases for those instruments I never got round to putting in cases (mainly because I was playing them) before they go into the container. No sign yet of the promised electricity, so I can't yet put a dehumidifier in the container. I've had enough for one day.

This is a dispatch. I'm mentioning AC. Hero of the day as far as I am concerned. Thank you, A!

Can't believe this is still so difficult. I've reached drawers and cupboards I've never looked in. It feels like everything I open contains objects and memories more painfully poignant than the last. Although I don't know why Dad needed two boxes of staplers and three staple extractors, it may be related to the forty-four pairs of scissors I "recycled" two days ago. A drawer full of personal cassette recorders and players may be more understandable for recording every rehearsal from every group he sang with over the decades, but today's treasure has to be his tailor's cutter sketch books and pencilled-in notes from when he was an apprentice.

In answer to a friend's question, "Why do you have to do it all?" one sibling has been here a couple of times and we managed to do quite a lot when they came. Other than occasional visits when their work schedule allows I have to do it all. because, umm, who else is going to? Possibly only a few days to completion of sale. I'm tempted to try another "Aaaaagh!" but that didn't work before. No other sibling is closer than thousands of miles away.

I suspect some of the stuff I got rid of before A came to help this week was valuable. It's knowing who would value it though. I've neither the time nor patience to list everything on e-Bay.

I was just trying to extract some cupboards from behind stacks of stuff that has to be moved somewhere else. I could really do with these cupboards in my lock-up so I can get my music books out of the way before the bulldozers come. I can't believe I've just found some concerted attempts on Mum's family tree. That was always the difficult one with too many dead ends …

Today, my hero is Neil Cousin. Thank you so much Neil! And to anyone who reads this, Please think about buying his cd, "Bonfire". It's rather good.

Thanks to AC for helping out again yesterday! Along with my brother and sister-in-law we had a productive day. Two skips filled. Am about to venture back into the garage. If I'm not back in twenty-four hours ... 

Move -7 days

Disappointingly slow progress today, but a stack of instruments and books moved and another filing cabinet emptied. Still have not heard a moving date. Am I being irrational if I worry about the buyers turning up in their van before I've been told about it? Experience suggests not. The solicitor acting for the executor was even yesterday suggesting that exchange and completion could still be a possibility for today!!! Given that there is only an hour left I'd say it was unlikely now … hopefully.

Move -2 days

Still so much to do. The solicitor chose today to send me a special delivery letter containing a contract to sign promising that I will vacate the property on completion - i.e. the day after tomorrow! He is demanding that I return this contract by special delivery so that he gets it tomorrow. Why I should have to put myself out to mop up his mistake is a frustrating mystery! Finding a friendly school with a photocopier and then a village with an open post office at lunchtime resulted in the loss of half a day's planned clearing and packing. In my panic to get out to the recycling centre I left my phone at home. On my return there was a message from the estate agent who understood the house was empty and wondering where the keys were!!! I phoned back and pointed out one or two truths including the fact that the house might have been closer to being empty had the estate agent done his job properly and not stolen half a day of my precious time getting him out of trouble with his client. She informed me that I shall be legally obliged to leave the house whatever happens, but that I could not expect to see any money tomorrow. That was not the agreement ... ever! She seemed rather put out when I made it clear that if I didn’t get any of the money on the day of the sale as agreed with the executor I was not going anywhere. Of course she always had an option to come up with any suggestions that would prove more useful than the chocolate teapot syndrome they’ve exhibited throughout this whole miserable process. They've been no help to me at all and have added so much to this stress.

I've signed that contract today and sent it back in good faith. I can't wait for this all to be over. I plan on returning to my normally serene self soon!

Thanks to T and S for their suggestions about solving my lack of wi-fi and having no address to offer anyone. I shall be looking further into both possibilities, but I'll have to get the move over with first. Just haven't had the time to spend on it properly these past two or three weeks - ie the time when it became increasingly apparent I'd need to do something different. Unfortunately the post office in the nearest village won't hold deliveries for me, so I don't know what to tell people. So much for the post restante service!

Of Moving Tales Of Boats Part 4 - Siblings And Friends

This story is already one part longer than I intended, but I do hope the reader will find this back story helpful. After all, if a tale is worth telling it is surely worth embellishing. However, I don't think I have done much embellishing. The upside of that is that The Awful Mrs K and her family will get off certainly more lightly than they deserve after the anguish they put me through. This section is turning out to have some more personal and difficult detail in it, some or all of which may get the chop when I've completed it. It is also the most fragmented part of the account and the timeline may be a bit broken up in places. I was trying to keep a lot of plates spinning at the same time and this all happened nine years ago, I've used asterisks to mark some of the jumping about.

****************

Although I continued to cycle alongside the five waterways I was rather fussy. I did register interest in a space at the local marina. They never did get back to me, but I already knew I didn't want to be crowded in with other boats and people or outside the marina and close to a busy and noisy road. I guess that I'd have had more success searching for a place to moor a boat had I persisted, but time was definitely running out and every waking moment was spent earning a living or clearing the house. One of my siblings actually came up trumps towards the end and helped me move furniture and clear the three sheds and the greenhouse that Dad had made, as I mentioned previously, from recycled window frames and offcuts of timber. Despite my description they were all well made and looked fine from the outside. I continued to have to show people round the house and the garden. My siblings had added to the "encouragement" not to put prospective buyers off. Grudgingly I bowed to the pressure.

One day I received the phone call I'd been dreading.
"We've had an offer from Mr and Mrs House Purchaser, which we have accepted. Congratulations, you have a buyer!" It was The Awful Mrs K.
"I'm the executor," I moaned pathetically.  "I was rather expecting to have some say about whether an offer is acceptable ..."
"You signed that right away so we could undertake the work on your father's behalf," she said, somewhat tersely. "We've settled on £140,000, which your siblings have accepted."

I was completely knocked back. This was £80,000 under the original valuation just a few months earlier and a further £40,000 below the unacceptable reduction we had already discussed. All done with no consultation and, worse still, behind my back. I was in one of those stories where brothers and sisters plot against each other over money. I felt keenly the knife between my shoulder blades. They had nice houses to live in, so they didn't need every penny just to put a roof over their heads. I certainly did not resent being available to help my father, but the others were very distant, both in terms of their relationship with Dad and in terms of geography. One of them had phoned me from his home several thousand miles away, when Dad had been sent home from hospital to live out his final weeks, to say they could only afford one trip.
"Would it be better to come now for a couple of weeks while Dad is still alive and risk missing the funeral or do you think it would be more important to make the trip for the funeral?"
Why was that even a question?

I did not resent being able to be of service to my Father as his life closed down. Somehow it felt like a privilege to be able to help him when for most of our lives I had treated him with such undeserved disrespect.  During our years of living together I learned what an exemplary human being he actually was and I learned to love him at last. It shocked me to realise that my siblings still held a lot of anger against the man they had perceived him to be earlier in his life. I was, however, simply exhausted from the strain of this whole experience. Where were the siblings when I had been the one to run Dad around? Sometimes backwards and forwards to the GP several miles away three times in a day. I had been the one to care for him at home, visit him twice every day (all fifty miles of the full journey) all those weeks he was in hospital. I wouldn't get home till ten at night and then had to think about getting something to eat, only to go through the whole routine the following day. None of my siblings were in sight every time Dad panicked, overdid the laxatives, and didn't make it to the toilet in time - another anxious hangover from his childhood. None of them had to worry about getting the medication exactly right, worry about leaving him with the morphine or prepare meals and special protein shakes he couldn't or wouldn't eat, or had to deal with each bit of medical news that was so depressing. I was the one  who sat up with him all night and held his hand and watched him wasting away and, on the final night, had to mop away the blood and dark bile that dribbled from his mouth in a steady flow.

"What!" I was furious.
"We've agreed it now. You need to make arrangements to see the estate agent from this point on and sort out the details."

I didn't bother making arrangements. I drove straight there and asked to see Mr Agent. To his credit he did seem a little embarrassed that the offer had been accepted. He felt it had been a "little on the low side and could have been negotiated up". The buyer was a taxman who was moving south to work in the local tax office. He knew exactly what he was doing when he made the derisory and speculative offer. I bet he thought all his bonuses had come in at once when everybody rolled over and accepted it. I had never felt so betrayed.

So now it had to be full steam ahead. I had to get on with clearing the house. I contacted everyone I could think of who might be able to take some of dad's tools, some of the crockery, the furniture, books and all the other evidence of his well-lived life. Just a year before he died he had finally come to the realisation that the Mormon Church had been fleecing him for more than fifty years. The "one true church" was a con. He had donated tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of pounds during his time of membership, not to mention the countless hours of service. It gave me some small pleasure to dump the church books and manuals. At least these books wouldn't be used again to ruin anyone else's life. An aunt took most of his sewing equipment of which there was a lot, uncles, aunts, siblings and children helped themselves to the photographs. There were thousands of photographs in albums and in frames. Generations of the lives of family members and friends. Everything had to go. Sadly, with days to go before I moved out of the house most of the stuff from the sheds ended up in a skip hired locally. One of my brothers and I filled that skip three times. That was heartbreaking too.

Meanwhile, I still had nowhere to move into and no idea of how I was ever going to be able to afford it. One day I looked in the window of an estate agent in Wisbech and saw a flat in the town centre for sale that would only (!) need me to borrow about £20,000 if the revised estimate of what I could expect in inheritance was anywhere near correct. This was better than anything I had seen so far. There was also an industrial unit with parking for a relatively modest lease. Although I wouldn't be able to live there officially, it was far enough away from prying eyes that I could probably get away with it for a while. Failing that there was a parking space for my van and I could sleep in that. There would be plenty of storage for my instruments. In the end, the most sensible option seemed to come when I realised I was old enough to move into a park estate of mobile homes. I had a look at one that was for sale. It certainly offered more space than the flat and would be more comfortable than sleeping in the van. Unfortunately, there were the inevitable terms and conditions. Although I would own the property I would only be able to lease the land it stood on. When time came to sell the property ten per cent of the money would have to go back to landowner. The more I looked into it the more depressing it appeared. It was like the Hotel California, but without even the promise of the "pretty pretty boys". I could check out any time I wanted, but I'd never be able to afford to leave. There was no guarantee that I would be allowed to park my van on the estate and there was another rule forbidding the growing of vegetables or fruit in the gardens on this ex-brownfield site. Nobody could, or would, tell me how badly the ground had been poisoned in its previous incarnation. I discovered that the rules for erecting a cabin on a park home site bypassed the safety aspect of a more permanent type of structure. The final depressing nail in the coffin came when I was walking round the estate one afternoon. I got talking to a resident and a propos of absolutely nothing he asked,
"Do you play bowls? We're looking for new members for the club ..."

It sounded like a death sentence and I spiralled further downward.

****************
It was a Saturday night and I was calling for a ceilidh with my band. During the break the Wise Bass Player told me he could tell I was upset and he didn't think I should go into the "old people's home". I told him I could not think of an alternative and time was not on my side. He thought for a moment and said, there must be something I hadn't thought of and to leave it with him. He would mull it over and check out some possible ideas.

The very next day he phoned me and said he'd been in touch with a video artist and his wife who lived in the same village as him. They lived in a large farmhouse that had an empty annexe and that the artist and his wife did not have two ha'pennies to rub together. They would be happy to meet me and discuss the possibility of me moving into the annexe and providing some rent money which would amount to considerably less than the commercial rents that had made other options so unavailable. This was the best news I'd had during this whole miserable year.

I think I went over to the farmhouse to visit on the same day and the annexe looked ideal. There was also a very large room,  mostly used for storage, that separated the main dwelling from the annexe. I could store my instruments and books there. We parted on a verbal understanding that I would move in when the sale of the bungalow went through. I wasn't sorry that the buyer's solicitor had a number of questions relating to the shared drains, the front boundary and some extra land my father had bought to extend the rear garden when he and my mother moved in a few years before she'd died. He was being very cautious - a small mercy at the time.

One morning I was in the kitchen at home and my phone rang. It was the Video Artist. I told him I was pleased he had rung because I'd like to start moving things over the following week.
"Yes, about that," he said. "You do know we've been trying to sell the house for three years? How much stuff did you say you were bringing? Will it stack tidily, because we don't want to put off potential buyers by having the house look like a tip."

I explained that most of my percussion was boxed or cased, but the cases were not in uniform sizes that would not necessarily stack evenly. Silence. If my goods and chattels were going to be a cause of contention before he'd even seen them, this arrangement was clearly not going to work. Oh well, that was another plan exhausted. What now!

****************
This was a crunch point and my belongings had to find a home. I am very grateful to G, a friend and retired farmer who let me store a lot of stuff in his barn. I also found a storage unit in a complex a few miles away and started moving my work equipment over there. A dear musician friend helped me break the back of that move. I was able to remove and rebuild the Dexion racking I first had in my garden studio and instrument store when I was married and had remodelled in Dad's garage. That went to the lockup. Filling the shelves was easy. As a percussionist and workshop leader "stuff" goes with the territory.

"I didn't know anyone could have so many xylophones and glockenspiels," marvelled N as we emptied another van load of drums, pitched percussion, guitars, amplification for live gigs and recording equipment. Of course, there were also the music education books, the sheet music, the cds, the vinyl, the cassettes ...

****************
Feeling that a van conversion was looking increasingly necessary I continued clearing and moving stuff.

I think it was the day after my conversation with the Video Artist, my phone rang again. I didn't recognise the number nor the male voice that began

"Hello, you don't know me, but I hear you are looking for a boat."

Of Moving Tales Of Boats Part 3 - Horse Woman And Boat Man

The fifth time I visited the farm I encountered a contractor at the wheel of a huge machine. Of course neither of us had any idea who the other was, but he must have recognised me as a stranger, because he slowed down; maybe it was just the desperate look on my face. I asked if he knew anything about the moorings and he answered that he didn't, but instead pointed to a house in the distance and suggested I ask there. I suppose if I'd had any sense I would have started knocking on doors earlier, but I hate cold calling, whoever is doing the calling.

The door of the house was answered by a very tanned woman who could have been around my age, but I'm rubbish at working out such things. She spoke with a Fenland accent containing a hint of what my music lecturer at college would have called an "Embassy-tipped" voice and was very jolly and friendly. She turned out to be the Horse Woman I have mentioned in earlier essays. We talked and I explained my situation and how, by this time my options had contracted to living on a boat if I could find a suitable mooring or to follow the example of a number of friends and converting my van. Given my already confessed lack of d-i-y skills the van, however much more convenient it could turn out to be, was my least favourite option. "I suppose if I had a choice, I would want a boat that didn't need too much work doing." Ever hopeful, ever naive ...

She replied that I would need to speak to her brother who wasn't there, but would be back soon. In the meantime someone who was already living there had a boat for sale if I would like to meet him? Of course, by this stage I was happy to talk boats and to meet anyone who might help me make any kind of decision one way or another. I felt sick every time the estate agent phoned to let me know another person wanted to view the bungalow and I was tired of it.

Whenever the estate agent phoned he would bring up the subject of a key. He wanted a key so he could show people round the house himself whenever it suited him and his client. I insisted that I would hang on to the keys since the house was MY home and I wanted to know who was walking round it and what they were poking around in. I had a lot of money invested in my irreplaceable instruments and a recording studio set up in the garage. There was no way I wanted everyone knowing what I kept in there or anyone touching anything. I had visions of people touring houses for sale looking for a reason to come back later after they had cased the joint. He was never very happy with my refusal to part with a key, ("... but we do this every day without problems!") though I suppose I could award merit points for his persistence. I could see he had a business to conduct, but my sympathy with his situation waned as he showed no sign that he had any understanding of the fact that doing his job would be likely to see me out on the street. It was also clear that he did not trust me to do any kind of job of selling the house for him. He was right, of course. I had no interest in leaving my home. If someone asked me why I was moving I would tell them the truth. My father had died, my siblings wanted their share of the estate, I had lost my rights to act as executor and the will-writing company wanted as quick a sale as possible (I could have added "at any price", but I wasn't going to give these strangers the baseball bat with which to do me in). I remember as I was showing one couple round the garden that the lady asked me what I was going to do. I was honest and said that I hadn't a clue. I wouldn't be able to afford somewhere to buy outright, I didn't earn enough for even a small mortgage, I didn't qualify for a council house, local housing associations only had waiting lists and I couldn't afford to pay a commercial private rent without eating into and spending within five years whatever my share of the estate turned out to be. I felt completely trapped. It seems this poor woman went back to estate agent in tears on my behalf. He was livid and contacted the will-writers. Soon after that I was sitting in the church yard of St Peter and St Paul in Wisbech, after another pointless visit to my bank and an equally pointless trawl round the estate agents, when I received a phone call from a very cross managing director/owner of the will-writing company and newly assumed executor of my father's estate, the Awful Mrs K. I had a very large strip torn off me for blocking the sale of the house and halting the progress of probate. This was ironic. It was four months after we had buried my father and they still hadn't got round to publishing the notice of his passing in the London Gazette, which is apparently the usual organ for such legally required notices and which notices are normally submitted within a few weeks of a death. The Awful Mrs K and her gang (who all seemed to be members of the same family) omitted many such actions, which would see them hanging on to my father's bequest and accumulating the interest for nearly another three years. In the end we had to get the police involved and they were very interested in this company. This particular group of will-writers (at the time an unregulated "profession") was apparently known to them for a number of similar cases. However, during the phone call, The Awful Mrs K had a punishment ready. Because the bungalow had not sold within the three months following instructing the agent, they were going to knock £40,000 off the valuation. At that point it was my turn to become upset. I remember pointing out that other homes in our area had been on the market for a smaller asking price and for a far longer time, two or three years in a couple of cases I could think of. She had no idea about the housing market in our part of the Fens. The phone call ended poorly. After that The Awful Mrs K only spoke directly to me once more, otherwise she always dealt with me only through her family minions. She would usually speak to one of my younger siblings whom she deemed more reasonable.

I suppose the truth was that I was worn out by the whole situation. I was grieving for my father in a way I had never yet managed for my mother. I was trying to keep my business going as a sole-trading, independent musician earning some kind of living income. I was trying to be creative, but I was more often simply in tears. Although I did have occasional help from my ex, a friend and one of my siblings, I was trying, mostly by myself, to clear out the house my father and I had shared for all those years. This meant selling, giving away or dumping his stuff and finding somewhere suitable to store my own belongings for when the time came to leave, specially if I had nowhere to go. All of this was exhausting and time-consuming enough without having no idea where and how I was going to manage when I was forced out.

The Horse Woman walked me down to a landing stage on the river and knocked on the roof of a newly-painted narrowboat. "Anyone home?" she called out. A smiling man, who looked to be well into his sixties, emerged and introductions were made. "This is ... what did you say your name was again? He wants to buy a boat ..." She left us to talk and went back to the house. I had to explain, neither for the first nor the last time that I wasn't looking for a boat at the moment, but that I was looking for a mooring so that I could start looking for a boat. The Boat Man and I slipped into easy conversation and a couple of hours passed by almost unnoticed. He showed me his own very tidy boat, where he lived alone with an aged and quite poorly dog. Then we talked about the boat next door. This was the one for sale. It had been bought ten years earlier by a Welsh carpenter, called "Taff" (obviously), apparently an alcoholic who had sold up and moved to Bulgaria. Boat Man had entered into an arrangement with The Fireman, who kept a small outboard-driven cruiser on a nearby mooring and together they bought Taff's boat. The boat, named Mab, had at some point been painted burgundy. I liked both ideas immediately, a nice coloured boat with classical, and supernatural, connections. As we stepped outside to look at the boat for sale two things were immediately apparent. It was now two shades of Tory blue with gold bordered panels on the sides and it was no longer called Mab. "The Fireman and I thought people might think Mab stood for Muslim Association of Britain and wouldn't want to buy it," explained Boat Man with neither shame nor irony. "We've come up with a much better name anyway," he went on. "We called it "Timeless". It's very apt don't you think?" 
"It's very bourgeois" is what I actually thought, but I managed not to say it out loud.
"The name has real meaning. We've been doing a lot of work on the boat and we decided to make a name using our own names, Tim and Les ... and we've found the perfect sign for it." 
Indeed they had found the perfect sign, a huge vinyl clock face without hands had been applied to one of the rear panels of the boat ... OMG, a bromance. Did they realise? The only other time I'd noticed people combining their names was when a married couple called their house "Carobryaline". That was naff even back in the 70s when the I lived across the road from them. There was also the couple I knew who bestowed a two-syllable name on their first-born devised from a single syllable taken from each of their own first names. I found the symbolism unsettling. The husband was quite proud that not only was the child named from each of their names, but that she was also made from a bit of each of them ... too graphic! That kid was lucky to be a girl, though, I suppose. Had she been born a boy they might have called him something like "Mischance"! Since then I've noticed a trend among starry-eyed and already partnered boat owners to name their boats after an amalgamation of their two names, Deblee or Debbie Too around the Fens spring to mind, but neither before nor since have I encountered two straight blokes in a project partnership doing the same thing.

"Can I see inside?" I asked.

Inside was far more promising. The fittings were beautifully rendered in cedar and oak. The previous owner's personal problems hadn't prevented him making a craftsman's job of the fit out. Boat Man and Fireman might have spruced it up a bit but the underlying workmanship was undeniable. I fell in love. The fact that it actually ticked every box I had set out for myself should I ever be in a position to buy a boat was unexpected and rather amazing. Fifty feet long, traditional stern, brand new multi-fuel stove and ready to move into. 

"We had to replace the engine, because the original had seized solid. We've done lots of other work on it too," the Boat Man explained clearly very proud of the achievement.
"How much are you asking?" I enquired.

Sadly the £40,000 they wanted was well beyond what I could afford at the time and I would probably still struggle even when my inheritance came through after all the fees had been covered and the remainder divvied up.

It had been a nice encounter and a lovely relief for a couple of hours that I may have found an answer to my problems. Sadly, though, it got worse. I left the Boat Man and went back to the house. Horse Woman's brother, the Farmer, had arrived and he came to the door. Again, we talked for a long time. I explained my situation and what I was looking for. I discovered that the thirteen boats I had counted on the satellite view of the river were no longer there because the local navigation authority had given The Farmer instructions to evict them. He had a long history of disagreements with the authority and this was a case of them flexing their corporate muscle over his riparian rights. I remembered some of what he mentioned being recorded in the local paper some twenty years previously. He had appealed against all the boaters being evicted and the authority had eventually relented and allowed three live aboard vessels. Everyone else was dispersed to different parts of the waterway or forced off the system altogether. Since there were already three liveaboarders mooring at the farm the allocation was full. Shame, that was it then. Back to square one.

Of Moving Tales Of Boats Part 2 - Narrow Dog

My Father died in April 2011. I had been living with him since April 2003. I had been lucky to find such a comfortable home and sharing became an arrangement that suited us both, even though my eldest daughter once remarked that we lived together like students! I suppose that was mainly on account of our different lifestyles, incompatible timetables and dietary preferences. It took me weeks after his death to begin the awful task of dismantling our home. It was weird enough actually learning to live on my own for the first time in my life, but to be packing away or getting rid of everything that made that bungalow my home at the same time was very unsettling. Strangely it was my ex-wife who phoned me one afternoon and offered to help me make a start. I shall always be grateful to her for that; I was incapable of beginning the process of emptying the house under my own steam and had no clue what to tackle first. She arrived and immediately offered characteristically practical suggestions.  

When the thought of continued house clearing became too overwhelming I would load my bicycle into my van and drive to any place where there was water. Parking up nearby I would use the bicycle and explore places in closer detail than was possible from the driver's seat of a car or van. Dad had given me his old bicycle, which he had of course picked up at a car boot sale. I never saw him use it although he once confessed that he had tried cycling round the garden to see if he could still do it. He was happy enough for me to use the bike many times while he was still alive, but I certainly managed to get a lot of use out of that bicycle the year he died. I cycled many miles alongside five local waterways on several  occasions - The Great Ouse, Well Creek, the Little Ouse, the Wissey and the Old Nene through the Fenland town of March. I was beginning to hatch a hope that just maybe I could find a mooring in a place that I liked. If I could do that I would buy a boat. Buying a boat without first having a mooring seemed like asking for trouble. I did not want to have to worry about where I was going to leave my boat while I went to work or where I was going to leave my van while I moved the boat. It felt a lot like trying to earn an Equity Card where an actor has to have a job before they can get a card, but they can't get a job without an Equity Card!

I saw plenty of moored boats and I spoke to a few people who spent at least part of their lives living afloat. There were stretches of waterway, specially on the Wissey and Little Ouse, where boats were tied up bow to stern for what looked like miles. Conditions were also quite primitive for some people and I was not ready to go quite that far or quickly in dispensing with some of life's necessities as I saw them at the time. Most of the moored boats were very close to busy roads. Some had roads on both sides of the waterway. I had no wish to live with my head at or below exhaust pipe level where I would be lulled to sleep (or carbon monoxided into unconsciousness) by the gentle thunder of lorries hurtling past. Some of the boats on the Wissey seemed to be accessible only by wading through acres of mud. There aren't many towpaths in the Fens and facilities for water, waste and sanitation are even rarer. Sometimes somebody would give me the name of the person I should speak to, but it never amounted to anything. Several times I heard rumours of some moorings on one of the waterways that became my favourite haunt, but I could never find them. I was almost at the point of going door to door to ask if a house owner would accept me mooring a boat on their private mooring. One day I hit on the idea of using my computer and pulling up a satellite view of the terrain to try and find the mysterious moorings, mention of which I had by now heard often. I followed the course of the waterway in question on the map to the point where, on the ground, I had encountered a farm gate across the road and beyond which I had never ventured. It had been clear that the road beyond that gate led only into the heart of the farm. From that point I had always turned round and retraced my journey the three or four miles back to the van. However, on looking at the satellite view of the area I was able to see what lay beyond and indeed, just around the bend in the river not visible from the road, I counted thirteen boats in a little floating community. Had I been brave enough to cross on to private territory beyond the gate across the road I would have discovered the moored boats within a quarter of a mile. 

My next river exploration was going to be back at that place for sure. One sunny August afternoon I cycled through the gates that led to the farm yard. As I reached the deserted yard a very large and very thin dog (a greyhound, I supposed) began to howl, bark and came bounding up to me. I thought I was about to become a late lunch, but I did try not to panic. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that dogs can smell fear. I stood still and the dog stopped before it got to me. We looked at each other and I started talking quietly, in as calm a voice as I could muster under the circumstances, suggesting to the hound it would probably be better for both of us if it waited for its dinner. I will admit to not having had much experience with dogs in my life up to this point and I was acting purely on instinct; I wasn't ready to die. I must have done something right because the dog approached slowly with head bowed and seemed to want some fuss and attention, which I was happy enough to provide. As I stroked the dog I looked around for any glimpse of a creature with two legs, but I found no one to ask about the moorings. Surprisingly, I visited the farm five times, before I found anyone to speak to.

Of Moving Tales Of Boats Part 1 - Dad

I have promised myself for years that I would record the story of how I came to live on a boat. This would have been quite an odd aspiration to my childhood self. I could not stand to be in or on the water and movement other than by train, pram, bicycle or via my own two feet made me feel quite nauseous. As for travelling in the car ... I am sure every journey must have been as huge a challenge for my parents as it was for me. At least I was only bringing up my last meal, not clearing it up. 

My interest in narrowboats began with my experiences on the Summer Storyboat and there is an account of that here. Unfortunately the project folded; oddly not, like so many projects, because it ran out of money, but because it ran out of people who cared enough to keep it going. Artist, author, musician Rob Lewis, tried valiantly to take on the task from his refuge in Wales, but even he could not raise the dead.

In 2003 I walked out of a bad situation and needed to find somewhere to live. My widowed father lived less than five miles away, so I asked for sanctuary for a week or so until I could sort myself out. That week or so became a month or so, but it was soon obvious that I was not going to be able to afford anywhere of my own, specially while I was being driven into debt not only by having to pay child maintenance, but also the “spousal maintenance” that took no account of my ability to pay. Eventually I was summoned for a consultation by the bank manager who had observed I was at the end of my overdraught and had used up every bit of credit available to me to try and keep up with the payments. In those days the bank had been raising my credit limit on an annual basis for many years. How very British to set someone up only to whip out the rug from beneath. 

In April 2011 my father died from the cancer that had plagued him undiagnosed for a while. I had lived with him for eight years by that time and had become his sole carer as his illness progressed. I cannot ever remembering being so exhausted. Even a string of babies didn’t leave me feeling quite as wrecked. I was trying to hold on to my work commitments to bring in some money and look after my Dad. Eventually a nurse was engaged to check in on him when I was at work. In order to make life easier for my brothers and for me he had signed up to a will-writing service some years earlier that offered to undertake all the tasks associated with probate for an extra fee. I was named executor of my father’s estate, but for some reason was expected to sign over the authority to the will-writers before they would do the work for which they’d already been paid. Things became very complicated.  The will-writer decided which estate agent was going to sell the house, my home for the previous eight years. Whilst grieving I had to start clearing Dad’s accumulation of stuff, clean up the place for viewings and work out where and how I was going to live. 

The where and how wasn't easy. Although by this time the maintenance situation had been resolved I was stuck between a rock and the proverbial hard place. My share of my father's estate would not be anything like enough to buy me somewhere to live. I spoke to the estate agent who was selling the house. They couldn't help, because of my low income and poor credit record after the maintenance fiasco, and told me to apply to a housing association or the local council. I couldn't find an association willing to take me and the borough council told me that after probate had been settled I would have too much money to be allowed to have one of their properties! Damned whatever I tried to do, it was all closing in.

Clearing Dad's house was heartbreaking. He had built himself three sheds and a greenhouse in the garden and the sheds were full of the stuff he had acquired at car boot sales with extras of everything just in case they came in handy. It's not that anything was at all out of place or untidy, quite the contrary, but there was just so much of it. Mostly though he had shelves and racks of tools along with labelled jars and trays and drawers of screws, nails and fixings of every type, size and material. Lengths of timber were stored up in the rafters and propping up the walls were workshop and household electrical goods of every kind in front of offcuts of hardboard, chipboard and ply. Why would anyone need seven electric drills? Mostly though, it was the hand tools and the jars I found so upsetting. Many of them I remember from childhood. Along with hoping he would be able to play football with me (I was a complete disappointment on that score) he also seemed to think I might somehow inherit his make-do-and-mend cum do-it-yourself interests. I made slightly more effort with that, but I was a dead loss there as well. Every time I would cry out for help with some simple job that defeated me he would try to get me to do it and all my old adolescent rage would surface even in early middle age. I really should point out though that moving in with him was a wonderful second chance to build a loving relationship we had never mutually experienced before. I cannot begin to express how fortunate I felt about that. How many kids, particularly men, get a second chance at making a relationship with a father?

When I moved in with him at the start of those last eight years together I found a photograph I had never before seen. It was a black and white print of my handsome father as a young man, probably about twenty-seven years old cradling a tiny baby in his arms. He was looking down with such amazement and obvious love that, when I saw that photograph, I cried. I'm in tears thinking about it now. That baby was me and that photograph undid the decades of resentment I had felt about his absence as I grew up. During those final years together we talked about a lot of things. Why had it taken me forty years to learn that his drive to keep three jobs on simultaneously (jobs that would keep him out of the home during all my growing years) was the result of his deeply rooted fear of losing everything and everyone he loved should he lose his income. He had seen his siblings taken into care when his mother left his father. He worked and fought so hard to get his brothers and sisters back home again before he was even old enough to start work legally. It took years, but he did it. That was why some of my earliest memories are of the tenement flat in London with two rooms I was never allowed to enter. One was the lodger's, the other was my Uncle B, dad's youngest brother.

Of Death Chants, Lockdowns and Military Waltzes Part 1

A Fellini inspired Casanova

Casanova, Trifenia del Fellini-Satyricon & a mad bishop from Roma

"Hi dad, are you ok? Have you been caught up in the lockdown?"

This was the message I received last week the day after arriving in Venice for Carnevale di Venezia 2020. Until that point I knew nothing about the spread of COVID-19 in Italy and had not heard that there were whole towns in the north of the country where people were confined to quarters for most of the time. It was a shock. The previous few days had been much of a whirlwind in France, whizzing up and down the A41 to The Divine Miss M's apartment where she and P had already been working on their masks and costumes for weeks. After I arrived from England, P had still been teaching during the day and we were working on our costumes and masks at night, usually not getting home till three in the morning. Although I had only had one week of this I felt exhausted. Keeping up with the news was not much of a priority.

Naturally, we turned to the web to find out what was going on. One person in our shared apartment on the fifth floor above one of the smaller canals near San Marco switched on the television and turned to the BBC news channel. Looking for real news is where the problems began. Finding hard information was difficult. The reports we found were highly coloured and sensational. It sounded as though we were all about to die. Within the hour the reports came through that the authorities were ending carnevale that evening, two days earlier than planned, stopping all sporting fixtures and concerts and even church services including funerals! The news was apocalyptic.

Would the weeks and months spent toiling away on our beautiful creations be for nothing? Of course, if the emergency turned out to be a real thing, we would have no choice but to comply with whatever we were being told to do. Unfortunately, no one anywhere seemed to be equipped with definitive instructions. Nature abhorring that vacuum, people began preparing their own scenes. Under the circumstances the best we felt able to do was to dress up and go out in our finery for possibly the last time. That was what we did and carnevale closed that night, Sunday. Like ghosts we slipped through the nearly deserted piazzas and along the quayside. The public were staying away in droves. Sunday evening during Carnevale should not look like this. We wafted by little huddles of polizia, carabinieri, esercito and what I took to be private security operators. These latter were the ones who had been issued with some pretty impressive protective face masks. Not one member of any of these armed security forces was interested in us, breaking curfew or not.

As the days went on more information became available, as well as more evidence of misinformation. It was difficult sorting wheat from chaff, sheep from goats. I should have been back in the UK two days ago and preparing hard for gigs coming up tomorrow and Saturday. I had to make a decision so, last week, I contacted the organisers and withdrew from the bookings. I also had to turn away a last minute request to lead a drum workshop yesterday with a group of adults with learning disabilities. Many of them also lived with conditions that would render them an at-risk group if I did turn out to be a carrier of the disease. We had an NHS nurse in our apartment. She is the sister of one of the founder members of our French costume group and works in a hospital on the south coast of England in A&E. She talked a lot of common sense while we were struggling to work it all out. It was very helpful having her with us.

I hate letting people down. If I make a commitment to do something I do it. Of course there has to be a priority made to protect people from contracting a vile contagion, but there is a balance to be struck. I was in Venice. The closest place in lockdown was an hour away on the other side of the region of Veneto. Admittedly an hour is not long as a virus ticks, but far enough away, I would imagine, to be less dangerous than taking five trains back to England - each a sealed tube with hundreds of unknown travel companions. However the level of public concern has been so great that any knowledge that I had been to Italy would soon spread at a gig and someone would be almost certain to make an issue of it. I did not want the rest of Friday's band, or the the organisers of any of the gigs, to come under fire for me being there. That was the reason I pulled out of those bookings. If I had to go into quarantine anyway, I might as well do it in France, where I would at least be warm and where I would have some company. The difficult thing about making the choice I did is that, as time passes, the number of cases in both France and the UK is rising. Who knows how greatly increased my chances of contracting the virus will be in a fortnight's time on the journey home? Who knows how the quarantine instructions will change during the coming fortnight.

The instructions to UK travellers from the end of last week until today have been that anyone who had been in the northern area of Italy does not need to go into self-imposed isolation unless they have the symptoms of Covid-19 namely, a cough, shortness of breath or a temperature. In addition, anyone who has been in any of the locked down towns should also quarantine themselves. What I have chosen to do goes beyond the requirement and is, or was, done with perhaps an over-developed sense of responsibility, but with the best of intentions. Today, the Northern Italy-plus-symptoms area has (according to BBC news) been expanded to include the whole of Italy. Today the first patient in the UK has died. This was an older person in Reading who had been in and out of hospital for some time with other problems. This is, of course, very sad for all who were close to that person. However, in the larger picture it is still fewer deaths than the number who have died from influenza this winter and according to the Department for Work and Pensions, certainly fewer than the sixty disabled people who have died each month after having a personal independence payment (PIP) claim rejected. I know I am not comparing like with like, but I quote those figures for comparison. Which circumstance connected with death is getting all the attention at the moment?

Covid-19 is a new disease in the same way that SARS was once a new disease or, in the 1980s, AIDS. Misinformation breeds hysteria. Hysterical public reaction looks for people to blame. I have seen reports of racist attacks on people perceived to be "Chinese". Wuhan is the city in China where the disease was first identified. I believe that while we do need to make ourselves aware of the issues surrounding Covid-19, we do not need to lose our humanity in order to protect ourselves. In a country that has been split and polarised by an unnecessary political situation since 2016 the United Kingdom does not need another excuse to hurt fellow citizens. I have seen close up how harsh responses from one friend to another can be made when each carries a different perception of how we are responding to this disease. Now is not the time to turn on each other. I want to talk to my friends and make sure they are okay. If I start lecturing them or judging them somebody stop me.

This was supposed to be about carnevale. Here's a picture of how my costume and mask turned out. This is the first time in three carnevales I had made such a large contribution to my mask (which was moulded to my head from plaster) and the crown. Our inspiration this time was the films of Federico Fellini who would have been one hundred this year. P was one of the mad bishops from Roma, the Divine Miss M was a character from Satyricon while I was ... Casanova!

First attempt to get dressed

And ... we did go on another gondola trip before we came back to France.

The English Nurse, The Divine Miss M, Carlos the Gondolier and Marshlander

The Grand Canal from a gondola

Of Strikes And Being Stricken

Many French people are accomplished at finding imaginative ways of expressing dissatisfaction. For the past year or so the gilets jaunes have not only caused delays and blockages (mostly on Saturdays from what I've seen), but they have also been responsible for opening at random the barriers at the toll stations along the autoroutes. A few times P and I have arrived at a barrier to find that the machine won't take the payment card, but just then the barrier magically lifts - all the barriers lift in some kind of bizarre simultaneous salute to the power of the people in yellow jackets who have climbed on to variously constructed or found plinths, so that we may see and marvel. Or else the gilets jaunes congregate round their braziers displaying their drooping banners, slogans and yellow balloons at half-mast. This action is somewhat double-edged. While the strikers cause disruption and loss to the bosses the bosses have set about raising the tolls on the autoroutes, so that in the end they don't lose any money. It is a finely balanced game of chat-et-souris.

Since the beginning of December there has also been an ongoing general strike. The French are truly sorry, but they are still making everything as awkward as possible, as politely as possible - "malheureusement votre train 9*** ne circulera pas en raison de la grève nationale interprofessionnelle en cours. Croyez bien que nous en sommes sincèrement désolés."

For reference my usual monthly journey involves one train to London. Then

St Pancras International to Paris Nord - Eurostar
Paris Nord to Paris Gare de Lyon - TER
Paris Gare de Lyon to Genève Cornavin - Oui SNCF Lyria
Genève Cornavin to my final destination - Léman Express

The route plan above may help unravel the following:
Yesterday I received an e-mail informing me that one of the trains I was expecting to travel on was being cancelled. At least that's the gist of what I got from the message. My French is just about good enough to work that out. However, what to do from then on was simply overwhelming. After four hours of struggling with my SNCF phone app, the website on my computer and extended polite online chats with people bearing the unlikely names of David or Michael I did manage to change my booking from Paris to Geneva at no extra cost. The change would add an extra four hours to a journey and turn it into a twenty-two hour one. The reason for this is that, in order to be able to take advantage of the cheapest fares I have to be at St Pancras International at about 5am. The only way to do this is to leave home the previous evening and sit around St Pancras all night. The only part of the station left open all night is the UK booking hall passage between Midland Road and Pancras Road. It can get drafty. All that achieved I had my new departure organised from Gare de Lyon. 

On arriving in Paris Nord I tried to get to the TER line D (the green one) to discover that the usual TER route was being terminated at Châtelet les Halles, preventing me from getting through to Gare de Lyon. That meant negotiating the Métro, something that is for some reason much more complicated than the Tube in London. I also had to change lines mid journey. I took and deep breath and thought, "I can do this", specially now I had the extra four hours". I did it and climbed out of the Métro into the subterranean Hall 3 at Gare de Lyon before emerging into the glaring sunshine of Hall 2. Out of habit I checked the departure board and guess what ... my original train was apparently running after all! It hadn't been cancelled by the strike or by anything else. I had about an hour to see if I could change my later reservation back to the original time. Another deep breath because this would involve a lot of queuing and speaking a lot of French. In I went. The mission was accomplished even though the man behind the desk didn't appear to believe that I'd received an e-mail since the train clearly hadn't been cancelled. I tried to find the e-mail on my phone, but you know what it's like when in a panic and a fluster. You can never find what you want.

While I was waiting for my platform to be announced I was treated to the sight and sound of a strike march by Parisian railway workers right through the station. For a Tuesday lunchtime it was impressive that not only were trains running (after a fashion), but that the CGT union had mustered about two hundred marchers a month after the strikes began. President Macron has had to climb down on his proposed pension reforms, but is it enough? Action is continuing.

Not quite what I saw, but you get the idea. The Daily Telegraph was the first site to let me steal a photograph.